Odd marriage

While Grit spends her time impersonating fish or carrying bottles of cheap beer covertly from the local Co-op late at night avoiding the stabbing spots of Smalltown, Dig spends his time jet setting around the world.

But now Dig is back. Which means Grit and the gritlets are whisked away into Dig's world for a few days.

And if you are in Madrid, watch out.

Back on Monday.

Grit sells herself for a bottle of Jonnie Walker and a packet of fags

John Lewis say they'll bung 25 quid this way for tip top rules on a perfect family Christmas.

Grit's family is perfect, obviously. One member floats about Hong Kong harbour and three are tied to the radiators, so they've come to the right place.

Unfortunately, I can't think of any rules. This house mixes autonomy, anarchy, and seasonal adjustment disorder in equal measure. The line between them is razorfine, and cross it at your peril.

Quite frankly, it's easier to simply say that John Lewis is a lovely place to shop. OK? They sell lovely things like tinkly things and furry carpets and reindeer and things and more things.

But more importantly, no one who works there has ever thrown me and the gritlets out, probably fighting with themselves over that, but they never gave into that urge, which qualifies as lovely in my book.

Anyway. Christmas rules and traditions. We don't have any.

BUT THEN. I thought, Aha! We DO have rules. And special traditions!

The children must notice what they are. I'll ask them.

Squirrel: When you put up the decorations, do not make trip hazards on the stairs. People might fall down the stairs and go to hospital. Do not throw baubles. Do not climb up the Christmas tree. Do not hit your sister with bits of the Christmas tree. [You can see what issues we have here.] Do not eat all the sweets in one go. Do not electrocute yourself. Do not stab yourself in the eye. [Squirrel? You are rambling. Shut up. Your turn, Tiger.]

Tiger: Daddy must set the pudding on fire. Not his beard. The pudding.

Shark: If I had a grudge against the neighbour, could I put up an inflatable plastic reindeer now and everyday loll it over their wall by accident-on-purpose? [Advanced thinker.]

Be quiet the lot of you. I can think of sensible traditions.

1. Spend days doing craft, but not knitting with our own hair, that is right out.
We do lots of crafts. I am too mean to buy decorations. Holly up the bannisters, make home-made wreaths, dress down the house with toilet rolls and string, and create our own presents*. Except for gifts we buy at the charity shop.**

(OK, John Lewis might not like this rule, for obvious reasons. But every year I tell Shark, Squirrel and Tiger that it is time to help others, and in my book that's not a fat banker in a suit behind a desk who keeps a mistress in Newton le Willows.)

2. Do not mention the inlaws because they are all DEAD DEAD DEAD.
Now you feel guilty, don't you, John Lewis. Make it £30 and we call it quits.

3. On Christmas Eve we party at the Hat's.
Remember? Someone was sick down the back of my leg. But it's important to visit friends. Christmas is such a forgiving time. And this year don't eat all the grapes.

4. We tell the story about baby Jesus.
We may go to a special heaven for non believers who like the idea of virgins giving birth.

5. But say what? You want light entertainment?
This year ladies, we might take you to midnight mass to see all the drunks!

6. For Christmas dinner we eat baked potatoes.
With cheese and baked beans. Seriously! No-one's going to believe that. But it's true. This year I shall photograph it.

7. Christmas Day is a non-computer day.
Mummy Grit and Daddy Dig never turn on the computers. Only in secret. Next year we will all sing songs round the Victorian piano.

8. Mummy Grit mixes cheap gin at noon.
Then she has Daddy Dig see if he can squirt it into her mouth from a used shampoo bottle across the kitchen. By then she is smashed on cooking sherry and already foaming at the mouth, so it makes no difference.

9. Do not, under any circumstances, listen to the Queen's Speech.
If you so much as touch that remote control, you are DEAD. We are not quite at the republican stage in this house but we are coming pretty close. Close enough to want to see the entire lot of them living in a terrace in Manchester and see how they like it.

10. Bring about world peace from the homely fireside.
I am now insensible enough to think that spending entire days footling about with my kids, trying to extract modelling balloons from the U-bend, telling anyone who will listen that life can be imaginative and fun even though it comes with a destroyed house and a beaten spirit, all makes for a good way to raise happy children who appreciate and love their families. (Are you listening to this, Shark, Squirrel and Tiger?) And if there is one rule we have about enjoying each other's company, and not bloody well arguing all the day long, this one's it.

Now, if any reader persevered this far, know that I needed cheering up. And right now, considering the options, prostitution to John Lewis seems fair enough.

And what's with all the This is a sponsored post. What have I got to do now? Run a marathon?

P.S. Squirrel just asked What are you doing on the blog? I answer Trying to get 25 quid out of John Lewis. To which she replies Is it a bribe or a threat?

* Because we are smugbastardhomeeducating types and learning how to make a felt brooch is a way of providing an education round here.

* Because we are smugbastardhomeeducating types and giving to the local hospice shop is a way of providing an education round here.

Double judgement

Great hilarity here after the recent revelation about how children want to live.

Catch our coat tails!

Shark, Squirrel and Tiger have followed their own sleep patterns for years.

The kids went to sleep about midnight last night.

No yelling, no screaming, no pleading, no power games.

We didn't need to get up early for anything this morning, so late nights are OK by me. The kids take it in turns for the bathroom and most nights they no longer need me to negotiate order of access to the bath, sink, loo. They sort it out themselves. When they're done with that, they climb into bed with books, and read until they decide to switch off their bedside lights.

It's as simple as that. I force nothing, the kids are not resisting anything, they sleep and wake as they need.

When they came down about 11am this morning, they set about reading their weekly newspaper.*




Over brunch, we talked about Children in Need, koalas and baby sharks.

Simple.

But tell me, why is it that when home educated kids stay up late, it's neglect, but when a school does it, it's an educational revelation?

* And just to clarify, no money or advantage is conferred on the gritty household for that link.

Here's one mother who couldn't care less

You see? This is the cavalier approach I take to safeguarding my children.

Here's Squirrel, handling DANGEROUS TOOLS.


And this took place in a totally NON-REGISTERED environment.

Now guess what? We filled in no forms for any type of RISK ASSESSMENT.

That's how little I care.

Better still, this dangerous and alarming environment is the workshop of a local woodcarver and he works with SHARP CARVING TOOLS. At any moment, any one of those tools could KILL YOU or GOUGE OUT YOUR EYE.

You would think that was bad enough, wouldn't you? But this shows how far Grit has gone, because she cannot give a gnat's piss whether the oldcurledupwoodcarver - who is probably made of oak himself - she could not care less whether he has been entered on the VETTING AND BARRING DATABASE.

And WORSE. He is not even a registered and licenced teacher! NO! GET THAT! He is a WOODCARVER. TEACHING WOODCARVING.

I can hear the OFSTED inspectors tut tutting now.

Grit should have done this lesson on woodcarving PROPERLY. According to the government. Like, NOT AT ALL. Who approved this type of thing in the National Curriculum? Really, she should have BANNED the activity altogether.

But you know she's bloody-minded. The very least she should have done was hire a biology teacher with fuck all experience and interest to cover the lesson in a proper CCTV controlled classroom while Squirrel and 30 other kids watched a video about woodcarving and answered the questions on whether wood comes from a tree or a motorway.

Then, just as you thought it was as bad as it could be! Not only do I encourage my kids to enter dangerous environments, wield banned tools, and interact with people who are not rubberstampedgovernmentapproved, MICHELLE IS HERE TAKING PHOTOS.



And you know what that means.

NEITHER OF US may be CRB CHECKED.

And what is Grit's attitude?

Pah! Kiss my arse! IGNORE THE LAW.

With that sort of attitude, you'd almost expect the government to try and close all home education down.

That's the third person today who says...

... Oh dear! What can we do?

And my answer's the same.

If you don't like the sound of it, tell someone. Write to your MP.

If you want to sign the petition, do so.

Use your blog.

Print off this leaflet and stick it up on your local library notice board.

Read around, and get informed.

Do I sound tired? I'm tired. I need a break.

'I'm a government minister and you're vulnerable, little girl. Let me safeguard you.'

Oh dear.

Ed, was it wise to turn up today at Parliament, with the big ceremony and everything, with all the cameras and the BBC and the Queen! and include stuff like your safeguarding proposal in the Children, Schools and Families Bill.

Was it wise? Would you like to take it back? To be honest, it makes you sound a bit creepy. You won't win friends with that sort of language these days you know.

Ed, I feel I have to lead you through a land filled with danger.

Let's look at the home educated Shark, Squirrel and Tiger. They are pretty tough kids. And Ed, when you come round here to try and bully the weak - sorry, I mean safeguard the vulnerable - you may find your work's cut out.

Trust me about this. Shark, Tiger and Squirrel are anything but vulnerable.

Did you read how Tiger knocked Shark's tooth out? Seriously, you don't want to mess with these kids. I mean, they know their own minds. The effort it has taken me to strap them to the radiators and shove fish fingers up their noses, you should hear them howl. So you be aware that they give as good as they get. And that proves they can look after themselves. Really, I'm proud of them, my little tough cookies. They don't need safeguarding. Possibly from you though.

But I must admit, I think you've got guts. I like the way you turn up there with the tiaras and all and say right up front in the same drawn breath as 'youth offending' the words 'home educators' like it's all as offensive and smelly to you as moving into a new house and after six weeks finding a rotting cod stuffed behind the skirting board.

The only advice I have for you now Ed, is Grab your pomander.

Because over the coming weeks, we home educators will probably smell. Some people who may be advising you in Westminsterland may say we stink only of homemade yogurt and granola. But hold on! You may be disappointed. In my experience with some of these mummy home educators out here in the shires, you may find there's a definite pong of outraged Dior.

Timetables are crap really, aren't they?

Apparently I should be spending an hour playing a board game to help Squirrel with her times tables. She'll no doubt get out that board game and play it with a sister soon enough.

And I don't worry; she'll learn her seven times table on another day.

Instead I am writing emails about petitions. And if this comes near you, dear reader, you can sign it if you want, or not sign if you want.

