Education for free down the shopping centre

Do you know, when we are doing well, this home education lark is like one long permanent holiday? Like ice creams and hot sunshine and golden sand every day?

However, please don't try it. The queues and crowds at the sea life centres, and in all the museums, workshops and galleries will become miserably long and I shall be forced to put Shark, Squirrel and Tiger into school to escape.

Remember that home educators are a ragbag of old hippies waiting for the revolution. We smell, too. Vile. Send your kids to school. School is best, that's what I say.

Now, where was I? Oh yes, home education, going well.

Today Grit (rancid old hippie, Scargill was right, it's all a government plot etc. etc.) takes her (vile, smelly) home educated kids to the (stinking capitalist enterprise), Milton Keynes shopping centre.

Here we can benefit from the studious Open University, which has set up lots of science education stalls as part of a grand science festival. This sounds odd, doesn't it, popping to M&S for knickers and emerging two hours later with a new planet and a gravitational microlens, but bringing knowledge to the people is one of the things the Open University is all about. And if the people won't come to science, then it must come to them. Well we don't need any encouragement about that, seeing as we hippies believe home education is really education anywhere, anytime.

Surrounded by shops selling ski boots and handbags we meet a lovely man who tells us how to land satellites on comets (comets, small deaf Squirrel, not camels), and how to grow bacteria behind our ears (Shark, stop sniggering, he said ears, not rears). Then we explore exoplanets, European space research and moon rovers, and discuss whether six billion pounds is a useful amount of money to spend on something that looks like a disability vehicle without the disabled person sitting in it.

All of this is wonderful education because the children imagine themselves as tiny as a molecule and Tiger, Squirrel and Shark make blobby things out of plasticine. Then Grit becomes ridiculously excited about OGLE-2005-BLG-390Lb like she just found three squares of chocolate at the bottom of her handbag that she thought she'd eaten. Yes, as excited as that: the jumping up and down look!look!look! sort of excitement.

Now of course Grit with her education hat is all fired up again and is off to reinforce ideas about camels, rears, and nanotechnology and will be purchasing a copy of Fantastic Voyage almost immediately. All that is left of this splendid trawl round the science stalls is to remember next time to buy some knickers.

And, of course, copies of Das Kapital, On the Road, a tie-died frock rubbed with odour of goat, and some skunk for the kids.

Tiger's (out of focus) molecules. Please keep up.