Grrrrr

There I was, enjoying an otherwise peaceful day, and along comes Luke Blackall's write up of the NPower survey.

Pfft, Luke, pfft. You should've been more critical. You should've treated this survey for what it is. Crap.

Did I say that? Was I quite so rude?

Yes, I could sweeten my reaction Luke, but let's not bother. If you're going to write without any critical or inquiring eye, then you deserve a rough-edged rejoinder.

This survey is utterly disingenuous; it's duplicitous and deceitful. Does NPower care about the experience of childhood lived in the environment? Really?

NPower need to sell stuff, Luke. They're advancing a brand identity and promoting business interests. To do that, they're maligning parents and presenting children as suffering impoverished modern lives, disconnected from simple pleasures like grandma would've known.

I can imagine the discussions with the ad agency. We need to promote NPower, and don't mention the nuclear power stations, the appalling record of customer complaints, the cost of energy, and the large-scale international operations of the corporate which is ultimately driven by profit (tax-avoided).

Let's use kids! Not only that, let's present kids as failing to experience anything worthwhile except how to program the DVD and open packets of crisps. Then let's attach a current cultural concern - the environment - to parental anxieties about their kids growing up. Combine the narratives of the disconnected generations, the lost, innocent childhood spent in the rural idyll, the inspiring, environmental, glad-to-be-green story, hint at the parental failings - you stupid misguided mother, who has colluded in teaching Tinkertop how to program the DVD player and search on Youtube for talking cats - and then wallop on the might of NPower! The brave pioneers and saviours who will lead us out of the dark and into the light with skills of shelter-building and rabbit-gutting.

Well, I'm pretty impressed the kids can program the DVD, frankly. And someone's got to open the family-sized pack of salt'n'vinegar.

Start from the premise that kids are perceptive, aware, and quick as a light. They're growing up in a world where the local tree is political, where someone seizes on their ability to read a map as part of the school data in an international educational league table, and where making a cup of tea means navigating your way as a consumer through the minefield of unscrupulous parties who would flog your personal tea-drinking information without a moment's hesitation.

Then let's present NPower's survey for what it is. A put-up job to provide the let's-be-anguished press release which they can capitalise on to present themselves as society's saviours, where the parents have clearly failed. Sold on the back of a child.

Yes indeed, NPower care so much about the environment they're prepared to support the dumping of nuclear junk in the ground as a happy legacy for all our kids to enjoy over the next 5,000 years.

Pfft.

I had to get that off my chest.

Stick to the celebrity lite, Luke. Please. It'll be better for my blood pressure.

Hmph

Spend most of the day feeling cross with a newspaper. Not the South China Morning Post (even though they can piss me off) but the Independent, the newspaper of home, in the UK, which I read online.

They won't let me look at their website, which I do every morning with coffee. That is my routine.

Well not today. Instead, they deliver Error 400 Error 502 and Bad Request, as if I am naughty for trying to look. They know I am cross, because then they mock me, and suggest I might need guru meditation.

Dig says it is all my fault. He says I cannot manage a computer. I cannot believe that. I am taking it personally. After a lot of upset and some lip-peeling curses, I flush out a screen that reads ok.

No, Independent, it is not ok.

Because when I finally do wrangle a scrap of news, what do I find? A stream which is headed by Susan Boyle having a temper tantrum, Katie Price living in a hut, Gwyneth Paltrow doing something, and Michelle Williams doing something else (I don't even know who she is). As a sop to women going through the menopause, or any middle-class female readers with a dented head, next comes the news that Sylvia Plath did some drawing.

Finally, finally, underneath that lot, comes a reference to the Greek financial crisis.

I have slaved all day to receive this.

I am seriously not impressed. This follows the headline of two weeks ago: Rihanna in trouble for touching strippers. A story maybe lifted from the Sun. I am still cross about that, too.

Stupidly, I wanted a newspaper that assumed the impact of the Greek economy is more significant to a reader's life than a glamour model's sleeping arrangements, or what a singer does with a stripper.

Independent, if I want a stream of celebrity shit stories I'll buy a trash celebrity magazine, ok? I remember the days when you wouldn't have been seen dead with Katie Price. When politics, public policy, world affairs, and environmental issues were priorities. But I guess these tedious matters don't really encourage circulation or advertising; maybe they simply don't bring in as much money as Katie Price's bosom.

For my part, if the prurient strand continues, the love affair is over. You may as well be on equal footing with the South China Morning Post.

Shark had to calm me down. She is a better guru than anything the Independent can offer. She handed out three batches of bread (result of experiments with proportions of salt and yeast) and said my reading of China's history (Eastern Zhou to Western Zhou) was interesting. So you can bet she is not on your future readership list either if you insist on keeping it up with Katie Price.

I'm in a minority; the politics of food is still worthwhile to me.

Schadenfreude

Here's a shocker.

Then a large part of me thinks, doesn't the glossing, filling in, making up, using assumptions happen anyway, if you're gripped by the drama of composing those words, and paid a good salary to do it?

But maybe I'm not so forgiving; because here I am, about to jump on the bandwagon of recrimination, dig up the past, etc etc. In mitigation, I'll admit the indefensible: enjoying, amongst it all, that naughty moment of Schadenfreude.

You can probably guess why. (Surely it can't be that I harbour injustices, nor seek level scores for tiny grudges and petty resentments! No way!)