Personally, I blame the government for intruding on my educational provision, messing with my timetable, Squirrel's times tables, and trying to stick their foot into my door.

And if you think I must be that crazy woman to take things personally, then please call me crazy. It's personal. And this is why.

I should timetable an extra hour for emergencies and natural disasters

There isn't enough effing and blinding to go round the world today.

You might notice that shortage as you reach for a blasphemy on getting out of bed and standing on the upturned plug.

There is a shortage because I have already used up all the bad bad bad words, and I did it this morning while the world was still dark and the children sleeping.

Because as I stand in the shower and am just soaking up that yummyyummy warmth on this day when I have to get up special early and drive Dig to the train station to be mugged and assaulted by a wise and knowing Virgin on her run to London for Heathrow, just as I am murmuring in satisfied sleepy delight mmmmm and mmmmmm in all that lovely soapysoapysudsud then all the water runs suddenly at -120C and freezes me in the shower in the sort of freezestream which says

HA! BOILER BROKEN!

And that is how I start today.

Isn't life amazing with a timetable?

You see? Now I am officially in control of time. I can order about minutes and hours. I have a command centre. I am queen of timetable.

Today I command that we achieve. And not just wearing shoes, like yesterday.

Today is different. Today I can say we are going to Shenley Woods at 11am to learn about forest management techniques in ancient woodland. And then we are leaving at 1.30pm prompt, arriving at the Museum of St Albans felt workshop 2.24pm. Where we will make felt.

And I'm sure Shark, Squirrel and Tiger achieve with this structure too. Or they would have done, had they stuck to my timetable. Just don't ask. This is an ongoing process, and I'm building one day at a time.

But look here. At the woods.


We can achieve knowledge about how to kill pigeons with a Harris Hawk. And we learn that Harris Hawks are native to South America. I didn't know that. Did you know that? Knowledge is achievement, isn't it? Make me feel good and say yes.


Then we learn about the history of charcoal burning, the coppicing of woodland, the banking and ditching of animal enclosures and how many pigs you can release in medieval woods before they're taken off to the compound and you're fined.


Oh, and how to make a wood kazoo with a rubber band and some gratifyingly dangerous tools.


Come 2pm, we're learning to travel at exactly 50mph down the M1 monitored by the speed and distance cameras while learning Spanish with Michel Thomas on the in-car CD player. I'm beginning to like this sense of order.

And then there is felt making! How relaxing is that?


I don't want to be that woman who makes timetables, who controls things, and who says I'll read one chapter to you and no more, but right now, when the front room, taps, life, are all spinning away uncontrollably, and that husband is just about to step back on that plane to go east, then a timetable is a good structure to have.

And who knows, if it works, I could say goodbye to all the other control issues I have. Like bladder, mouth, memory, flab, mice, and bath plug.

November now has a timetable

Grit is worn out, fed up, and mangled flat.

My solution at the end of the day is to create a large timetable for the week ahead and pin it up where everyone can see it every morning and I remember what I do.

In my timetable is listed lessons for children, group activities, things for everyone to do, and a free day on which they sort themselves out.

You can hear the rustling of the autonomous crowd as they shake their heads in despair. The fact that I have actually timetabled a day of autonomy is not in the spirit of things at all.

I can say the sound of that distant collective sigh is far better than the rasping of Grit's broken fingers drawn down her own despairing face.

On the plus side, Dig has flown back and mended the tap.

A time and place for everything

It's inevitable, what with my Munchhausen's Syndrome by Proxy and the way I tie up and beat each of my home educated triplets with frozen fish, that eventually I'll have to take the weakest and feeblest of them to the doctors.

I do that today. We have not much else to do, and with my keen eyesight, when she rolls out of bed this morning at 11am, she looks like a hamster.

So I get her over to the health centre, and apart from looking like a hamster, there is nothing wrong with this particular driblet, I can tell you. She is like one sulky argumentative little kid griblet, prodded out of bed, poked in the face, and brought to the attention of the National Health Service.

Tomorrow is Saturday, I tell her, and if looking like a hamster means the start of a horrible BIG disease, then it will happen on Saturday, and that will be inconvenient. Now get in the car.

And here she is, scowling, dragging her feet, crossing her arms, and doing that snorty harrumph noise while head tossing.

Sitting in the surgery with the very nice old doctor lady, I say I wake up this morning and she looks like a hamster.

If you follow this blog you will of course know that at this point I have an expression on my face that reads And I have Munchhausen's Syndrome by Proxy! Pay attention to ME ME ME.

The old lady doc peers at the miserable sulky triglet through her halfmoon doctor glasses, and says, She does a bit.

And she has no other symptoms! I add. (Apart from sulkyitis, snortynose, scowlydragfoot and harrumphing.)

And how do you feel, little girl? Asks kind old lady doc to the crossed arm sulk pit.

[Snort snort harrumph.]

Can I look into your mouth? Say aaaahhhhh.

[Snortynoise]

Can you say aaaaaaaaahhhhhh?

[Snortynoise]

Can I look in your ears?

[Harrumph.]

I see. And how are you eating?

[Harrumph.]

Mum? Is she eating alright?

Oh, MY BIG CHANCE! Because with the MSbyP it's now all about ME ME ME! She is eating fine! (I gave her the usual pint of vodka on cheerios this morning, and she wolfed them down and asked for her three lines of cocaine, like normal. What could possible be wrong? Apart from looking like a hamster and pre-teen snortynoising?)

Well it could be an infection. Or a virus. Or something. Did you go to school today little girl?

TOTAL SILENCE

Now you can hear a pin drop, because if nice doctor lady finds out THE TRUTH about our incredibly depraved lifestyle, we are in BIG TROUBLE.

Did she go to school today, mum?

Er er er er... she's um home educated?

Oh! Is there a reason for that?

STOP RIGHT THERE LADY. Now I have brought in a fritlet looking like a hamster and that is as far as I am going to go. That is an educational question you asked me, and this is a hamster related illness. If it were not for bully Balls and all his little minions, would you even conflate safeguarding and education? Do you seriously have five hours for me to answer that question with a teaching and learning philosophy? And anyway, what about the MSbP and ME ME ME?

But I am saved from all embarrassment, because the little sulky griblet who has done nothing but scowl and frown and snort and harrumph when the MSbP mother frogmarched her to torture at the doctor's surgery, suddenly can take NO MORE!

She swings round in her seat, targets that laser beam of withering scowl direct at old lady doc and shouts

BECAUSE I HATED NURSERY!

And me and old lady doc both sit with our hair shot away to a big circle round our dumbfounded faces and our eyebrows perched on top of our heads because we were just blasted in the face by a giant tornado and never saw it coming.

In my heart, little triblet, I love you more than ever, because maybe you took advantage of my hesitation there to tell that doctor lady to cross that line no further; and bringing up all your force and direct words you chose the most appropriate or inappropriate or best ever timed moment to yell that out in someone's inquiring face and settle that matter once and for all.

Daughter, even though you look like one sulky hamster, I am taking you right home and giving you a big smackeroo.

Lovely. Just lovely lovely lovely.

Get your coat. We're going out.

Shark, Squirrel and Tiger are being educated properly, in society.

I know what you're thinking. The smugbastard home educator voice is back.

You're too right. We don't get days like this very often. And when we do, I'm milking them.

Let's just say it's the sort of day* I can shove granola down my moralhighgrounded sanctimonious homeknitted knickers.

Now come along on the perfect child-focused journey of an ordinary day down the home educating range.

Tonight, Shark Squirrel and Tiger are out at a drama club with schooled children for signing, singing, and dancing. But let's start the school day here. At the art gallery.


Did you hear that? THE ART GALLERY. Because over at MKG they have an exhibition on Nasreen Mohamedi. This is the sort of thing we home educators take for granted. That someone else will organise the gallery tour, talk and workshop. And they will be much better organisers than Grit.

They are too. In fact the gallery workshop people are so enthusiastic, working at just the right levels, and the home ed group of kids so occupied and involved, that Grit wanders off and gets artsy Mohamedi style with the phone camera.


When she gets back, the gritlets are all absorbed in making Mohamedi picture lookalikes with bits of wool and pencils.


So absorbed in fact, that I need to threaten them with the radiator to make them come away.

We must be on time for the afternoon education in a field. This is also a large group event not organised by Grit, for which she is truly grateful.

Here is the afternoon home ed group, getting ready to explore the natural world under the faultless guidance of a real unbludgeoned teacher who is free to respond in warm ordinary human language and totally unencumbered by worksheet 3 key stage 2 because it's Thursday.


Her first activity is to blindfold the children and send them off into the wood. On any other day I might say that at this point I ran off to the car and hid, but this home education group is having such a good time and my children are so accommodating, I might stick around to see the smiles and hear the laughter.



The walk is so successful all round that I will not even comment about how Shark, Squirrel and Tiger look like they are interrogating a tree in the style of an OFSTED inspector. No. They are making their own identification sheets.


This small insight should prove that home education children are not only quite normal children, what with the sensitivity, understanding and competence to hang around an art gallery and become inspired and enthused by the work, they are also inquiring, interested, well adjusted children who can read, write, make friends, have fun, talk to trees and go home happy.

I think it might be called a primary education suitable for a child.

Smug bastard.

* Don't mention the problem with the tap. I'm taking advice from Heather. The washer will grow back. After a day of pure education like today, it will see that this is a house of perfect parenting and total righteousness and make that decision to fulfil its destiny of tapturnonable and tapturnoffable. It's just been that sort of perfect day, I almost believe it.

We may not have mains water, but we do have an education

Wait a moment! I must finish the household checks!

I do the same duties before I leave the house.

I have to. It is like count to ten while washing your hands. Or push the front door with a forefinger after locking, just to check.

There are good reasons for this particular safety obsession.

Like the time I came down one morning and found the back door open. And I don't mean unlocked, I mean open. Why don't we put up a sign on the driveway notifying Burglar Bill that there isn't much, but the TV bought in 1989 still works?

