How many battles would I like to fight?

Not content with Dig's cancer diagnosis - for which the blog will morph into a whining pile of self-pity larded with too-much-anatomical-information* - I could choose other battles too!

1. Lord Soley Bill. Oh, you school choosers! How fortunate you are! You are cocooned already by the Corporate Curriculum. Your frogs are a nice, warm temperature. You know nothing of struggles out here, in the land of the free. Our frogs are still fighting.

We won't be free much longer, if LS et al. get their way. We'll all be at gas mark 9. No child left behind? Every child matters? There is a pragmatic behind that. These days, every citizen is an asset waiting to be stripped for the $$$$$ payback. The education budget translates into a lot of yachts.

2. Or I could choose the ongoing misery that is Squirrel's School. The battle is simply this: to get the school to stop treating Squirrel like a person of no independent thought, and start treating her like a young woman who has chosen to be there. The irony is: Squirrel is the least likely person to cause them problems.

Squirrel is laid back, easy to get along with, widely educated, articulate, fluent, an A-grade candidate who just asks Why. Yet the school cannot figure this, throwing themselves on techniques of reprimand rather than discussion. Not surprisingly, they have made for themselves a basic problem: that Squirrel doesn't fit the conveyor belt they have built. They have been creating consumers of facts, but Squirrel is a producer, creator, original person who makes her own destinies. She wants the school for 3 A Levels, not for their insistence on detailed scrutiny and control over her every action.

I do not know how you school choosers handle schools when they turn ordinary kids into problem kids. For a parent, it must be a long journey into emotional pain.

What I do see is that the Modus Operandi of the school is attempt to divide parent and child. It feels to me as if there must be the School Rule Book paragraph 1.3: To divide and rule, insinuate/use downright lies. Paragraph 1.4 probably suggests offering stuff like, 'your child is best supported by supervision to address their underperformance'.

I feel fortunate to be able to calibrate this nonsense by 17 years of self-directed learning in a virtually non-supervised home ed environment. This at least I can use to assess the quality of school 'supported supervision to target underperformance' (a seat in the library independent learning hub, on her own).

3. Myself. Yes, I can beat myself up any day of the week for various shames, guilts, losses, griefs, despairs and sorrows! Currently, I am in battle with life itself, facing (not for the first time) a profound overhaul of all my assumptions, expectations, wishes and desires.

Looking on the bleak side, this moment is something I am used to, this teetering-on-the-edge moment; knowing that I'll be leaving behind what is familiar and comforting; knowing that I am about to be pitched into the strange, fearful, bewildering, unfamiliar, scary. I feel ill-equipped to deal with it all, but know too that I'll be thrown into reliance on my instincts to chart a way through, and that will make a different person of me, once again.


* might be useful, if you face the same

Candidate for worst day of 2018, so far.

1. We receive an email from Squirrel's prison. Previously, on Prison Update, we have suggested Squirrel needs a slightly more flexible timetable. Without the attentions of a school for the last 16 years, she has self-educated to A-grade GCSE standard, and can do private study, thank you very much.

But! Squirrel's prison insists! Squirrel must be present in school for all her non-contact 6th form day. i.e. from 8.30 to 3.15. Even if she has just two contact hours that day. She must present herself at the extensive self-learning hub (aka library).

The library, I need add, consists of one shelf books, a desk, and a chair. Here she is supposed to 'study' while being supervised. Mmmm. Supervised study looks an awful lot like being chained in solitary confinement as in a monk's cell. Tell me, is this the Modern Expectation? Fine, then, study away! But if study means educating yourself with the aid of 7,000 books, five computer systems, an office equipped with uptodate software, her private space with all stuff, books, resources, own networked computer, and Planet Internet, then, um, come home.

Sorry to pull rank, you crappy-equipped crappity crap prison, but we can do better.

But! Squirrel's prison says she needs to be in school, alone and chained to a desk if she is to perform. They also added, for good measure, some acronyms, and the novel idea that Squirrel needs to be in school because then they can give support. Squirrel has worked out that this support must mean the 'Independent Study Self Learning Hub Supervisor' (aka librarian) shouting Be Quiet to the 6th formers hiding in the space under the stairs.