It was the one article Johann wrote that I've always held in a special place.

The article driven by a writerly need to provide an eye-popping, roller-coaster of a read. The one where home educated children made it to the top of the list for totally unwatched kids heading towards criminality.

Our turn for the 'polemicising'; the demonstration of our 'errors and idiocies', showing up our 'wrongs', so that we can 'get it right' and 'reduce our wrongdoing'.

And it was a great read. Didn't matter that sticking the knife in the home ed world didn't help the article make the serious points it could have made.

On the home ed issues, the writer failed to think through the implications, missed the points about law, misrepresented kids and parents, confused roles of welfare and education, glossed over legal parental duties, showed scant understanding of key issues in special needs, education, or indeed, having responsibility for kids, and so helped undermine the important points to make about minors held in prison and detention centres. A big fail.

Of course I could not hold people to account for one article. I wouldn't stand up to scrutiny for a second!

But once again, thanks, Johann. Score levelled. Please make your writing great with incision and precision rather than through cheap shots with kids.

In support of the crazies

Over at The Independent, they're putting on a battle, an adversarial either/or. In the teacher's section (it's school vs. free school, not school vs. no school) one commentator casually dangled a morsel of bait.

Some students, however, are, in fact, kinda crazy - and cause all manner of chaos whilst in the system. ... There is: plain 'crazy'; followed by 'batshit crazy'; followed by 'home-schooled crazy'.

I have never met a student, coming from a home-schooled background, who was anything other than severely lacking in social skills, lonely, immature, barely educated, deeply unhappy, paranoid, suspicious and profoundly 'odd'.

Made me smile. I thought, Yup, you pretty much described Tiger - my home educated beautiful bonkers creation - at this stage of life right now. Not the paranoid. I wouldn't include that. We haven't yet got to where she thinks butterflies pass secret messages in wing flaps to spook her. (Hey! There's time!)

But the lack of social skills, loneliness, unhappiness, suspicions? That's a fair assessment for Tiger's plight if you judge her today.

I'll maintain though, that being crazy in this shape and form is not a result of her education. Tiger's special form of crazy comes about because she is a unique expressive person. One given extra sufferance, sure, by living life with people like us, her mama and papa: we're the sort of selfish types who seek out work and life experience and take the kids with us. We weird home educating parents lifted up our Tiger, along with her two sisters, took her away from her normal community, culture, background, friendship groups, and dropped her in Asia.

One daughter is doing quite well, thanks. She's autonomously exploring the island, learning Chinese, making incisive comments on the culture. The other has traded her hat and is considering setting up a craft stall, so she's doing something mainstream folks can call business studies.

Unlike her sisters, Tiger feels she doesn't belong. She has trouble knowing what to do in the local shops. Heck, some of the shops are people squatting at your feet with a bamboo basket busting with skinless fish. I have some sympathy. Lonely, yes, because she misses the other crazies; the home educated kids she sees back home for lessons and in playgrounds and woods. Worse, she doesn't speak Cantonese. She can't read Chinese, although she's learned the word for ladies, which by itself has a limited literary range. So she's not communicating well. You could say she's poorly equipped for this world, and even barely educated.

Is her type of crazy wrong? In my view, no. She's a person, expressing herself in the world. Like people do, like children do, sometimes because they're made that way, and sometimes as a reaction to challenging life circumstances: relocation, job change, divorce, bereavement, family stress, new contexts, culture shocks. All those circumstances can create people, large and small, who are utterly and completely bonkers by any narrow definition of normal. And if those people screw up your system - cause chaos in it - then it's your system that's wrong, not the people in it.

In fact, I'd go so far as to suggest it is quite a healthy experience, to be a little crazy. If we arrived here, sent Tiger to school, just like normal, where would she have expressed her fears and anxieties? Maybe not at school. She'd save the demons to let out at home. I'd have two hours to slay them all, settle her down, then wrestle her into bed to start the day again.

That doesn't sound to me as healthy a response as the day we spent today. Tiger asked me to come with her to the basketball court two minutes walk from home - the one her sisters skip to freely. She needed a parent to be there, reassure her, tell her it's OK, it's not strange, that's the expectation here, this is how things are done. She played, then came home, a little quieter, less lonely, just for an hour. The fact that she is home educated, I'd say is a positive support.

So my point in response to this commentator, is that people are wonderfully complex, nuanced, and much more interesting - crazy ones and all - than ever represented in a mainstream institution.

There, I could argue that socialisation takes a limited form. People are well adjusted to a type, succeed to a norm, hide their unhappiness, cover up their loneliness, present the education required, keep their inadequacies hidden for fear of exposure, hide safely in places where their immaturities don't show, and be always suspicious that a merciless member of staff will seize upon failure and use it for power and humiliation.

I'm coming out then in support of the crazies; the home ed crazies I hold in particular affection. I like the expressive, the strange, the outside school range.

I'm a little far gone myself, so I'll support all our rights to be crazy. To move, as we need to do with life circumstance, between states of madness, illness, sanity, health, composure, off the wall bonkers, stone cold sober. To do that means we're people, living life, and maybe not normal, not crazy, but healthy.

Actually, parents know best

I'm so glad these kids are playing. I'm delighted they are not sitting at desks, being criticised for the way they hold a crayon at the age of two.