Howabout the week we stayed in Northumberland and returned to find all the kitchen lights still burning? Or the day we spent in a field, came home and found the gas hob ring glowing brightly. For SEVEN HOURS. And are we lucky not to be dead or looking at a burned out shell of a house, dear husband, who made poached eggs for breakfast that day?

So of course I do obsessional house checking, because we're out for the day. I'm taking the kids to Hampton Court Palace, as part of our Tudors project.

Back door locked? Check. Lights off? Check. Gas knobs pointing in correct alignment towards the wall? Check. Kitchen tap turned off? Kitchen tap off? OFF?

WHYWONTTHEBLOODYTHINGTURNOFF.

And there I look at it. Gushing water into the sink like Niagara Falls. But it's worse, because the hot tap that won't turn off is connected to the hot-water-on-demand boiler, and after ten seconds of spinning a tap that's not responding, that boiler is rattling and wheezooing and squeaging with the effort of keeping pace with the demand for hot water drawn from that bust tap in the kitchen.

I stand to consider my options.

Quite frankly, with hot water plunging into the sink at 150 litres a second, there aren't many.

I cancel the day at Hampton Court. I never even got to threaten that punishment half way down the M1, yelling I'll turn the car round this second thanks to the swinging punches or screaming obscenities from the back seat.

But it has to be. I break the news to the kids, get the picnic out the car, and go and see if I can phone Dig to talk over the safest course of action whereby I can save the day and make sure I do not blow up the boiler, cause a thousand pounds worth of damage, soak us all in water, electrocute myself or blow all the fuses in the house by flooding the cellar.

Never think phoning Dig is making a straightforward call to an office in London, by the way. Dig is in Brazil. And such is his life that I realise that I cannot recall whether he is in Sao Paolo, Rio, or Buzios. Me, as usual I am up a creek without a paddle.

But you may think I am being over cautious about contacting him. Take a look back at that list. I have only one on it yet to do.

Of course even though it is early morning in Brazil, Dig is not contactable.

I might have been calm up to this point but now I am fuckingfurious because it is his responsibility to be available to me on Skype, mobile and email 24 hours, 7 days a week.

OK, it might be a worn out washer and a destroyed day, but it could have been Tiger, Shark or Squirrel throwing themselves out a top floor window.

After an hour of pleading, twisting the mains tap which is stuck, and alternatively crying and shouting at the tap, neither of which actions actually make the ruddy water stop, nothing gets any better. The water torture sure is working though, because after another hour I am just about beating my head against the wall.

Finally, I manage to apply the micro atom of my brain which I reserve for thinking and I locate a bit of equipment which looks like a big pair of teeth with long handles. I work out these will give me leverage on the stuck mains tap. Either that or the damn thing will twist off altogether and the pipe explode.

And that, dear reader, is what I do. I twist round the water mains and bring the entire flat to a watery conclusion. Then I call the wonderful Mr W, the home educating parent down the road who knows what he is doing because he is an engineer, and he dutifully and cheerfully arrives like a knight in shining Volvo to make sure that I have made the boiler safe, the water safe, and that nothing will blow up.

Miserably, we have lost Hampton Court Palace. But for a woman whose profound life motto alternates between never give up and look on the bright side, there is consolation.

See the benefit of a real world education? I tell the mournful Shark, Squirrel and Tiger. Today you have learned about washers, taps, stuck mains valves, leverage, and being flexible with your planning.

And next time it might not be the water! Next time it might be mama electrocuting herself again, and then you will also learn how to wire plugs.

Child's tooth found under floorboards

I can see the headline up above, forty years down the line.

Some foolish innocent will renovate this fallingdownheapofbrick and they will find a child's tooth, lodged in the roofspace between kitchen and cellar.

The moment they make that gruesome discovery, they'll scream Help! and start ripping apart this old house, splinter by nail, looking for bodies.

So I had better fess up now, and put it forever on the record.

I stuck on the video Harry Potter and the Flesh Eating Zombies and wandered off to shovel shit in the upstairs rooms. After ten minutes I have to put down the shovel because the entire house is rocking on its foundations, and reverberating with POOPYBRAINIHATEYOUYOUFATPIG!

By the time I get downstairs, Tiger is on the sofa red hot with fury swinging punches like a windmill at Shark. Shark, from a floor position, is flaming bright scarlet with outrage and trying to claw up Tiger's legs to rip her face off.

My ears are bleeding with the pain of the bansheeing, so I do the mature adult parental thing and start yelling. Really I would like to beat the pair of them senseless with the Muzzy French video box, which is the nearest thing to hand, but I believe that is called setting a bad example. Anyway, Tiger might grab it out my hands and bash me over the head with it.

Squirrel meanwhile is sat on the sofa in this war zone, staring straight at the TV screen with a puzzled frown like there is an irritating buzz, somewhere over there.

Now no-one is paying one bit of attention to me and my big weight of AUTHORITY I carry about this house, so I take the next step to demonstrate my responsible power and that is to march up to the zombie video, clip it shut and start yelling again.

Squirrel tuts, curls her upper lip and stares in disgust at me, like Is that it? I didn't get to see the flesh eating demon rip out Harry's heart. No, Squirrel, that is because death and mayhem is now in 3D surroundasound and is happening on a carpet in front of you. At which point I yell some more.

It is clear to me as controller and supreme ruler in this house that neither Tiger nor Shark is taking one bit of notice of AUTHORITY.

AUTHORITY will not get involved in this fight. AUTHORITY is righteous and does not take to slapping arses, even though she'd like to. AUTHORITY does not drag six tonnes of screaming kids apart either. Not unless one is holding knitting needles or scissors.

Anyway, AUTHORITY has learned that if she totally ignores screaming kids and reappears thirty seconds later they will be sitting quiet side-by-side on the sofa indivisible as cells and acting as if nothing ever happened. Passions come and go quick in this house.

Once AUTHORITY has ascertained there are no knitting needles, scissors, or other sharp weapons of war available, she turns on her heel to leave the room righteously shouting SORT IT OUT in big letters and with an extra large booming voice.

No sooner have I slammed the door shut than a deathly silence descends. The door flings wide open, and Tiger zips up the stairs quicker than a speeding atom round a Hadron Collider.

Then I hear only the rising shriek Mmuuuuummmmmyy! and I see Shark standing up, a startled look on her face, and with her hands clamped round her jaw like she's just been punched in the mouth.

In response to moments like this I have been saying the same three tender words for years and they are not Are you alright? They are Doctor?Ambulance?Hospital?

Shark opens her mouth with a stream of blood and squeals My tooth!

Standing in the kitchen with a pint of warm water ready to throw it at Shark's mouth, I foolishly attempt to catch the tooth which Tiger had knocked clean out of Shark's face. But I let the bloodied evidence slip from my fingers, where it bounced through the hole in the kitchen floorboards: the same hole I never saw before last summer and which I have to assume was drilled out by a late night partying mouse.

So, to the people who will renovate this house when I am dead because I never got around to it, know that this story explains the child's tooth you're going to find under the floorboards which form the roof of the cellar.

It can join the three dead bodies of the gas men.

But what do I know? Gerald could secretly work for MI6.

Recently I left a comment on Jax's post.

To the effect that it's easy to confess I am followed by a giant iguana called Gerald. Much easier than rationally explaining the fears I have about the future, and which she and many other explain so well.

My fears are not whether Squirrel will fall out of that tree; nor whether Shark's desire to dive will be the death of her; nor whether Tiger's teenage years will wreak havoc on us with anorexia, bulimia and self-harming.

Those fears I put down to the normal range of anxieties pouring from the heart of motherhood. I may yet do self harming and substance abuse myself. Then I'll call it coping strategy.

My fears are outside that range. But admitting any fears beyond the conventional is a hazard though, isn't it?

It's worse in the world I inhabit. Let's call my world the one where our kids have education other than everyday 8-4 at school.

Some people hate people in my world. Even though the people in my world are not all granola eating hippies, knitting with their own hair, or living in communes. As I've said, some people in my world are engineers, scientists, drama practitioners, artists and health workers, but I won't get distracted by that here. Whatever we are, some people resent us, because they believe every child should be in school, and if we keep kids out of school, we are damaging those children, full stop.

So, as a home educator, passing any comment about anything is like holding out a stick which someone can grab and beat us with. At the first sign of vulnerability, like expressing fears, some very judgemental people leap at the chance to attack.

Horrible comments stick around. One commenter I recall, whose voice leapt off the page and stuck inside my head, burst out - probably from a discussion about How nice is your cushion cover? - that home educators are a load of smug bastards who think they own a moral high ground because they home educate.

I wasn't standing on any moral high ground when I looked. Swamp, maybe. I had a bloody exhausting day of hard work, a heavy sense of responsibility, a broken bank account, and no idea why my cushion covers were in the freezer. Despite it, I still think home education is worth the trauma, pain and misery. So maybe they're right about the label smug bastard.

But really, I'm feeling battered enough without attracting that kind of comment, so I'll say at this point that Gerald is a lovely blue green colour, likes to eat granola, and goes to sleep at night outside the kitchen door.

And I can confess my fears are not coming from my role as a parent, and not just for home educators. My fears come from my place as a citizen, and they are about what you are allowed to do, and be, as a parent.

Because I believe right now we're heading for a life where the law will make provision for every parent to be vetted or checked; where the right of state entry will be automatic to every home if you have a child of any age; where the right of a parent to make decisions about the upbringing of a child is increasingly fragile and within a whisper of being removed.

Now some folks can read those fears and say Grit is a nutcase. She is clearly followed by a giant spiny tailed iguana called Gerald. Voicing that sort of They've all got it in for me! attitude, she deserves to be suspect. With that mental condition, she is placing her vulnerable children at risk.

And who knows what will happen to Gerald then? He will be homeless, and he is not a bad sort when you get to know him.

All I can say in my defence, before the evil lords of power come to get Gerald, is that home educators have to be closer to the coal face when it comes to discussing the law, our legal rights, and the statements from local councils. We have to think carefully about our arguments; we have to take responsibility for our positions; we have to weigh up the pros and cons of any scheme, any help offered by any council, any statement made by anyone in power. We have to read the tons of stuff, from OFSTED, government, local authorities, advisers.

