Everyday brings new challenge

A few weeks ago Dig casually wanders through the kitchen on his way to Bangalore and he says to Squirrel, Hey cute little kid, what is 6x7?

Squirrel narrows her eyes, peers down her nose, then tosses her head and shrugs off something like D'you think I care?

Dig, whose experience in these matters stopped when he emerged blinking into the sunlight from a public boarding school some forty years ago, stops breathing or moving.

I'm guessing, what with the need for the defibrillator again, that Squirrel's response has not quite reflected the studious attitude he'd hoped he would see from a trainee gentlewoman. He probably would like to see her embroidering 6x7 onto a sampler, but Dig, I gently remind him, you married Grit, that beat-up idle working class hippie on the lookout for a good time and this, one of your spontaneous daughters, is the result. Get used to it.

But he can't. Later, he quietly collars Squirrel and quizzes her on all the other times tables, possibly including the 2x ones, but I'm admitting to nothing.

After about five minutes of this fruitless line of questioning, Squirrel slides off to stuff Arseface up a tree and Dig turns to me like I might have something to do with this maths education. I deny that completely. I say he has a physics A level, therefore he is Einstein's separated family. It's his job.

In fact, you are looking at a woman that at age 8 had a length of chalk thrown at her head by Mrs Smitty because she did not understand the 1x table. 1x anything? It just makes no sense! No sense! How you can you times anything by one when it's only one? One of something is what it is! I'm already on the brink of existential angst, just thinking about it, so traumatic is the thing that is the 1x table.

Dig, who says that little girls in today's world should know a thing or two about 6x7 says that Something Must Happen.

Which explains why today we take delivery of a package of CGP Maths books.

Taking delivery of that package not only shows how completely opposite are Grit and Dig when it comes to most things in life, that package immediately plunges me into home ed schizophrenia.

One half of me is mortified.

The horrified inadequate battered half of me throws myself on the ground, rends my clothes, tears out my hair and generally disgorges a lot of bottled up selfhatredbitterfrustration over 6x7, maths in general, and Mrs Smitty in particular.

When I have done with this side of things, the other, rational, resourceful, clear-thinking Super ego part of me will stand over the snivelling frog Id and wag a finger in the air.

Because of course being crap at maths myself is no reason not to show a positive attitude to it for the little grits. Although I hated this subject at school and have the chalk dents to prove it, remember that home ed means a learning adventure for us all, so we can all expect to follow the remarkable cooperative journey that is 6x7.

Well, Dig is out the country soon, lecturing everyone on how more commas are used than ever, so I doubt the CGP books will be studied for some months yet.

And Grit will thrash around between her Id and Super ego for some weeks to come, and probably, alongside Squirrel, come up with an answer somewhere in between.

And I hope it's 42.