I want every nursery and pre-school, and all early years schools around the country, to make mud pies. Schools need to be bolder, more imaginative. They should do what many parents want: say that testing toddlers is shit, so they're not going to do it. While you go to work, they're off to play in the woods instead.

I'm sure many parents instinctively feel that an assessment approach to early years - instead of free-range creative imaginative play - is education in the wrong direction.

Sitting kids behind desks makes them easier to control, sure. But it's not the right way for a healthy individual to grow. And it only works in the short-term.

I want more kids to be free. Every move they make should not come with a teacher-assessor, an Ofsted inspector, and a tick box on a clipboard. That is a crap way to teach children about the role of adults in their lives. It is a destructive way to say 'this is the society you grow up in'. It destroys trust. It breaks apart every growing relationship. It says, 'your parents do not know you best. The assessor does'. It is social control, disguised as education.

How many kids were removed deliberately from this culture under the Labour years?

But here's my problem with this article. Not the nursery. Not what they are doing. That's fantastic. National coverage will be great for them, and put smiles on faces.

It's the writing. Specifically, the assumptions that creep through this article, and that I feel the writer holds about the audience. Assumptions that are implicitly endorsed by The Independent. The article merits a page, after all.

This question: 'So what if the children do splash each other with the water?'

Eh? I don't know whether to fall about laughing, or drop my head in my hands in despair.

Whose voice is that? Is it the headteacher presenting herself with a rhetorical question? Is it your voice, Richard?

And then, more, who is the question aimed at? Richard, who are you speaking to, love? Are you asking this question of intelligent readers, and people who are parents of kids?

To even think this is a worthwhile question, to ask it of us, assumes we have already absorbed, endorsed, and approved the toddler assessment culture; that we now look up in horror at this latest assault on our educational provision. Look Mabel! I have dropped my toast in shock! Have you seen the breakfast news?! Kids splash each other with water! The end of the world has come!

But Richard, maybe you're asking this question of yourself? It certainly reads like it.

Well, don't worry about that. Grit knows a thing or two about talking to herself. But she keeps a blog read by six people and a hamster. Richard, you write in a national newspaper theoretically read by thousands. Do you know your audience?

I have not, in my life either as a parent or in pre-parenthood, ever met anyone who thinks it is somehow dangerous, abnormal, regressive, alarming, a retrograde step for civilization, if nursery kids splash water at each other.

The only way I can imagine this behaviour can be thought of as alarming, is within the context of a dry classroom, possibly one in which Ofsted is reviewing behaviour. And that, Richard, is an assumption behind this question. That pre-school life is automatically institutional; the mainstream supervision is school; that child behaviour within this context necessarily must be monitored, explained, and justified.

Maybe it speaks volumes about the outlook of The Independent. Maybe the life of an educational writer is a narrow one. Maybe journalists should get out more, so they can ask sensible questions.

An article like this offers the opposite to the assumptions I have, out here, in my home ed world. That children of all ages are free to interact together, to play, take a role in supervising each other, grow with the expectation that adults are here to support them, help them realise their liberty. There should be no justification to play.

Richard, I think your question comes from a wider assumption, so often made across the educational media, about what kids should be doing and the contexts they should be found in.

It betrays that same, predictable track of many education writers: that education can only take place in school, that the words school and education are interchangeable. As if one means the other. Yet how clearly you can see, from people about you, from kids themselves, from looking at how they behave, listening to what they say, that schools and education are often worlds apart.

Yes, maybe you should just get out more.

Grit's new job? MAGICIAN!

I'm sure avid readers of The Independent will have read this article on Thursday writ by Richard Garner.

Now there is plenty in this article I want to argue about. Even the headline.

But mostly because it reads like Richard churned out the Ofsted press release. You see? It's not just because I am an argumentative hippy with a fat arse and a bad attitude.

Richard's article starts off with the predictable conflation of welfare and education, as if they are exactly the same thing.

Hey, Richard, do teachers spend their days talking about how Tinkertop inhales poppers? And not discussing how to drag her D-grade GCSE prediction to a C-grade before the league tables are published? Because that's for sure what happened in our department, which means I guess we school teachers were trying to focus on EDUCATION.

But strange then, how education out the school system is related uncritically as a welfare issue. Like, maybe I am mentally ill. Possibly, it's companionship. Or maybe, it's just another of my 'affairs'.*

After the tone and structure, maybe I could argue with the way Richard selected his copy-out bits. Like this:

'Now, Ofsted says: "The current legislation around home education severely hampers local authorities in fulfilling their statutory duties to safeguard children who are educated at home and ensure the suitability of their education."'

But Richard, you should know better. You're an education writer. A local authority has no statutory duty like this. Not even when Ofsted claims it. Precisely, the local authority has no duty to assess educational suitability of kids out the school system. Maybe you should go read this. Then this.

But all of that is nothing, compared to this fantastic assertion:

'A report by Ofsted, the education standards watchdog, calls for new legislation to avoid making it possible for children to 'disappear'.

I like this idea. Very much indeed. I am dreaming now about making children disappear.

I am going to mix up some magic potion and give it a go. Pfff! Magic words! There they go! GONE!

When I have made my children disappear, then I'm off to the gym. I'll eat cake, and do all the naughty things I cannot do when kids are around all day long, moaning and groaning that we never stay at home and who wants to draw a picture of the ear anyway?

Richard, the only place I can make them disappear is, in fact, school.