We simply have to be closer to it as a means of survival. Any day as a home educator we may be stopped by the police and by truancy officers. We may be challenged in the supermarket; or called upon to defend our decision in the park, or playground. We have to walk around the world knowing as best we can what rights and responsibilities we have and be prepared to argue for them at the drop of a hat.

That does not make us any more moral, nor better parents than anyone else. It just makes us aware.

Now excuse me. I have to go. I must bath the kids, and Gerald says when he snuggles down for the night, he wants the blue blankie, not the yellow. The yellow makes him itch.

The peaceful Sunday history walk in Salcey Forest

Tiger: Will there be dogs?

Grit: Probably. It's Sunday. People walk dogs on Sunday.

Leader: Hello everyone! Welcome to Salcey Forest! There aren't many of us. I'll go and get the dog.

Grit [sinks to ground in despair]

Tiger: [shouting] MUMMY! I DON'T WANT TO BE HERE!

Grit: [trying to pass off writhing behaviour like this is normal] Um um um, excuse me, umumum do you mind, umumum, my daughters are scared of dogs. Could you keep the dog on a lead? thankyouthankyouthankyou.

Squirrel: [shouting] MUMMY I WANT TO GO NOW.

[History group walks on, a few backward glances cast to the performance at the back of the line.]

Grit: [whispering] It will be alright. I am here. I will protect you from dogonlead.

Tiger: [whimpering sounds]

Leader: We've walked back in time and here we are at the ice age! Now in the ice age...


Tiger: Mummy! Don't leave me! Keep it away from me!

Grit: Shut up about the damn dog. It's nowhere near you. Stop whimpering. I cannot hear anything about the ice age.

Tiger: [whimpering sounds]

Grit: Ssssshhhs. shhhshs. shshshsss. If it comes near you I will do something. I cannot pick a fight with someone because they have dogonlead. We have strategies, remember? We have strategies for dogonlead and dognotonlead. We have to come out the house! We cannot stay at home forever because we might see dogonlead and dognotonlead.

Leader: Now we'll walk forward in time to our next stop! The iron age!

Grit: Now look I didn't hear anything about the damn ice age. Stop making that noise. People are looking.

[Repeat this conversation for...

Anglo Saxon ditching and forestry techniques...


Trees planted from the times of the Norman invasion to provide hunting forest...


Medieval coppicing...


Hunting in the Tudor style...


The establishment of forests for timber supplies for the navy to the battle of Trafalgar.]

I would say there was no respite at all from the dogonlead and dognotonlead, bar this moment, when an antler was found, and the whimpering changed to Cooo! Antler! If a dog comes near me, mummy you can hit it with the antler.

Somewhere there is a place for us all

Here we are, breathing a big Saturday sigh of relief. We are back among the finest eccentrics of England. The Meccano enthusiasts, exhibiting their pleasures today at the National Space Centre.


Honestly, this is where my soul should be, amongst people who maintain a single focus in their life: they keep right on doing as they must, whether you throw tornadoes at them, beat them about the face with frying pans, or feed them to polar bears.

To them, it makes no difference. They just extrude from that polar bear arse, a little crunched, weather battered and dented, and simply pick up where they left off.

I admire those people, I really do. They never give up, no matter what the challenge. And for that they are my inspiration.

Take Meccano. It occupies grown men for hours, weeks, months, years. I can look at those fantastic models in puzzlement and am genuinely uncomprehending how anyone would spend three years of their life in a purpose-made shed building a scale face shovel excavator.

I stand before one elderly gentleman who makes my life complete with his chalk dust hair and woolly waistcoat, and I utter something which sounds like That's a remarkable construction!

And the old man nods kindly, but looks at me askance, like this is not the starting comment of anyone who knows what they are talking about, but he'll give me the benefit of the doubt. He kindly points deep inside the face shovel's guts and explains gently Yes, this was a little tricky, the erector socket and boss facing forward next to the rod socket and between the nut and adjustable throw crank.

And because I am wide eyed staring blankly at this strange language I never heard before but which must be tribal, the elderly gentleman peers a little, leans to me, speaks more slowly, and politely inquires, Do you see there? Between the connecting strip, grub, and threaded boss?

The uncomprehending expression on my face now tells him for sure I am the village idiot.

But this is what I love about The Eccentrics of England, because at this point any normal person would ignore me and hate me and would take my lack of understanding merely as an opportunity to make me feel uncomfortable. Then they would show me how they are exasperated by me, by loudly tutting and making a face like they would like to kick me over a Dover cliff if only they could be bothered to soil their boot end with my pointless carcass.

But not your fine English Eccentric. They like nothing better than to come across one of these bemused idiots. For them it is a happy occasion where they can inform the unenlightened and naive; here is an opportunity, and a challenge, and who knows, a convert.

The elderly gentleman smiles benignly and gives me a comforting glance like you might reserve for the afflicted but not quite dead, and then he says And it lights up! knowing then that I will be amused by the LED display and will begin to grab Squirrel and pump her arm up and down in delight at the wonders of light inside Meccano. And I am! I am amazed! Look Squirrel! Look! It lights! It lights up!

I might feel abashed for not speaking tribal, but the old man smiles. I am welcomed, and then graciously entertained with moving clocks and shovels and this, the most splendid of all, from the orrery maker.


For one brief moment, all Meccano makes sense. I am completely won over. This is my destiny. I imagine life is filled with such acceptance, such warm hearted community and belonging. I imagine myself, gently crafting a face shovel excavator on the kitchen table, with adoring children clapping their hands in glee and their beaming faces turned to mine, and then I will say Look, the light is here! The light! The light!

If you're coming to this blog looking for evidence against home educators, add this

Here is Shark, outside BHS in Milton Keynes Shopping Centre.


You can say Evidence! This home educator humiliated her poor daughter by forcing her to face the wall in a public place to complete her homework!

Proof. Home ed should be banned, to protect the vulnerable.

My fantastic list of crimes, misdeeds and madnesses is coming along nicely, isn't it? I might do unicorn horn chopping next, or driving round Leicester, naked.

Well, it's a better line than saying this is a geology lesson.

This BHS wall is faced with marble, which you all know is a building material also used for gravestones, ornaments and worksurfaces. And it's a metamorphic rock, which is mainly why we're here, looking at the patterns and talking about heat and pressure under the earth and what that does to all the minerals and chemicals and fantastic bits that make up rock.

Not as exciting a story as driving round Leicester, naked, huh?

For me, the most wonderful rock is Travertine. Here it is.


Imagine a huge bubbling bath that you're going to leave for thousands of years. Every so often the water is just the lovely right temperature for lots of algae to grow, and they're joined by great gloopy lumps of bacteria and little creatures, having a fantastic time swimming about in that lovely warm bath.

Then someone turns on the tap, and out pours a load more water, mud, silt, and tiny carbonate particles like bits of melted pearl or crushed up snail shell.

That tapload bashes the surface, ripping up and killing off the algae, and lays down a new top layer of mud and silt.

But don't worry, after a few more thousand years the algae's grown back. Then you can turn on the tap again.

Give it long enough, and the whole lot solidifies. And now you can see it in Milton Keynes Shopping Centre. It's called Travertine. It's a sedimentary rock, and here it's all over the floors and walls. Can you see those layers? The darker lines are mud and the lighter lines are algae. It's fantastic. I love it.


When we've done with Travertine, we go off and look at Gabbro, and a pretty pink granite and a blood-red granite.


It's all thanks to one of those experts we know from this education world, fantastically filled with opportunity, should you take it. So a public thanks to Jill Eyers for one of her walking guides, Rocks Afoot.

But I know a geology lesson is not a crime. And if you've come here looking for that evidence of our sordid lifestyle, then this is bound to be a disappointment. Sorry. I promise to do better with the madness and naked driving thing.

But look on the bright side. You can always accuse me of being a smugbastard highhorsed granolaeating homeeducator who definitely lives on the fringes of society because we went all that way to CMK and never even bought an acrylic jumper.

I think this means I'm not dead yet

Travelling this home education road over the last few years has been an eye-opening and challenging experience. It has taken some toll on me, emotionally and intellectually. And physically, it has trashed me. My withered face now scares horses.

I found an old photograph of me yesterday, one taken way before the responsibility that is children, and I just looked at that open smiling expression and thought such awful innocence. Call the last few years scary, isolating, fretful.

On the plus side, I can find exhilarating, satisfying, rewarding.

And fortunately, my mind can add, never boring.

But you can bet over the years on this home ed journey with triplets, I've seen some things. I've met some wild and wacko parents. And boringly normal ones too. All with as many approaches to education as there are kids.

Some home educators opt for school at home, with timetables and exercise books. Others go for autonomy - and take that to levels of child freedom which to watch at times has both scared me witless and knocked me sideways for the assumptions it has challenged, and the ways forward that approach has confidently found.

Many more people, like me, swing between goalposts, trying this, negotiating that, feeling our way, joining this group, trying that, working with the local authority here, backing off there, hoping this, working towards a future. I am sometimes blindfold, with soapbox, weeping, raising two fingers. Some days I have insisted on worksheets and stuff we need to know, but I do not know why, and some days I waved my kids away, saying Sure! when I am not sure. Pleading, Come back if you need!

Throughout, the huge variety of people and approaches in this world have been a support to me. It has only improved with time. Whereas once I used to feel home educators might be hard pressed to agree about anything, now I think there is such tolerance for each other's styles and ways, the latest attack from the government in the UK can only have helped us overlook our differences; now the loudest voice is about the need to protect our freedoms to choose.

I have seen a wide range of ways of working with local authorities too. Some home educators work closely alongside, supplying information, arranging meetings, building trust, teaching their local authority staff about the huge variety that is education. Others have found ways of working directly with the local authority through schools and local groups, drawing down funds and building flexischool schemes. Other home educators maintain a courteous distance, watchful, reminding authorities of good practice. Yet others refuse to deal with local authority staff, bruised perhaps, bullied, having met a system that has already failed them.

The thing is, what I want to convey, is that this education world is so very complex, so fantastically varied, offers so many options and avenues, that all is possible, and can be much much more than this government would have you believe.

