The ruddy petition

This is possibly one of the worst days of my year.

The first thing to get me heaving is the dread and icy thought that today I must deliver the home education petition of evil to the member of parliament for pointlessness.

How do I explain my involvement in this? Where do I begin?

To my wide (and thinly spread) audience out there - many of whom I know do not give a toss about home education - all I can say is this is just one more example of Grit attempting to take a responsible role in our democracy.

We are all entitled to do that in this country, theoretically, and Grit wants it to stay that way, thank you very much.

Suffice to say, apart from turning out in the rain to scrawl an X in a box once every four years, you can do other things to make your voice heard, like deliver petitions about anything you want to your local MP, and arm twist the bugger to read it out in parliament.

In theory, becoming involved in petitions and parliamentary procedures on the streets is great fun.

You can go round with an excuse knocking on doors.

When your neighbour opens up, you can say Hi! Nice to see you! Shall we have an argument? After fifteen minutes, shorter if you are lucky, you can reach the point of seething resentment and near blows after discovering your neighbour is a closet Nazi when you thought they were nice. It only took the issue of gravel extraction or speed bumps or Tesco to reveal the profound chasm of non-negotiation. When the neighbour has told you to shove your poxy petition where the sun don't shine, you can contemplate creeping back after dark and shoving rotting sardines through their letterbox. This is an example of our political life bringing the community together.

In a moment of madness I actually volunteered to be the local idiot bringing the community together, by taking on the job of delivering the home education petition of evil.

If you are a home educator you know which petition it is and I won't need to explain.

If you are not a home educator, I guess you couldn't give a toss about the petition. You just read to find out if this month I end up in prison or in a ditch. I may yet do both, and for you there is hope.

So I take the petition of evil that no one will sign, because apparently it is not taking part in a democracy, it is written with ink made from the festering BILE OF SATAN and it is EVIL and DANGEROUS, and I have to deliver it by hand to the constituency office.

If you have a local MP like ours, they will ignore you. They never reply to your emails, and all contact becomes strangely 'lost'. Well I am one of the constituents here and this little Labour party creep has turned their back on me. They are probably much more concerned with their own career and position within the local party. We have got to the point where I could stand in front of them, disembowel myself and hand them the throbbing gristle of my steaming innards and they would be gazing somewhere to the left of my shoulder idly reading the bus timetable pinned on the wall.

This is not only my experience. Take a read of these words used by another appellant to describe a visit to our lovely MP, and you have a flavour of what we're up against: 'they were confrontational, unenlightened, unsympathetic, were small minded, weren't interested in developing understanding to better understand our concerns, talked of HE parents controlling their children, and HE children not getting opportunities to interact with others'.

So this is my day today. I arrange for the petition of evil to be hand delivered to the MP of pointlessness.

I want to forget it, because it is so miserable. I want to remember it, because when I come to scrawl my X in the voting booth, I want to score it with venom and acid revenge, and know exactly WHY.