However I like the idea so much, I may now turn to magic as my new source of endeavour, so thanks for the tip off!

And at least this job might get me out the house, unlike the job your colleague suggested, which was prostitution.


* I am not conducting an affair, since you assume I am. I am conducting an education. However, if you are interested in an affair with Grit, you have to bring your own pigeons.

Terence, you didn't go far enough

This article, I largely agree with, which is surprising, because it is in the Independent.

Recently I have taken to tutting at the Independent. Tutting. That has to be a sign of middle age, hasn't it? Once I might have donated a fiver to an anarchist cause of firebombing their offices. I am growing up.

I tut at the Independent because four days out of five they find some pathetic excuse to stick a photograph of Carla Bruni in my face. If the article tangentially refers to the French banking system, there will be a photo of Carla Bruni's legs, possibly because she once walked to a bank. In the mind of an Independent picture editor, the state of the Société Générale probably justifies a quarter page given over to Bruni's ankles.

I could go on. Like the Pandora section is complete waste of space. Seriously, are they paying money for junk? Pay me and I'll write pointless junk. And don't get me started on the 10 best or 50 best, all of which are fine if you are the type of person who can lose the odd £600 down the back of the sofa in spare change. Then there's all the family travel tips which are so very useful if your family is loaded and comes in a 2adult2childrencosyunit.

Their worst crime, but the one we laugh at proper bellylaugh, is of course, the education journalism: the advertorial. Pages of this masquerade as independent journalism. They must think they get away with it, and no-one can see the single reason to that copy: to support Thursday adverts.

Anyway, none of that is what I want to say here. I just needed to get that off my chest.

Today in the Independent Terence Blacker writes of English fields, tourists and ramblers. This is an area of special interest, Terence, and you don't go nearly far enough. I'll fill in those ordinary people gaps for you; they're in Grit's fields.

We have stumbled across fields in all directions from our town - round edges, through middles, over topside and downside, into ditches, up trees, under fences, through cowpats - and I can tell you that our English fields are crawling with eccentrics, gentle enthusiasts, and small straggling groups, criss-crossing those spaces looking like oddments and allsorts, but all standing still on moments to purposefully, wondrously, point to grass, sky, tree, and earth.

They may first come, townielike, to these fields because they seek antidote before heading back to the office come Monday morning. Or they may be dwellers in chocolate box villages wrapped in lace curtains. They may be both and neither; I don't know. I see people who use fields, woodlands and open spaces as a resource, a place to learn, a place to grow; a place of belonging; a place where we can teach children what it is to build friendships, neighbourhoods, communities; a place to meet people who share your special interest, no matter how bizarre, eccentric, abnormal, laughable.

And these people found in fields I probably admire more than anyone else in the world, because these people truly are independent minded. They know you laugh at them, and let's face it, sometimes that is easy, because amongst their numbers count hippies and druids and mad people. But it doesn't stop them. I admire their resilience and determination; their refusal to give up, no matter how odd-ball and off-beat. They do what they do regardless; because they want to follow their enthusiasms, interests and desires. Do you go with them? You can if you want; makes no difference. They are building things that are theirs, and things that are loved, and you can share it if you will, and they would be delighted with that.

In these fields we've met hundreds of people with their quiet passions: parchment maker, charcoal burner, twitcher, lichen expert, herbalist, fungi collector, historian, storyteller, geologist, telephone pole enthusiast, organ maker, flint knapper, sewage farmer, morris dancer, archaeologist, and woolly mammoth hunter. Hopefully, we have hundreds more to meet, and all to celebrate.

Like I said, I am just getting old, and joining them by degrees. But it is of some relief to me that among this number I can yet count hunt saboteurs and anarchists. And you never know, I could soon be visiting ecowarrior Shark chaining herself to a tree; Squirrel, enthusiastically exploring the world of woodlice, and Tiger, digging the earth in search of a sabre-toothed cousin. Their enthusiasms, communities, and loves have to start somewhere. May as well be a field.

Is this normal? Not for us.

'A lot of mum action happens at tea-time (after nursery or school) and cake is often present to liven up proceedings... And, by the way, there is a lot of social pressure around this issue. You can be ostracised if you don't eat cake. I'm serious. No one likes a mum who doesn't join in. No one likes a mum who fusses about what her child eats.' (Opinion piece, Amy Jenkins, The Independent 27.8.09)

If this is mainstream, then this is a world I don't want to join. It sounds like a world of judgement, social exclusion, and bullying.

I have only ever encountered the judgmental cakes-and-mums situation once. That, by the way, was at an after-school club that Squirrel joined for a term. It is true I was definitely a strange item there, to be commented upon if I didn't eat The Cake.

So what happens to you? Do you approach that cake like it was a fearful initiation ritual into the one-of-us mum gang? Do you eat it willingly? Is it a mark of social acceptance? Are you airkissed afterwards, hoping you don't chuck up the blue flavoured sugared up E-number icing over the new moc-croc handbag? And when it's done, do you sigh and settle back down, and wait for the next new mum to turn up innocently, so she too can be shown the cake slab?

I declined cake. But to these tea-time mothers I could shed no light on their world. So there was no way I was invited to the post-cake chit-chat. I could not discuss the latest heel styles (is three inches too high?); I could not talk about how difficult it is to shop when you have a three year old who, infuriating, won't go to nursery (really? want to try three three-year olds who we choose not to send to nursery?); of course I couldn't say anything about Tinkertop's school (school? should we say child care?), and then there was the burning question of what to put in lunchboxes (how many hours can we really talk about that?).