This government wants you to think only in terms of types. Home educators are on the fringes of a normal society. They want you to eliminate all the shades and tones and nuances, all the people and personalities, all the possibilities. They want you to think in black and white, cut and dried, us and them, divide and rule.

The truth is, home educators are drawn from all society. We are you. We are professors of education, builders, teachers, diplomats, caterers, administrators, doctors, journalists, drivers, artists, visiting scholars, office workers, engineers, managers, cleaning staff, community workers, nurses, lawyers, volunteers, people who run their own business, people who employ others, people who work hard for a wage.

We cannot be picked off, isolated, controlled; we are this society.

'The problem Graham Badman, Delyth Morgan and all the other idiots who started on this crusade against Home Education, is that their ignorance of what Home Education really is was deeply profound. I say ‘was’ because now they know that there are a substantial number, probably the majority, of Home Educators who are highly qualified, trained, successful and professional people, who are more than capable of defending themselves, their philosophies, choices and methods of parenting.

They erroneously imagined that they were dealing with a bunch of uneducated, defenceless and deviant people who they could easily steamroller, like they do with every other disadvantaged group. How wrong they were. Out of the woodwork come PHDs and every other type of lettered academic and professionally accredited person, all of whom either Home Educate or fully support Home Education.

They poked their stick in a hornets nest, and now the angry Hornets are coming out and vigorously buzzing around them. There are THOUSANDS of other hornets waiting to emerge if they are needed. And when they get their stingers out, there will be NO MERCY SHOWN.'

If you are finding out today why people are defending this fantastically varied world with all the opportunities, choices and exhilarating ways to make education our own, then take a journey round these thousands and thousands of voices.

You could start from the place where the above quote is taken, here.

Yet another reason to blog

These last few days have been so wretched, the first thing I think when I'm opening my eyes in the morning is how bad will it be today?

It would be OK if I meant triplets or home education.

Neither of those for me has been the wonderful fulfilling experience some may want you to believe. I have been in states of sadness, anger, loneliness and despair about both, but I have found ways through those impossible states, and found that there are joys, and triumphs, and pure feelings of satisfaction to be had; and certain knowledge that I am building loving relationships that will work.

So today my plan is normal: to get everyone to Mad Science, drive thirty miles for drama, then come home, cook, clear up, guide Shark to a new maths website, help Squirrel with her writing, and find that book I so faithfully promised for Tiger, then make a project book on Mexico. Throughout the hours we'll read, listen, talk, argue, and kiss nightnight before bed.

But managing triplets through this home educated day all pales into nothing when I imagine what new horrors and attacks Badman and the DCSF can dream up for me today.

This endless daily cycle of stress here has really brought me low. It feels like I am alone, and struggling. And right now, it's not with the education. I just want to be left alone to do that. It feels like people in this government must hate me for the choices I've made, for what I do, and I don't know why.

To prove to you that they are right to be suspicious, what will they tell you next? They've already said home educators are child abusers; oppressive evangelicals; we force our children to miss out on education; we're on the fringes of society; mentally ill. What will they tell you next? What next?

It's an act of resistance then, to tell you all, to tell anyone who wanders past this blog, that in the past few days this is what we've done, this normal home educating family. These are the things we've done, and I never said, because I was too busy with Badman and Balls.

They won't win, because I have stronger ammunition.

I have taken Tiger, Squirrel and Shark to playgrounds.


We have joined a local group for a lecture at the Open University on the Magic of Oxygen. I have taken my children to join a local nature group to search for fungi. With the help on an expert guide, they found chicken of the woods, King Alfred's cakes, strange and wondrous fairy bells.


They made their monthly evening outing to their wildlife explorer's group. We went to see Pixar's Up, and afterwards talked together about characterisation, animation, and about the story, Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad. We had a wonderful discussion wandering over interpretations of truth, power, colonial ambitions, obsessions. The responses from Shark, Squirrel and Tiger were staggering; mature, insightful, thoughtful, unchildlike.

They joined a group in St Albans to listen to stories, and make wigwams. We came home and pored over geography books and talked about the Americas, the New World, colonisation, the conquistadors.


They joined their regular classroom group for French; Shark went to her drama group. We have pinned up a giant skeleton on the wall in the front room; found out about Mexico's Day of the Dead; made icing sugar skulls.


We have read more of The Hobbit; cooked food together; listened to music; talked, made bad jokes, laughed, and flew kites.


Those are our activities of the last few days. Is that normal? That seems normal to me, to us. That's normal, and to do it, and tell you about it, is my ongoing, daily act of resistance.

Doesn't it make you wonder where your money goes

Last week I bought three new pairs of boots. They were all size 4, so didn't fit me. But they do fit our three flap-footing replicants, who stride down the street with great smiles springing on their faces; their feet no longer bound in bandages and the wet pavement not leaking up their legs.

I bounce those smiles right back. Even though they are replicants, my heart flips from seeing Shark, Squirrel and Tiger happy and well shod.

That pleasure was only compounded yesterday when we visited a local charity shop. Within a twinkling of an eye and £14 I had equipped each offspring with a beautiful autumn weatherproof coat; two pink and one blue.

Squirrel leapt on a candy pink and purple duffle style coat like it might run off if she didn't instantly pounce and glue it to her body. Tiger found a perfect pale pink coat which replaces one that the mother unit stupidly lost months ago, and for which I have yet to be forgiven. Shark chose a seablue coat. I'm not telling her that actually that is a ladies coat size 10 and Shark, it is wrapping round your tummy like a perfect cocoon. I said that the colour is fantastic, I would wear it myself if blue suited me, but on you it looks perfect. And then I rolled back the sleeves up her arms.

Boots and coats apart, I have yet some way to go in restocking the autumn wardrobe; not only are their enormously sprouting feet extending over all pavements, their legs are growing in all directions and their tummies are rounding, stocking up puppy fat for the body changes that are to come next.

But if only it were about growth and fashion. Do not replicants need to be kept warm and dry and protected against all the cruel winds and rains of winter? I thought that was so, and maybe some people call wrapping up these mini people just good parenting. Or maybe some folks will nod that's another sure sign of my mental illness.

Underneath all this shopshopshopping is the real hard fact that shoeing and clothing these growing human types costs money. And they wear their own choice of clothes everyday, due to mamma not having the steel plate fixed in my eye which would let me clamp them into uniform.

I take the cost of daily clothing on the chin. It's another small consequence of the conviction about home education: I guess it would be cheaper to invest in nine interchangeable, non-distinguishable, stain-proof, rust-proof, crease-free, fold-free, non-iron grey school skirts. Round here, that plastic uniform would be pennies by comparison to a daily choice of pink coats and purple dresses.

But if only home education stopped there! I won't stray into the costs of Amazon, craft materials, maths and science resources, lessons, annual passes, entry fees, train tickets, petrol. Believe me, there isn't much room left to buy those much needed boots for me.

Maybe the point of this roundabout post is that home education costs me in many small and big and ordinary ways, and not just in the cut to my salary.

And it's not going to get any easier. If, thanks to the Badman recommendations and new restrictions upon us all, then I would expect a lot more private companies, database service providers and publishers to leap in there. I'd expect those companies to offer inter-agency services; packages for local government; materials for home educators. I'd expect market growth for home software, educational products, study texts, monitoring solutions. Something for everyone.

Home education will then be a business opportunity, much in the same way that has happened from the national curriculum at school: how many publishing companies now produce thousands of Help your child at home with SATs books? How many do you own? Home education, if it were tied down, would be a wide open new market.

Will Nektus benefit from this? I don't know, and we're yet to find out.

But I'd better warn those companies who'll target me directly that with all their goods and services, they're competing for my limited purse. I reserve the right to ignore all of you. And I may choose to go out with Shark, Squirrel and Tiger, and buy new boots.

Now I have Munchhausen's Syndrome by Proxy

Seriously, anyone would think we decided to home educate these triplets like we choose pizza for lunch. Shall we have mushroom? Or just cheese and tomato?

I don't know about you, but we went through agony of thinking about the education of our kids, because like you with yours, we love ours. Like you, we didn't take our decisions lightly.

And I don't know whether when you made your decision, you were able to sit back and think, That's settled for the next few years. We don't have to think about that again until 2012.

If you did, that must be cool. I would like that feeling. And I envy you that.

Round here, the agony of debate continues everyday. Because everyday I wonder if we make the right choice and do the right thing; whether this worry I have about Tiger's maths, or Squirrel's reading, or the general reluctance of these kids to write, whether these worries are justified; what I should do about them; how I can best approach life so that everyone's encouraged in their various ways.

And then there's all that laundry to be done, so get up early and go to bed late to fit that in your educating day, Grit.

Doubts, fears, worries, laundry. These are my everyday. And to a large extent, I live with them because I have various convictions. Not religious ones, although sometimes I think this would be easier if I believed in that god; my beliefs are about people and education. And I am prepared to see through my convictions in practical ways by taking on that individual responsibility towards my own kids.

Having done that, and lifted that enormous weight on my back and shoulders and head and heart, I would like one part of my day to be able to heave a big sigh of relief.

I would like a part of my day to feel safe and free from worry, to know that I am supported, and trusted, and respected for my choices.

I would like to think that you, seeing my kids everyday, would know that my choices and responsibilities have some substance; you can see that Tiger, Shark, and Squirrel are happy kids who engage in activities, events, who enjoy life, learn new things, and look forward to everything this world has to offer. They appreciate their home education, and they're learning all the time about the expectations we have, and which I share with you. I want my kids to be responsible; to be resourceful; to be respectful. Those are our 3Rs. Through these, I want them to grow wise, learn independently, and learn how to learn all the time, so they have that to guide them throughout their lives.

But I rarely have that room to breathe. I rarely feel that I am supported, and trusted, and respected for the choice I've made.

When I read this today, I confess to sitting down and bawling out my eyes and howling from the top to the bottom of this house.

