I heard an interesting story on the radio recently. A very successful astronomer spent a lot of time looking through telescopes and watching space. She was so focussed on space that she was very impractical on Earth. She didn’t know how to cook, or how to use the washing machine, and couldn’t remember her children’s teachers’ names. She left these things to her husband, who gave up his own career in order to support his wife’s scientific research.
This was fine and made a successful family unit until the husband became sick. In fact, he found out that he was terminally ill. Because he knew that he would die soon, he worried about how his impractical wife would cope without him to do the shopping, drive the children to school, change the light-bulbs, and so on. So he made a long list of advice, a practical guide for how to live on Earth. He wrote pages and pages of advice, such as what to do if the toilet started leaking, or what to do in the event of a black-out. His wife was actually able to use this practical list after her husband had died.
It was a lovely story. I wonder what advice I could leave for my family to use if I were to die?
Our son likes to rank and compare the strengths of different animals, monsters, and dangerous places. You must remember that witches can beat giants, because they can use their magic, and that black holes can beat anything.
Unfortunately, that is all the practical advice I know.
Vocabulary:
an astronomer – a scientist who studies space, the stars, etc.
a telescope – something which you can look through to see things far off in space
to be terminally ill – to have an illness which is expected to cause your death, and which cannot be cured
to leak – for a liquid such as water to spill out of a small crack, break, hole, etc.
a black-out – a time when all the lights stop working, perhaps because of a power cut
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