Grit, who wouldn't have minded talking about what good books folks might recommend for children and how to encourage non-readers, was distinctly a fish out of water, a non-cake eating variety, for the entire 6-week run of the thing. And mostly ignored.

Not surprisingly, it is true that I now feel much more comfortable in the home ed meetings. There is cake there too. Actually, there may be several types of cake. Make one vegan, make one non-gluten, make one by Ellie, aged 12, with added jam and home made rosewater icing. There will also be fruit for those who don't eat cake. Someone's brought popcorn, because this morning they used it to model the Big Bang. And parents in my world care aplenty over what their children eat, and no-one thinks them strange, or odd, or fussy. Just normal.

The home ed community - and not just mums, I'd better say, but mothers and fathers and grandparents and siblings all turn up - is remarkably non judgmental about these things. Sometimes strange, no doubt, when you meet the roadkill enthusiast, but still, just let us all get on with it. Cake is not a social hurdle. It's just cake.

Kids should stink of strawberry sauce

I feel obliged. A large part of me doesn't want to write this, because it might read as if Simon Webb served up a well written, reasoned argument. Which he hasn't. His words crash along like ill oiled cogs in a clapped out bus.

But I would like to think the Independent will now print other voices. I have a miserable, sinking feeling that it won't. It seems to have opted for the Badman point of view, which makes its current campaigning about the vetting database look like hollow posturing.

So I'm writing this. Because Simon Webb's voice, given credibility by a national newspaper, makes me feel sad.

I think there are a range of parents out there who are wacko, bonkers and far gone crazy. But Simon, those parents exist in all directions, not just in autonomous education. They exist, dare I suggest, in the land of structured home ed too. And at school. From some perspective, someone will look at me, and the way we do things, the choices we've made, and because we don't fit with the way they do things, they think Grit? Wacko, bonkers and far gone crazy.

I'm OK with that. Because wacko, bonkers and far gone crazy are what makes our society free and interesting, isn't it? Madness and brilliance lie that way. Which makes me glad we don't all conform to a type. But I feel there was always this tolerance in Britain, which I could rely on, and could carry on being wacko in my own way. A sort of acceptance and mutual understanding that we may all be wacko, but we are working hard in our different directions, and therefore we could be given a sort of respect, reluctant at times, but a respect nevertheless, that we choose as free people.

And I feel what the Labour party are trying to do is take away all that tolerance, understanding, respect. To undermine that community. And that's the line you, Simon, have bought, uncritically, and been supported in a newspaper that's bought, in turn, by thousands.

Simon, the thing I feel is this: that you are complaining about how people are.

And sadly, that fits with a government that says we want everyone to be like us. Then legislation, culture, media, driven by economic interests, produces for our consumption an identikit model of a perfect child.

That perfect child is a perfectly trained consumer. They are delivered the right curriculum from birth; they wear the right clothing produced by those organisations contributing to our economy; they eat the required foods sanctioned by approved business; they are to appear in a particular way, behave in a specified manner, be accessed, approved, recorded, logged and monitored throughout their lives. At no point should they appear in public stinking of strawberry sauce, and wearing wellington boots on the wrong feet.

I believe the government would very much like all citizens to fit a model. I believe they want us to lose the distinction between care about our society and adherence to a party line. And I believe they mark any deviation from the Labour endorsed model as bad, and wrong.

I was brought up by Labour voting working class parents who believed that government didn't make up a society, but people did. Government might influence the culture or help advance particular interests, but they couldn't engineer what happened right down in the land of relationships with your neighbour. That was where people, and human nature, took over. People made for a good or just society because they were people, and people come in all shapes, sizes, colours, variations, outlooks, bust size, opinions, limb length, attitudes, values, experience, hair shape, nose length, wisdoms, and it didn't matter to my parents what those shapes and colours and beliefs were, and it doesn't matter to me either. They were tolerant of all, and I hope I am too.

I like to believe tolerance is a positive trait. Which is why I can only reject the depressing conformity, the intolerance of difference, that this government presses down on me, not only in every part of my life now in this country, but over every part of my thinking. It is an intolerance of difference which seeps through newspaper articles like this.

I was going to quote from the article in the Independent. I won't, because it will take my day away from my kids, exhaust my time, leave me feeling miserable and downbeat and not really produce much from me but sarcasm and mockery, which means coming down to setting one home educator against another.

And I think home educators are sometimes encouraged to fight each other. To show fragmentation, disunity; a divided, undermined community. Divide and rule is easy, and divisions are easy to exploit.

I won't do what this article wants me to do. Simon has a right to express his point of view. Meanly, I hope the Independent didn't pay much for his article.

Instead I will say what I believe in. That I want all parents in this country to be free to choose the education they think is best suited to their child. Their way of education may not be your way, not someone else's way, not the way of the state, or the way of the family down the road or what the council wants. I believe that all these diverse ways of learning produce diverse, creative, different people, offering to society a huge range of talents and abilities and contributions.

There are many home educators like me. Living life in the same house as our kids, knowing their needs, what they like and don't like, how they behave and respond, providing them with books, computers, activities, crafts, lessons, safe places to talk, to work things through, to try out ideas, to be wild, wacko, bonkers and far gone crazy in their own ways, before we tuck them into bed and tell them we love them. That's how I live every day. My kids will tell me if I'm getting it right or wrong. And my kids are who I believe in.