Memorandum submitted by Dr Paula Rothermel FRSA, Educational psychologist expert witness

1. I am one of the leading academics in the field in the UK and the only expert witness specialising in court cases where home education is an issue. My 2002 research involved 1099 children and remains the largest and most in-depth and authoritative independent of home education carried out in the UK. The research involved 419 survey questionnaires to families and 238 targeted assessments (with 196 different children) to evaluate the psychosocial and academic development of home-educated children aged eleven years and under.

2. I was invited on two occasions to meet with Mr Badman.

3. At our first interview Mr Badman was interested in what I had to say. His opening question was to ask me if home educating mothers suffered from Munchhausen's by Proxy. ...

4. At our second interview Mr Badman was dismissive of my work. He insisted that my study covered just 30 children. He indicated that someone had told him this and insisted that my conclusions and findings, therefore, were of little significance. Nothing I could say would sway him from this view.

This government should know that I have judgment, I have sense, I have a heart that can break a thousand times over and I will have strength in me to mend it again and again and again.

But I cannot for the life of me understand what motivates this attack of me and mine; what drives this cruel campaign; what informs this frame of reference used to judge me and my choice.

Today it's just another day of standing up and finding the strength to take this on, this hurtful and cruel way of describing me and how I live. I will do that, and I will fight for the choices I make and to keep the way that we live. They are my convictions, my family, our way of life, and no person will shake them.

But sometimes people, you will have to forgive me, or join me, when I climb to the top of this house and scream with all my lungs that you, you destroyer of choice, you corruption to my family, my life, my kids, you attacker of me, of mine, of us,

FUCK YOU.

Is this red carpet day?

Thanks to the Sunday Times, Grit dons her posh frock today, and stands blubbing on the stairs, shedding salt tears and dribbling snotty slime on the carpet, which just happens to be red.

Between blubbing and wiping her nose on her arm, Grit fulsomely thanks everyone she has ever known for this brief second of notstardom; this day which sees her occupy the same magazine as Russell Brand and an advert which asks me if I am dripping with sweat.

Gritty thanks might start with the little grits and the Mother Ghost and, after five hours with rivers of weeping, could get down to the one-eyed neighbour with the dodgy leg and the woman with red face and bleached hair who came round to poison the kitchen rat.

Really, they all need thanks. And I bet they would love those thanks to come from a woman who routinely humiliates herself in public. But thanks must be said. All these people are in Grit's world, and without them and the rich lives they lead, I would be a lesser human being. They jolly me up something royal when I am beyond despair and they tell me there are worse things to do with my life than this.

Like rat catching. That is surely a job so repulsive I am grateful my job is to gad about England amusing myself historically, pretending to home educate triplets, and pausing only occasionally to rant at Ed Balls. I might thank him too. Or perhaps not.

But there are so many of you who need a big smackeroo. And I promise I do not drip sweat and have not cut out that advert which promises a solution for only £299.

Thank you especially to those who return almost daily to be bludgeoned to death by gritsday. You know who you are. The reader in Southampton who will not give in; the dutiful person in Bath; the person looking for the pigeon; the people in Cambridge who dread me visiting that fine city once more; the upstanding readers who google for bali men naked and my newest reader, hopefully searching what to do with old grit.

And finally, there are blogfolk out there who have a special place in my blogheart for their good bloggy deeds and their infinite patience, and that is Belgian Waffle, Potty Mummy and Michelle.

Go and say hello to them, because now I have to take off my frock, and mop up the floor.

This is how we are British

Everything is happy down at the Celtic Harmony Camp today.


There is wand making, magic stone wishing, and broomstick making.


There's also storytelling, follow the riddles and take the trail to the druid.

OK, the druid was a little disappointing.

There was a sign through the trees reading 'druid' and our little party followed that. I was sort of quietly hoping there would be a proper druid in there, one that explorers maybe found in the middle of a forest. Someone who didn't know the Romans had arrived or never even heard about the Normans, he was just doing his druidy thing, like growing his long trailing beard, sipping from the elder bush of wisdom, rejuvenating himself with elixirs, and incanting over willow twigs.

But no, he was just a cut-out bit of wood with a label 'druid'.

I should have photographed that. Possibly due to being so completely underwhelmed, my eyeballs just stared blankly. Even so, we were all in agreement about that disappointing moment; no-one burst into angry tears, or became engaged in heated discussion about what a let down a cardboard druid was; no-one got all huffypuffy about Celtic celebrations being tools of the devil or found anything controversial at all. No. We all just stared, and walked back along the trail, and then we clustered around the fly agaric, going ooh! and I photographed that instead.


So you can see our little party was mostly happy and gentle and entering into the spirit of the thing called harmony.

But then we got to the Celtic cafe.

There was not harmony in the Celtic cafe. Not at all. Fifteen minutes more and there could have been blood.

There were four people serving, or maybe more, because it was hard to tell, what with Celts wandering in and out, arranging paper cups and scratching their midriffs.

From the four who were serving, it was the job of one to shout at all the others with a face that did not attempt to disguise intense irritation mixed with loathing.

From the customers who had not given in, died, or crawled away in despair with soup when they asked for coffee, there was one man who started off the twenty minute procedure to extract tea looking like the mild mannered man you might expect to give up his seat to an elderly lady on the bus home. By the end of twenty minutes he had shaved his head, tattooed his face with the word HATE and maybe would have torn down the counter with his bare knuckle hands if someone did not give him the fuckingcupofteaandrightNOW.

And then there was the little crumblepie cutie kid who stood in the queue next to a man who was a dead ringer for a six foot bullfrog, and the woman who was serving kept mixing them up. How can you do that unless you are blind?

So Grit's request for a biscuit shaped like a bat pales into insignificance. The serving lady dutifully wrote down biscuit bat on a piece of paper, despite standing next to the biscuit bats, then put the piece of paper to one side where no one paid any attention to the biscuit bat request until Grit was pulling at her own face in despair and making strangled cries of pain.

And the lesson I can learn from this moment is that the Celts were probably just like us.

They were probably very harmonious and polite and quite agreeable. Not at all warlike, and very tolerant, and possibly good at queuing.

They just became a snarling naked tribe of seething rebellion and anger and ripyourheadoff blood curdling redseeing mob painting themselves blue fuelled by fury and rage when they were separated from the thing they most desired and WANTEDINALLTHEWORLD and that was

ABISCUITBATANDALOVELYCUPOFTEA.

OK, I will do pumpkins. But stop it with the Haribo.

I hate Halloween. I do not know what it is for, except as a useful commercial enterprise for that lean period before Christmas. You know, that happy end-of-year time when people lose their reason and ability to count, like you need reminding every second of every day how many minutes to go before you are declared bankrupt.

And of course, like every other miserable antisocial parent in the UK, because it is Halloween and that is such FUN I have to slap a grin round my cheeks and pretend my life is now complete and yes, why don't you wrap me in bandages and bury me in the garden because that will make the day for you so much more FUN.

Of course, because we home educate, that means we are going to have a fantastic time. Better than a hundred million fantastic times rolled into one, because Halloween is not only such FUN, I have to make every one of our damned learning experiences FUN at well and this is an opportunity to make more educational FUN out of a damn learning experience than we ever thought possible.

But forget about the trick or treating. I draw the line there. Did we suck that one up from the USA? I swear before three years ago I never heard of that. And I am so peeved that I didn't think of it. I could have made a fortune in protection money and settled a few local scores properly. Like sending my kids off into the dark and stormy dimly lit street dressed as vampires to threaten Mr Arse that if he doesn't hand over the Haribos they'll slash his car tyres and shovel shit through his letter box. That sounds like a fine tradition worthy of Smalltown. I could start that.

Oh if only Halloween could stop there. There's yet the bloody pumpkin.

Who ever saw a damn pumpkin like these great orange globules until a few years ago? Now we all have to dance round the sodding bonfire cavorting with pumpkins like they've been doing this in Berkshire since the time of Henry II.

OK, maybe they have down there, but the pumpkin carving might push me over the edge. It is the first reason why I am so sharp on my wits, heels and telephone dialling finger today. I see there is a community arts event down the road in which you can carve your own pumpkin and then go off to the spooky night Halloween party with a torch to scare yourself witless, find all the spooky creepy carved Halloween faces, and fall into a ditch. Sounds fantastic.

Shark is dead keen and within ten seconds of me mentioning this opportunity, she is bounding off the walls, fully dressed and ready to go.

She knows the difference between promise and action. I promised faithfully, really cross my heart and hope to die, that I would carve that pumpkin. The same one that two weeks passed by and it started to corrode from its own fermenting acid and was sat in a pool of slime that looked like pumpkin piss. It stank something rotten, which only increased my reluctance to go near it, even though I knew, I really did, that from this point it wasn't going to get any better.

I still left it for three more days. I couldn't pick it up. All the flesh had rotted away and it was only kept in some sort of round shape due to the near-exploding pressure of the internal compressed gas created by its own rotted guts.

Two weeks after Halloween had been and gone, the only answer was a face mask, a bin liner lowered over the pumpkin from hell, and a shovel, to scrape the dead and diseased item off the worksurface. Two years later I can still see the stains.

So with the sniff of a pumpkin carving session by day and a party session by night, all laid on by someone else, you can bet that I am down there on the dot to enjoy it.

And those wonderful welcoming smiling people do lead that session, properly and smartly, and make a big party atmosphere from it. I cannot thank them enough for that, for making it all so exciting and funny, all day long, dressing up pumpkins, making clothes for shadowy shapes, then dressing them in sparkly twinkly fairy lights and hiding them all around a big old rambling party garden.

By the darkness of the evening, Shark, Squirrel and Tiger are so proud and excited, they're all this way! that way! look over there mama! I maybe might admit they're all cute again, even though they're tugging my clothing in three different ways at once, and chattering in every direction which makes it impossible to know without possessing six ears which way they want me to come and find the best one yet!

Which makes me love the happy smiles on their faces and their delighted excitement and howls of oo ooo oooh! at those jumpy shapes and shadows in the dark. And then the cute way that Squirrel hugs me tight just because she needs to and I am there for her, even in the dark in the garden, with pumpkins on sticks, and stupid misled foolish Grit, says Yes! That's fantastic! You are right! The pumpkins are brilliant! And I love Halloween too!

