Category: Home education

I read “Going Solo” by Roald Dahl. The book is about his life after school. When he was 18 he wanted to work for Shell Oil Company but also wanted to go somewhere exotic. He was first offered a job in Egypt but declined. After that he got offered a job in Africa which he very eagerly accepted. The contract was for 3 years in Africa so after he said farewell to his family he went on a ship from London to Mombasa which took around two weeks and many stops.

When he got to Africa he got his own servant called Mdisho who comes from the M Mwanumwezi tribe. He had to learn Swahili to talk to Mdisho and his other members of staff. One day Salimu(The gardener) was raking Dahl’s gravel garden when a 6 foot(around 183 cm) long black mamba slithered towards him as fast as a running man. Roald Dahl who was shaving when he saw this and shouted at Salimu who had his back to the deadly snake. Salimu turned round and waited for the black mamba to get very close and then stabbed it in the back with his rake. He jumped up and down pushing the tines of the rake deeper into the snake. After the snake became a bit weak he hit it on its head and killed it. Roald Dahl had saved Salimu’s life.

Another time the cook’s wife was nearly eaten by a lion. The lion had put the cook’s wife into his mouth and ran away. Roald Dahl’s friend got his gun and shot near the lion and the lion dropped the wife and ran away. The cook’s wife was unharmed and she was just playing dead.

There was also a time when Roald Dahl had gone to visit an Englishman name Fuller. When he got near the house he saw a huge green mamba gliding into Fuller’s house. He was so surprised that he as stunned for a few seconds before quickly running around to the back of the house and called for Fuller. Mrs Fuller popped out of the upstairs window and asked what the matter was. Roald Dahl explained to her that there was a giant green mamba in their living room. Mrs Fuller called for her husband and he came. He lowered his wife and two kids out of the window first before hanging on the windowsill and jumping onto the soft grass. Mr Fully went to fetch an old Scottish man who was nicknamed “The snake man” who caught snakes and sold them to zoos and laboratories Unfortunately the Fuller family had forgotten about their dog Jack who had been silently killed by the snake. The snake man caught the green mamba with a very long pole around twice the length of a grown man with two rubber forks on the end of it. He moved the rubber forks up the snake until the snake’s head was between them. He dragged the snake into his large sack and took him home. I think this sounds so hard to do and you have to be unafraid of the snake to do anything this dangerous.

Roald Dahl was also in the RAF and had many encounters with the german bombers. He had a near fatal plane crash when he was flying around looking for an airbase he had been told about and got blinded for months. Dahl had so many accidents in his life and it’s really amazing that he lived for so long regardless of the injuries. Going Solo was a really amazing journey through Dahl’s life before he decided to become an author. I really liked this book as it was easy to read, very exciting and sometimes surprising. I also want to learn more about Africa and maybe even go there some day.

Would you like top read Going Solo? Or have you already read this book? Please let me know in the comments below.

I read the book “Boy” by Roald Dahl. The book is about Roald Dahl’s childhood to 18. I’ve read a of Roald Dahl’s books. One I really liked was “Fantastic Mr.Fox”. It’s satisfying because Mr. Fox manages to gather so much food for his starving family and friends.

Roald Dahl was born in Wales in 1916. The book is mainly about his life in Wales and England, and his time at school. The contains lots of incidents from his childhood. For example he was in a car crash and nearly had his entire nose cut off. He very luckily had it sowed back on. Also his worst memory in Norway was when he went to the doctor and got his adenoids taken out and had tons of flesh and blood falling out of this mouth and it was very painful and shocking for him.

When he was 7-9 years old there was a sweet shop he liked to go to with his friends. But the sweet shop owner was a nasty old woman who always had very dirty fingers when she picked out sweets from her jars. One day Roald Dahl found a dead mouse underneath some floorboards in his classroom where he had been hiding sweets with his friends. He decided to put the dead mouse in his pocket and went to the sweet shop. When he got there he put the dead mouse in the gobstopper jar while the nasty old woman, who was the shopkeeper, was selling some other sweets to Roald Dahl’s friend. The next day the shop was closed. The same morning the shopkeeper came to the school and found Roald Dahl. The headmaster took him and his friends into his office and hit them on the bottom many times with his cane until they bled. When Roald Dahl got home his mother was very angry that her son had been hit and he couldn’t sit on anything without yelping. The mother went to the headmaster’s office and had a long argument.

On summer holidays Roald Dahl and his family always went to Norway to meet their relatives. Dahl’s mum first had a big rowing boat to visit many minature islands in Norway. But when she upgraded to a motor boat they could go to islands much further away.

The book “Boy” by Roald Dahl was a very interesting and detailed story of Roald Dahl’s childhood and life in general from 100 year ago.

Have you read any of the Roald Dahl books? If you haven’t, are there any you are interested in, like Boy? Please leave a comment.

On Monday this week I went to “Our living room café”. The café is in Chofu which is around 1 hour from my home if you don’t get lost on the mind boggling journey. My dad and i had to change trains 3 times and 2 of those times had to walk quite far between stations.

“Our living room café” is run by a 16-year old boy called Daisuke. He welcomes people to his café in his living room where he serves hot drinks for free. You can relax there and chat with him. There are books and games too.

When I arrived Daisuke said he had been finishing his assignments for a big test for the online high-school he goes to. The online school happened to be the same one I’m planning to join in April. He showed me the website and the Slack groups for the school. He was very helpful and good at explaining how the school works and he said he will tell me anything I ask him when I join it.

I think he has run the café for over 2 years. For 1 year of that he ran his café in an empty house because he thought that empty houses shouldn’t be wasted when they could be turned in to something useful. He wanted to make a place with a welcoming atmosphere for people to make friends and get to know each other. And in December after a few months break he started his café again in his own home.

I stayed there for around 2 hours and after about 1 hour a Japanese man came. It seemed like he had come there often. He was very interesting and friendly. He didn’t speak much English but Daisuke worked very hard translating from English to Japanese and vice versa for us.

It was nice to sit there and talk about many things with friendly people. I would like to go again soon. Maybe next time we will play a board game as they have a lot of them at the café.

The café is open three times a week:
Mondays 14:00 to 18:00
Tuesdays 14:00 to 18:00
Fridays 14:00 to 18:00
You don’t need to make a reservation, you can just turn up but it’s important to check on X(Formally Twitter) to see if the times have been changed: https://twitter.com/livingroomchofu
This is their website(currently only in Japanese): ourlivingroomcafe.mystrikingly.com

Daisuke’s sister Sara, helps with the café but she wasn’t there when I went. She runs a weekly book swap and you can find her X(Formally Twitter) page here: https://twitter.com/BookSwapChofu