Grit goes alone

I am sticking with this Independent no diet, even though it means shrugging yourself off the sofa, moving out of your comfort zone, and shifting your legs down the road in a quick march brisk walk.

So at 7.30 am, lured by the thought of a shapely behind that could be mine if only I would move it, I manage to lever myself out of bed, reluctantly drape myself all around with a brown skirt and not the black jeans covered in yesterday's clay, and then, smartly dressed for a Grit on a Saturday morning at 9.30, get in the car and drive to Northampton.

Now I know this comes as a bit of a shock to Shark, Squirrel and Tiger, who are used to the comfort zone of having a mamma in scruffy black jeans routinely squeeze 6 feet into 3 pairs of tennis shoes and arrange them in a line to cross the road to the courts at 9.59 for the lesson which starts at 10. Yes, we live that close, and yes, it is bloody marvellous, because on winter Saturday mornings I can still be wearing pyjamas under my coat and holding a cup of coffee in a spot of weekend comfort zoning.

But not today. I'm uncertain about going, about navigating the wilds of Northampton without small fingers to fasten onto, but I'm determined. I think Grit's imminent disappearance takes Dig by surprise too, as I stare at his bare feet in the kitchen, while jangling keys and saying 'I'm going to Northampton. I don't know when I'll be back. Look after the children. Tennis at 10'.

And all this because I am determined to get out of my comfort zone and into Northampton where there is an archaeologists outing. I know I am not an archaeologist, but it doesn't stop me going to their meetings. In fact I broke through that particular comfort zone a couple of years ago when, resenting the imposition of a long-term prison sentence while Dig wandered again about the Middle East, and despairing that I would ever get out of the house alone before the year 2010, I spotted the local archaeology society skulking about the web and joined on the spot.

Come to think of it, I probably challenge their comfort zones too, but now I reckon that is a good thing. I used to think Thank God! The archaeology meeting! It's an excuse to escape the house once a month on a Mondays between 7.30pm and 9pm and not be accompanied by small people minding and criticising and arguing over every decision and footfall. Thank goodness I can walk down a road without glancing nervously behind me to see if anyone needs their hand holding. Marvellous to be free of the terrorist rages that can strike a seven-year old who has not seen the colour green first that morning, so making it a Bad Day when Bad Things must happen.

So Grit is free. And transformed. She drives to Northampton with no one squealing. She parks the car with no one arguing, and pays the machine without worrying about the order the coins go in. Then she sets off with all the walk-about striding energy of a single woman wearing a skirt, who has no one's feet but her own to take charge of. She walks briskly and purposefully to the museum, thinking this is once how she walked everywhere in any urban townscape, and into the museum she strides. This is a museum we know quite well, and have visited over the years, and this is probably the first time Grit has visited it alone.

Mature enough not to hang around in doorways, peeping out behind sculptures to see if her party has arrived, she directs herself straight to the top floor and the archaeological finds, reasoning this is where a party of archaeologists are bound to congregate. And sure enough, they're here. No messing. No weeping on the stairs because someone else put their foot on them first, no complaining about the stairs, no arguing on Level 1 or shouting down the stairs to someone who won't come up them. What's more, I go straight past the toilets, so there's no lingering wait here - two toilets and three children - and no need to play with the hot tap for ten minutes before deciding it really is too hot, let's try the cold, then filling the basin with water and pretending our fingers are fish.

Grit's party of archaeologists shift slightly out of their comfort zone to speak in words of slow syllables to a member of the general public who won't go away. Throughout, Grit has a wonderfully rewarding time, liberated from interruptions and arguments or excited pictures of dolphins and horses, and is able to talk in a mature and dignified way. Not once do any of the archeologists lie down on the floor and cry. None squeal loudly or deliberately lean against the glass to block the view of someone else. Neither does anyone lift up Grit's skirt in what is fast becoming a very irritating and undignified game, even if Grit inadvertently did start it the other day to see if Squirrel was wearing any knickers.

After a couple of hours Grit steps out of the museum, full of enthusiasm for archaeology and vowing to become one in a different life, and even perhaps stop Northampton from falling into the hideous mess that it has become. Still liberated, with an hour left on the parking ticket, I then take advantage of freedom, and buy a new outfit too. Hey ho, with this amount of freedom, I might just fantasise about hiring a nanny and staying out late.

But, as if independence is all too much, I spoil it at the very end in the electrical department of Beatties. I pause to consider Shark's hungry tummy. Dutifully, I buy a slow cooker for the days we're out at the safari park, and there's no time to do the dishes from breakfast before embarking on preparing tea.

And when I get home, I shall probably regretfully change out of the skirt too.

Ho hum

Grit is all sad and lethargic. Perhaps it is because she has failed at the Independent no diet task. Today it is to be more conventional, or less conventional; which ever one is opposite to what you are normally.

This is difficult. I don't know whether I am conventional or not. For example, I like eating Indian take aways. Perhaps I should change it to Chinese. I like wearing black jeans. Perhaps I should wear white jeans. And I like reading the Independent. Perhaps I should read the Guardian instead. In fact they might have a diet to try too.

Well, it could be any number of things. Including this.