Did the earth move?

There always comes those particular points in the home educating day when I think to myself that if I do not leave the house right now, right this minute, away from this one square centimetre where four people are standing to growl simultaneously, then I may pick up the nearest blunt instrument, in this case the Exciting Book of Fish, and bludgeon myself to death with it.

So it is fortunate that tonight I can spare Shark, Tiger and Squirrel the sight of blood and send them scattering in different directions to find knickers, socks and footwear. Because this is the evening we have waited for, since the last one was cancelled due to cloud cover, and that is the astronomy night down in the desolate and dark beyond in a field somewhere south of Bletchley.

Do not laugh, by the way, at Bletchley. It was chosen as the wartime code-breaking place partly because it was situated in the abandoned part of England where no-one wanted to go. And today's Bletchley town centre is hardly the bright light city centre for your evening social whirl. Everything round here closes down at six. So it's either dogging or star gazing.

Of course we arrive late, despite setting off for early, because in the dark I cannot find a field south of Bletchley just by driving around, cursing at the Satnav. Although I try it.

When we do arrive, park the car, stumble out into darkness, I am blinded by the organiser who probably does not realise you cannot have a sensible conversation with someone if you wear a head torch. After having my retinas burned out, I am guided towards the pitch black field where I think there might be a huddled group of would be astronomers, listening to a talk by an astronomer who knows what he is talking about. With his slow, unhurried way of talking, pausing, thinking, describing, he is immediately recognisable as one of those experts we follow, literally blindly, into fields all over England.

It takes ten minutes or so for my eyes to adjust to the blackness. There are a lot of people here. I think they might be people. They might be hideous reptiles beamed down from Planet Zelta and staring at the skies waiting for the pickup from the mothership for all I know, because in this unfathomable darkness I can make precious little out of anything except for a crowd of great lumpychunk shapes, attended by mini creatures clinging at ground level and whining. I recognise that sound. They must be the offspring, so that almost guarantees we have found the right group.

Although the proper astronomer is very interesting and explaining all about globular star clusters and the magnitude of Venus, I'm only hearing half of it. Squirrel is cold, and that despite me having said a million times that people in this country wear clothing if they are going to take to autumn fields after dark. But a Squirrel who is cold clings onto the back of your coat and slowly throttles you with your own neckline and zipper, forcing you to make gurgling noises as you unsteadily try to fix yourself on grassy lumps in the darkness to look for Venus.

I could cope with that were it not for Tiger who suddenly takes fright at the mini people at ground level. She probably thinks they might be dogs and thus clings onto my left arm, perhaps hoping to pull it off and club one of the mini shapes to death should it crawl too close.

In between choking and whispering getoff me you are pulling my arm off stoppit stoppit stand up look at the damn sky you should have worn a coat stop doing that and standstill I feel sure that all the reptiles are going to start turning and tut. Shark legs it over the other side of the crowd. Even though it is dark I can sense that expression of exasperation. She will have nothing to do with this embarrassment and is already pretending she is someone else's daughter. Even a reptilian parent from the Planet Zelta waiting for the bus back home might be preferable to the spluttering one-armed Grit thrashing around on a grassy knoll beating off two replicants.

But after I have unpeeled Tiger and trekked back to the car to retrieve Squirrel scarves, I manage to stare at the skies and catch the end of the talk.

Our astronomer guide is wonderfully knowledgeable, and does not come across as a person who maybe also likes model railways in sheds, not at all. He is enthusiastic, jolly, and describes how seeing these stars is like looking at old friends, ones who have been around to help build the universe. And he cautions how astronomy is not without hazards, because one night he had his toes nibbled by badgers.

It is deeply relaxing, this hour, staring at the night sky. I forget about my cold feet and crick neck, and become absorbed in finding the constellations, those tiny twinkling eyes peering back to earth. If I could reach back thousands of years I would see myself standing looking at this miraculous sight, the huge breadth and depth of that immense sky dome. I could have spent hours, or days, or years watching, and I would think that there was something timeless and eternal too reflected back to earth in those shining lights.

When the proper astronomer finishes his talk, and we have to pull ourselves away, we all stumble off and look through the very expensive telescopes. If I were those enthusiasts, I would be wrapping those tripod legs in fluorescent hazard tape, because there is no small amount of stumbling and pushing in the queues to ooh and aaah at the moons of Jupiter and the wide bomb blasted craters on the moon surface.

By the end, everyone's delighted; if someone saw a satellite track across the sky, I believe it took an effort of will for us all not to applaud, and whistle and laugh in shared delight. Rarely have I met a sudden community of people come close together for that experience.

And who knows, I might yet become an astronomer. It is the simplest, most fulfilling and most satisfying way to have the earth move and, even better, there was never a moment of guilt or worry or fear that things would have gone better if only I had made an effort to shave my legs first.

The gentle day that is not spent at school

I had better chronicle the ordinary upwiththelarks* home educating everyday.

Any wandering past visitor will otherwise think this blog is only a permanent mouth open rant against Ed Balls, the dark lord Badman and all goblins who live in mountains.

Anyway, this blog exists partly to show you that if you enjoy life with your own children, there's no reason why you shouldn't do more of it. Money might be a reason, possibly. My solution on that score is mostly to go without. The charity shops in Northampton are cheap. They're a much better bargain than Hitchin, where the reusable M&S clothes are very expensive.

Cutting edge stuff, eh?

Well, if you are contemplating home education, here's an ordinary day. Minus the arguments.

After reading another chapter of The Hobbit, we all donned outdoor clothes and strode off across the fields looking for an education.

That means we can call the world and this field, our classroom. Including this special building which I feel bears some similarity to the one I used to teach in.

The little grits need no encouragement to go around poking their noses into these places. With this sort of background they could aspire to be OFSTED inspectors.



But given that we home educators encourage playtime, here is a picture of permissible play going on from a park bench.

And we walk past a lot of wetland, so let's call fifteen minutes in a bird hide staring at an upturned duck's arse both science and geography. The debate as to whether it was really a dead floating pigeon we will count as PSHE.

As usual, the Gritmobile is the last car in the carpark at College Lake today, so I'm betting that the gritlets made something of an education from their observations and experiences of the world; from all the discussions we had about dead pigeons, quarries, wetlands, global warming, and where you would hide if you were a weasel on the run from a ferret armed with a sub machine gun.

Later I might bribe the little home educated gritlets to write about it.

So there it is. A perfectly ordinary home educating day.

I recommend it.


*OK, upwiththelarks is a lie, and I only put it in to make myself feel purposeful and energetic. Really, I poke my kids with skewers to force them out of bed at 10am.

Of course, now I have confessed, I will claim that lolling around in bed is yet another benefit of the not at school lifestyle. You can hang around in jimmie jams till all hours reading books, and you get to call that an education as well.

I hope Maggie Atkinson has big ears

Why on earth would anyone want to be Children's Commissioner? Do they really want to listen to children? Have they thought that through?

I don't know about your kids, but mine disgorge an endless stream of incoherent rubbish concerning the intricate bowel movements of unicorns and fish and caravans and mudlarks wearing kitchenfoil body armour. Fifteen minutes of that and you'd be stabbing your own head with a knitting needle. I can tell you it's far less painful.

I chose to stay alongside my kids for this rambling muddling through journey, rather than packing them off to boarding school for some earhole respite. By the way, don't think I'm telling you this to show you how great and glorious a self sacrificing mother I am. Rather, it should tell you what a cruel streak I use to beat myself, thinking I want to experience the forbidding place that is daily living and education of your own children, and all the while listening to hours of endless babble.

The idea of journeying in home education alongside three mardy mucky kids - staying with it from the stumbling punch-drunk dwarf years towards the stroppy hair-flicking pre-teens - well, a long time ago it did seem like a good idea. That idea, as you can guess, was before these human types were made into microns of cells. And that one-sided decision to home educate was also possibly taken after a glass of red wine, facing a worried looking husband over a kitchen table some years ago. Perhaps the decision was affected by rising at 6am every morning to try and teach 7G about full stops while Kevin prowled the corridors with a baseball bat, and Jim routinely hid his bag of heroin wraps in my book cupboard. Maybe I thought any educational mayhem I could bring about wouldn't be quite as bad as that.

But now, sitting here, sunk under paint, paper, offcuts of fabric and unicorn fluff, rendered semi-unconscious from hours of stream-of-consciousness drivel about lampshades and trams and Barbi who wears matching shoes! You can bet some days I have my doubts.

So I wonder why Maggie Atkinson really wants that job of Children's Commissioner. Probably not to listen to children; certainly not to mine, Shark, Squirrel and Tiger. They would almost certainly speak the wrong answers, or witter on for five hours about giant cats fighting underwater battles with shape-shifting fish.

And wittering kids aside, she has all that work to do with bloodyminded parents. Would you like to do that job?

These home educating types for a start. They can be determined for battle, I can tell you. You're going to have a fight on your hands there, Maggie.

Let's face it, things have not started well with them, have they? First there's the link to the favourite bete noire, BullyBoyBalls. Then Maggie upset the parents of thousands of kids in England at a stroke. Take the information she gave to the Education select committee regarding her future appointment:

'I will take you back, if I may, to when I was an adviser in Birmingham city council, where there were quite large numbers of home-educated children - it is getting on for 20 years now since I worked in Birmingham. At that time, as an advisor I had a right and a duty not only to knock on the doors of people who were choosing electively to educate their children at home, but simply to go into their premises and, on the most headline of bases, to look at whether the environment was right, whether there were age-appropriate materials in use, and whether the children seemed okay.'

Let me hold up that rhetorical pointing finger, Maggie, and take you back to the law. Show me the law. Show me the law that gave a local authority advisor the right to enter someone's house and home. I don't think that law exists, Maggie. Ed Balls would like it to, which is why he's worked so well with Badman, who's recommended it.

In fact, Maggie probably knows that this is one of the sticking points for home educators.

The state seems itching to get inside family life, and many ordinary people are making a ripe rich noise about that right now. And it seems to many of us that local authority bodies are desperate to assume the power to enter any home in England where there can be a child defined as 'home educated'.