2. Shark had two teeth extracted. Shark was all, Uh? what is your problem. I can have two teeth extracted any time. I'm taking that in my stride, so stop whining, because it is embarrassing. I nearly passed out.

3. A pot of cream threw itself, with full Verdi operatic drama, out of the fridge as I opened the door. The cream splatter was over my shoes, the floor, under the fridge, across the wall, down the curtain and in my face. It was the La Traviata moment of fallen cream. Mop-up took an hour.

4. I had an Angels and Demons argument with Tiger over a pack of balloons.

5. Dig finally told the children about his diagnosis of cancer. As every Good Husband know (learn from his Good Wif Grit), you introduce bad news only after eating dinner.

6. Donald Trump is still heading up the USA, sending us all to global warfare, so what does anything matter? We're all going to die anyway.

There is no bright spot to any of this, except number 6. La famille Grit now has a new phrase for any family member exhibiting pugnacious behaviour, ill-tempered hostility or general belligerence. Don't start getting Presidential.

12 Days of Christmas: what day is it?

I have lost all track of time. The Christmas tree is down, on the stroke of Twelfth Night, as is customary in these parts. Clearly, that phase of the year is done for us.

I have lost time because all my attention is focused on Dig and the kids. The kids are back at their respective prisons, and it has come hard to all of us. Dig, he of weak and fragile constitution, requires special attention, so for him, I am attentive, and consider myself candidate of Best Wif Badge.

But I learn much! Never having done much Good Wiffery, I now find that some elements are important to this culture called Good Wif Service. I discover that Dig's requirements include the following:

Muffins. (Part 1) They must be scored properly otherwise 'it is all horrible'.
Muffins. (Part 2) They must be served at the right temperature otherwise 'they are inedible'.
Water. Must be served tepid and in a thermos flask otherwise it is squeally noise.
Paracetamol. Capsule type, not effervescent nor breeze-block type. Otherwise it is 'uughghgughghg'.

It is intriguing, I can say that, learning new things about one's partner of nearly 30 years. How lost time is all about reflecting.

12 Days of Christmas: 9

I've had enough of this Christmas lark now, thank you very much.

I'm clinging to my 12 days only to fulfil my fantasies of wearing my Tudor smock and burning my evergreen next to the pig pen.

That is what I have decided to do, by the way. I am going to become an old woman. Maybe an old woman peasant fitted to some Central Asian state, circa nineteenth century. In my mind's eye, I have padded felt clothing and my middle is tied with string. I am in retreat. Perhaps I have heard about the railways, but my donkey is just fine. Also, I have a ladder to mend the roof. And I live alone. No folks pass this way. I will eat the pig next year. This year, grass.

This is my new fantasy, because times are hard. They are going to become quite, quite Worse. It is possible that for a while I will become mad.

Anyway, because we tell each other that life is filled with bright sides and lead silver, for the time being I still hold onto my Cineworld card.

Rich rewards then, because today we see the Cineworld advance screening of Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.

This film is fantastic. All hail to McDonagh's writing, which pulled no punches at all and hit me straight between the eyeballs. That is a rare treat, to be punched in the face by a writer of uncompromising words. And splendid acting. I want Frances McDormand to go on and on, forever. See it, as soon as it comes out, for a perfect study of characters in a small town exploring extreme states of vengeance and justice.

Unless you like romantic comedies to take your mind off 2018. In which case, avoid.

12 Days of Christmas: 8

New Year's Day! Dig has bought me, amongst other treats, a radical year, in the shape of the Verso Radical Diary.

Did you know, January 1st 1994, is the day that Zapatista forces overtake towns in Chiapas, beginning an ongoing revolution against the Mexican state?

Personally, I wouldn't trust the leaders of the Mexican state any further than I can throw them, what with the border drug wars, reported corruptions and missing students. But strangely, they did briefly get my sympathies last year when Toddler Trump got into the sand pit.

Troublesome times, this 2018, when one is thrown into sympathies with torturers in order to avoid association with an unhinged narcissistic sociopath.