This is the door into the yard that fell on me last year. Look, there's the accident-prone window cleaner just appearing with his ladder now. Seconds after this photo was taken he managed to knock over the milk and bring down the washing line.

Or perhaps it is the sight of this. Dig has decided to mend the toaster. It is in bits all over the kitchen.

Clean and tidy

Grit is pleased. Grit is smug. Thanks to not getting distracted every two minutes by Tiger, Shark and Squirrel, Grit has been able to apply herself properly to today's task in the Independent No Diet. And she has brought shape and structure to Thursday.

In fact Grit has achieved something today that she has been too distracted, lethargic and can't-be-arsed to do for the last two years. She has cleaned up her desk. Grit is even now looking for the bison sweeping across the great plains of emptiness around her keyboard after removing a 30cm pile of paper layered over the vast acreage of fake wood. It is sad to say that for the last two years she has propped the keyboard up on this paper cemetery and it has been very uncomfortable. But now, thanks to the Independent No Diet, she has optimised her flexibility, ignored the children, surely lost a pound in weight and achieved no-desk-clutter success!

Look! Grit's desk Before!

And Grit's desk After!


Unfortunately, to celebrate, Grit is drinking a large glass of white wine and contemplating that last year's home-made plum jam goes very well on toast.

Busy busy busy

Grit is feeling a bit woozy now what with stabbing herself in the hand while dancing to the Levellers in the kitchen. Perhaps dancing while slicing bread is not a good example of multi-tasking.

But, oh my! Has Grit been multi-tasking today!

9am. Everybody: finish reading Tintin and the Shooting Star. Read about Humboldt's South American journey and scientific explorations of the nineteenth century from the lovely new library book that Grit might have to pretend to lose so she can steal.

11am. Get Tiger upstairs sewing the bat. Get Squirrel downstairs doing some maths. Get Shark in the schoolroom doing goodness knows what with some masking tape and string.

Midday. Eat cheese toasties. Changeover. Send Squirrel upstairs to work out her Shipwreck dance and Tiger downstairs ready to go to the bank while Shark researches dolphin names around the world, fired up by Trevor.

1.30pm. Get Squirrel downstairs, past the painter in the middle flat who Grit gets hold of so she can nose about the flat, find out whether it's up for sale and whether the painter wants a cash in hand job for the bathroom upstairs. Offer Squirrel some art with a block of wood and some felt tips. Send Tiger back upstairs to listen to The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe. Get Shark to sew some of her dolphin.

3pm. Everybody. Watch The Secret Garden and call it Film Studies.

5pm. Eat jam sandwiches. Take Squirrel down to ballet and Shark and Tiger to a new drama group that Grit is not impressed by but, hey, it's in walking distance and the fresh air does them good.

7pm. Back for cooking more than sandwiches and consider that today I have not done the Independent diet task because I have not had time. Think it would probably not be wise because it is 'Change how you behave in a group'. I did non-organising yesterday and nothing got done.

9pm. Drink wine and promise to do tomorrow's task. Tomorrow's task is 'Change your energy level'. That gives me licence to loll about on the sofa slurping Martinis and learning how to smoke cigars.

And here's a picture of Tiger wrapped in BacoFoil holding the head of a unicorn.


She tells me she is dressed in her armour. This is for reenactments of the Hundred Years War. The bit under Edward III, obviously. I say one glimpse of that and those Frenchies would surely have surrendered.

Grit grump

Today's task is to be nice to people and do a random act of kindness.

Huh.

Now I know that carrying out a random act of kindness was in my original resolution list for 2008. Actually, I was working on it. I'd made this cute cloth bag to give away to the next person behind me in the queue at Tesco. I was planning to write on it in big letters 'This bag is not by Anya Hindmarch. It is a not-for-profit random act of kindness. Bloody well enjoy it'.

And then my attempt was subverted by Tiger. Stupidly, before writing my kind message, I handed over the cloth bag to Tiger to decorate one side with a picture of a horse with her fabric pastels. But then she went and scribbled over both sides and it looks crap all over. So I'm using it for library books.

After that, I began to think that I do kind things everyday. Yeah, actually, I do. I run baths for other people. I cook food for other people. I do laundry for other people. I get shoes from upstairs under the beds for other people. I say hello to the postman. I say thank you at the Co-op. Even yesterday I let the old woman with the shopper get up out of the road where she'd fallen over before I drove on. I think I do my bit.

So now that I read the next step on my Independent no diet plan is to be kind, I'm sort of pissed off. I've half a mind to go round and see if I can insult and offend everyone.

Anyway, as I'm feeling bolshy, here's a list. And I'll be bloody kind in my own time.

1. Aunty Dee has arrived. Apparently she has been to a dental appointment and routed back to see us. This is actually a six hour drive. The way Aunty Dee drives, it should take twelve.

2. Winter tennis lessons have started.

3. I put the phrase 'my carrots look like a bag of shrunken willies' on a cookery discussion list.

4. When the next person says 'Triplets! I've not seen triplets before!' I'm going to shout 'Pedophile!'

5. Thank God the Evangelical Christian home educator didn't get hold of me again. I gave her the slip last time and she came round with a flyer for a kid's party when really it was a cover about being led to Jesus.

6. Lolling about in bed this morning scoffing chocolate digestives I read last Sunday's Independent and saw that someone in London thought that Margaret Thatcher was the best prime minister ever. Yes, that's what Grit says now. Bring her back! Bring her back!