So be careful, you keepers of runny-nosed bawling mini-humans aged under 5. If you do not choose a state nursery for your delightful littlehairysnorting Moonbeam, then can it be said you are 'delivering the birth-five curriculum, that every child is entitled to' in your own home? Then welcome to the world of home education.

Of course we can fight back on the idea of Maggie's mates doorstepping us Monday morning. Perhaps if the local authority would like the right to enter my house, inspect my 'environment', look at my 'age-appropriate materials', and assess whether I have beaten my child recently, then that's a right we can potentially extend to everyone. Doesn't it follow that citizens should have the right to enter any 'premises' belonging to an employee of the local authority and check that their family household is running in accordance with state policy?

Somehow, I think if Maggie wants that job of listening to children and the families who love and protect them, then her work's cut out.

But I can't leave this post just yet. There's one thing that's bugging me more than fifty beetles stuffed down my bra.

Did you notice the word Maggie first used to describe where thousands of people live? Premises? Not someone's house or home, but their premises.

I don't know what children up and down England call it - maybe after listening to those children you could tell me Maggie - but Shark, Squirrel and Tiger call these premises their 'home'.

Shark, Squirrel and Tiger love their home. They love this house. They love the way the floorboards don't quite meet; they love the way the worn down Victorian brass doorhandles turn; they love how you can gaze at the wooden joists overhead in their workroom; they love the curved stone step down to the coldest bedroom.

I might beat myself about the head because I cannot see the floor from one November to the next, but I know my children love this space, their home. And I've chosen to live with the way they show their love. Call that way rolling around, screaming, laughing, throwing themselves about, slamming doors, pulling the front room curtains down, creeping down under the fluffy sofa throw to read, and yelling obscenities while perched on the toilet. It's chaos. But it's our chaos.

Maggie should know above all that this is our family home. It's the place where we love, laugh, eat, sleep, shout, cry, argue, make up.

But it doesn't stop there. These rooms are filled with the things we have made and built. That mess of blue pipe cleaners, sequins and folded paper? It's Shark's home-made ray, and she dreams of the time she stood in the warm pool to stroke their silvery backs and feed them treats from her hand, and my underwater dreamer longs for that again. We'll try and help make her dream come true.

But that tangle of twisted wire? That's the day Squirrel spent two hours painfully constructing a wire horse from a design she'd seen painted in a Celtic festival. Every tiny piece of wire she carefully twisted between her near-bleeding fingers. I coaxed her to use the pliers; she still needed to feel the tiny threads press into her skin. That's how she learned the strength and tension of that wire.

And Tiger's painting, hanging on the wall in our front room. The one she screamed over, wept over, declared rubbish, and returned to, time and time again, bringing all the determination she could wring from her body to put into that paint the feeling she had. Tiger, trasher of bathroom, destroyer of clothing, creator of beauty: my most sensitive, expressive artist.

I wouldn't want to be Children's Commissioner, having to listen to all this.

But I bet this is all the wrong answer, so Maggie probably won't want to hear.

Another reason why I don't give in

Thanks to the Anglo Saxons, we've read Beowulf Red Fox Classics edition and The Hobbit second time through; made solemn progression to the Franks Casket; dipped into a dozen and more books about the years after the Romans and before the Normans; enjoyed ordinary days at West Stow Anglo Saxon Village once, twice, every year; jumped on the Secklow mound in Milton Keynes; and silently wept for the loss of that crumbling old house in Northumberland close to the sandswept shores of Lindisfarne.

It all makes sense anyhow, visiting Sutton Hoo in Suffolk. Here Shark, Squirrel and Tiger take part in an archaeological dig, meet King Raedwald, tour the burial mounds with a guide who is dramatist, historian, storyteller, then drink hot chocolate before setting out for home.







It sounds unlikely, given this holiday lifestyle, that I can say this year has been draining and damaging. But it has been so. Not because of the sheer hard 24/7 work of it, nor the shouty, sulking, opinionated children, nor the bizarre communities of people we meet, nor for our falling down house, nor the absent husband now supping beer somewhere in Kowloon. The damage has come from constant insinuations, a steady dripdripdrip of negative press reports, a government's sneering suspicions, wondering why as home educators we deserve to be hated. The origin is the DCSF and the Badman review, and I have resented the hours I have spent there, fretting, because those hours are more precious spent elsewhere.

We have met the state half way in our choices for education; we have been supportive of local projects that explore options for children and parents; we have sought to build good relationships. By this, we thought we could look forward to a time when families can choose some school, part school, no school, un school. Throughout, we believe that education is more important than difference, and that there are as many ways of education as there are children. We extended trust, and as parents we expected to be trusted in turn.

Badman betrayed us and all of that. And if it were not for the strength and gladness of ordinary people we meet daily in our gadabout life, people like Bryan the archaeologist who bursts into warm laughter, and shakes my hand firmly on finding that Shark, Squirrel and Tiger are home educated, declaring from the heart That's the best way to live! If it were not for those people who make up our everyday world, by now I probably would have buckled under the weight.

Lavenham living

Spending a cold night sleeping on a hard floor with only a part-share of a dead flat cat for covering is a small price to pay for waking up surrounded by the beautiful landscape that is Suffolk.

Big Bro took over this house, where we've spent last night, from mum and dad. It's a small house, not old, part of some new housing expansion years ago, built in a village which reached capacity with maybe 200 inhabitants, so there's no more now to be made. Who would want to live in this backwater village anyway? There's no shop, a bus every Wednesday and the post office ran from the side of the local labourer's pub. In the house there's no gas mains and the radiators are fed by an oil tank out in the yard, refilled once a year.

But there are compensations to village life in the middle of nowhere. Best would be sweeping back the curtains to these windows and seeing wide vistas of ancient weathered landscape fringed by bony hedges and raddled woodland. That would be perfect. But no matter. My wakeup view is the back garden of two bins, a washing line, and a battered shed.

But I still love Suffolk. I really do. Both my parents are dead here, resting or dozing. Perhaps mum is still pegging out the washing, or bringing it back in again, because she can't sit still until it's done, but her continuous activity, shaped by the wind and the likelihood of rain, is just another measure of how I remember her here in this house, busy in the back garden, worrying over the washing line.

I don't know everything about my parents, like why they saw Suffolk and stayed; perhaps it's the ideal retirement place, just far enough away yet close enough. I know why I like it. It's a mix of the hard-edged farm labouring life, with all the raw rook woods, grey clod fields and bleak misery of cold dark mornings which an agricultural heritage describes, set side-by-side with secluded gated mansions and ancient fifteenth century timbered manor houses, composed with the estate all around and bordered by peep-proof fences.

Such is that mixture of history, poverty, incomers and money, you can be walking away from this village on the unmarked single track road, up to the farm where the wife once sold eggs if you hammered on the kitchen door, and Claudia Schiffer might sweep by in her Audi, flicking you into the ditch by the cow field.

We're definitely from the poor side of Suffolk, so today we're off to look at what wealth meant in the 1500s. For us, it's over these fields to Lavenham, to look at gentry from the eyes of an elderly gentleman on a walking tour of the town.

Lavenham is a perfect medieval town. The weather is mild, a wind is stirring around the market square and the sunshine is intermittently breaking through, promising a bright autumn day. It makes a wonderful backdrop for the old gentleman who'll lead us gently on the Sunday morning tour.

A small party of us has assembled between the timber framed estate agent and pub, and as we wait for the walk to start, I listen hard, in case I snatch the sound of a pageant or a wandering minstrel finding their way here, to this old medieval town in the fields, strung along the roads from Long Melford or Sudbury. You never know; Lavenham's the place to come if you wanted to make some money and work in England's medieval cloth making industry. Broadcloth - a thick dense woven cloth - was exported from here as far as Russia and North Africa in the fifteenth century. Such was Lavenham's success and industry that in 1524, it was England's fourteenth wealthiest town.

But within a decade or so, developments in weaving elsewhere, a steep decline of demand for broadcloth, and sudden loss of overseas markets, meant the end for Lavenham's prosperity. The timber framed buildings put up in that period of expansion between 1460 and 1530 were left and stayed untouched; merchants who built them followed fortunes elsewhere; the money ran out for rebuilding or replacement. The oak timber houses simply stood here, frozen in time, while other towns around transformed themselves with new economies: redesigning, redeveloping, expanding. Lavenham, a little town, was saved by its own decline. Now we're told there are some 300 listed buildings here. And it's true you don't have to walk far to see the first fifty. After five minutes I wouldn't be surprised if I might look down to my feet and discover I'm dressed in a woollen kirtle with a chatellaine strapped to my middle, the keys to the family chest jangling as I move.

Really, it's a beautiful walk. The town is peaceful and quiet, and I can fantasize about living in those beautiful steep-roofed limewashed houses, where pewter mugs, dried lavender bunches, leather tankards and wooden bowls would be our everyday use. We walk up the long street where the culvert once spilled over with the blue woad dye which created the famous Lavenham Blue cloth and made the merchants wealthy. I'm sure, if I were on my way to market right now to buy that ha'penny of goose fat, then I'd stop at the street end here and clasp my hand to my nose to complain about the awful stench that rises from piss on woad and how it stains the very earth as blue as the devil's arse.

Seriously, I wanted to live on every street we went along, call every wooden carved door my own, and I can only imagine the pleasure for those that live here. I bet if they come here, they must never want to travel away, because to live in Lavenham means your family can stay forever not knowing about the grimes and crimes of places like Norwich, or that godforsaken place of London.

So we come away after the walk has ended, and I'm struggling to emerge from the fifteenth century, pretending not to be a tourist, but imagining that the houses, if not mine, are lived in by families who can trace their lineage back beyond the 1400s. They might be sat there now in wonky kitchens where the story of how Richard II once travelled through these parts are still told as if it were grandmother's favourite tale.

It's difficult to maintain that fantasy. There are too many Mercedes, Saabs and Jaguars lining roads like Silver Street. But don't tell me anymore about that. Let me keep my fantasies intact.