Grit will probably be back to normal tomorrow.

One step ahead

Another diet day! Another task! Today's task is to get up one hour earlier than normal and use the hour productively.

This does not mean Grit sloping back to bed and slurping an extra cup of delicious black coffee while reading the wonderful Independent. Neither does it mean weasling and fibbing that she does not normally loll around in bed so today she can. No. This task is to be done properly.

And I do get up earlier. And I do not read the newspaper. Much. And I do use the extra hour productively. I make a To Do list. It has 57 things on it. And I'm noting this achievement on the blog.

Amazingly, on achieving and completing this recording task, I see that by the logic of my blog diary I have got to Friday, even though I am writing this post on Thursday. Which just goes to prove how truly effective is the Independent no diet. It can actually transform time itself.

Of course it could not possibly be that I am unable to read, organise or maintain a simple diary, and have, as a consequence, already messed up the days of the week and the tasks that I have been doing, so today's task was yesterday, and tomorrow's is today.

Meanwhile, until everybody else gets to Friday, here are some pictures.



This is Tiger in the woods with a picture of a lizard jumping up to a tree branch on her face. It's not a crocodile.


This is Shark with two dolphins jumping out of the sea. They are not killer whales.

Both are very good attempts by Mummy Grit with the face paints box.

Walking, briskly.

Task number 4 on the Independent no diet regime is to go for a brisk 15 minute walk.

Grit started this at 6.47pm. At this time it is all dark and cold and stormy. Shark, Squirrel and Tiger are all locked up safe and warm in the house watching a DVD about two baby boy tigers who are separated at birth and have lots of adventures before being reunited as big tigers.

Hopefully the ending to the film won't be that the two tigers meet and fail to recognise each other and then proceed to rip great big chunks out of each other's throats in a battle to the death over territory and girl tigers. I won't know the end because I am heading hot-foot down the post office where the late collection is 7pm.

Actually, I would prefer my 15-minute walk to be other than a last-minute dash to the post box, holding a letter of appeal to Vinci car parking services, from whom today I have a parking ticket and a fine of £60.

This is typical. I actually have a car parking pass valid for today and was unable to put it on the vehicle thanks to the person holding it having disappeared and Tiger having a big scream outside Kentucky Fried Chicken. When I got back to the car with the pass that I'd managed to track down and saw the parking ticket I then went off hunting the warden who'd put it there.

On consideration, what with the walking about looking for the parking pass and then the traffic warden in the freezing cold outside the shopping centre, perhaps I can add another 30 minutes to today's brisk walk.

In a way it was quite energising. In fact I might try the same again tomorrow, only without the parking involvement.

Positive steps to a new Grit

And we're off the starting blocks here with the no diet book free from the Independent.

We dieters apparently have to change our bad ways of cruising by the bread bin and knocking up a tasty jam sandwich. We must change our habits through Tasks.

Task 1 of the first week is to change fatty habits by not watching TV.

Grit is smug. Not watching TV is easy. Grit does not normally watch TV because Grit is too busy with the dishwasher, laundry, clearing up, reading about polar explorers, wiping up paint, saying I cannot make a Snow Queen dress because the newsagents have been on the phone again and, what's more, I have to get down the post office to post the Christmas cards etc etc etc.

But today I obviously have to reverse this habit. So I check the listings just in case I'd like to change my ways by telling Shark, Squirrel and Tiger to push off, then lolling on the sofa and watching TV. I see the only thing to watch is Timeteam. Obviously now I've read that, I can't miss it, so I've recorded it. I reason I can watch Timeteam on another day when I'm doing another task and no-one is looking.

Not watching TV is not quite enough of a fatty-habit-changing task for an enthusiastic dieting Grit who does not watch much TV. So Grit does this instead in the hope of dropping two stone:

1. I have thrown out the single Quorn sausage that is in the fridge. Grit, I say, no one is going to eat one sausage which has not even been wrapped and has a best before date of 28th December 2007. (Actually when I went to throw out the sausage I did consider cooking it because it smelled alright. Then I wondered about being poisoned by a Quorn sausage and whether it might be a cause of death and leave the children motherless so better not to risk it.)*

2. I have resolved to stop thinking through the consequences of every action which inevitably leads to death, destruction, pollution of the planet, and the children being put into foster homes where they are beaten, abused, and sent to school where they are bullied by other children and spoken to harshly by the PE teacher.

3. I have, over the last 24 hours, not just been a selfish, whining, self-pitying, misery guts Grit. I have been thinking of the plights of other people and not just tasty jam sandwiches. I have wondered how to sleep eight people in a house that can accommodate seven. I have wondered about mastitis, recorder books, small gardens and big children. I have thought about discount cards, cat poo and toads. All this blog hopping has been life enriching and is not a fatty habit.

4. In the spirit of reversing some habits I have made two pies. I do not normally make pies. One was apple and the other was pecan and maple syrup, except that I substituted the pecans for walnuts and forgot to add the maple syrup. Both were delicious.

I am now well into the lovely Independent life-changing no diet and look forward to Task 2 which is write something. As I do write, everyday, I may have to change this habit task by not writing anything and lolling in front of the TV eating pies.

Soon, it'll be out with the weighing scales.

* I think I made the right decision. The fridge smells a bit better since I took out the sausage.