Carmen at the ROH

Superb performance at the Royal Opera House. Home educators can apply for the schools events, even if the language coming from the ROH can be a little teacher-heavy; doesn't matter if you're in a large or small group.

Le Nozze di Figaro

Here we are again at the Royal Opera House, this time for the matinee performance of Le Nozze di Figaro.

Okay, so the scene is not all perfect. I mean, I'm not wearing a hip-stroking green silk dress that rustles when I walk, and neither am in black sueded kitten heels, nor holding a pre-show glass of up-market champagne delivered to my fragrant, fingernail-buffed hand by a gentleman you wish could be yours.

For such a package of delight, I have to close my eyes and pretend. Because this performance of Figaro is the school performance, so remove the green silk and gentleman, and instead drop in Shark, Squirrel and Tiger, bunches of home educators, and 500 other kids assorted from near and far primary and secondary.

Well, all things considered, I ain't complaining as I position Shark, Squirrel and Tiger in their seats in the stalls at a price-per-backside about the same cost as the bus fare in and out of town.

Thanks are entirely due to the Royal Opera House who welcome small parties of home educators alongside large school groups. Simply put yourself on a mailing list and follow instructions.

Thank you, Royal Opera House, thank you a million times for helping bring up my offspring with access to world-class singalong, supported by world-class staging, sets, costume, and direction.

And you never know; you could have Tiger one day painting your back drop.

DIY education at the ROH

O deliver us! The news of Govian central planning - to hand over academies, playgrounds, book cupboards and all, up into the eager receiving hands of the venture capitalists - is not entirely unexpected. Although writ out in black and white like this, it makes for depressing reading round at Grit's.

I am ideologically opposed to profit-making from a child's education, of course I am, and here at home we have the most expensive private education going. But for your state school to introduce a cash-based exchange - your child run at a profit - removes, fundamentally, trust in a learning relationship, all round. Between parent and teacher; teacher and child; child and parent. Can a child trust mama if she is doing the bidding of a corporate body? Sure you have to get  the A grades. They want their money's worth from your exams. So what if your child is the one who doesn't fit the system? Tinkertop, who is messily devoted to paint, or slugs, or trees? And no amount of threat, fines, punishment or bullying will shift her? Who's going to be interested in investing in her failures?

Well of course you can always stick up two fingers to the corporate bodies.

It's just for the moment - and I'm beginning to think it is a moment in time, before home educators are required, along with the rest of you, to engage with their child's education on a commercial basis, before we all must register with a privately run body who overseas curriculum delivery, online monitoring, and accreditation - just for the moment, you can escape Gove's consumer world. You can elude his clutches; you can snatch Tinkertop from the hands of those who see her as a profit centre in miniature, and you can DIY her education.

At the moment, just for now, you don't need to ask permission, you don't need to have your plans approved, nor monitored - nor locked down in commercial agreements with your educational scheme loaned back to you with a 45% annual interest - you can take Tinkertop off the treadmill, look around this fantastic world with all the brilliant offerings from woods to fields to scout huts to quarry tours, and do it yourself.

Today, we did it ourselves; we snatched up the offer from the Royal Opera House for the matinee performance of Gloriana, at a rock-bottom cost for schools, educators, alternatives and old hippies like Grit. We showed a different way, off the path, out of normal, no profit to us involved, but seeing sudden growth, revelation and world learning in Tinkertop. Opera? she says wide-eyed, I didn't know I liked opera! But it is brilliant!

May day celebration

First of May! A date which seems more bewitching to me as each year passes: I made it!

I've hidden from the long slog of winter under me woolly thermal vest with the dribble, but now I made it, I can cast it off, and throw my diminished frame towards the luxurious promises of summer breezes blowing up me cotton frock.

If I made it this far, surely the rest is going to be alright. Come the long evenings, long shadows, I can be bolstered up by warmth and sun and wind, made stout and whole enough to face winter returning, when I dig out the thermal vest I said I'd never wear again, the thing I'll sew myself into till April 30th, but I'll know too, if I bite my knuckles and keep my head down, I will feel the same all over again next year. If I can make May Day I can call it triumph.

So it's all sparkly today, and I don't care what adversity comes this way. The marker's down, the line's drawn, I jumped the barrier, and the bit of me that's living is still alive enough to anticipate the freedoms of summer.

Even if, at any point I felt down, sad, and grieving today, which I deny totally, I'm drawing on the bright and shiny art the children conjure up, inspired by light and paint: what could be better for me than to clap eyes on Squirrel's rocks, Tiger's thingummy, and Shark's killer whale?
.

And if that wasn't enough to know it's all time for a spring celebration, the evening sings at me from the Folk Show with Mark Radcliffe on Radio 2.

Honestly, aged in my 20s and 30s, I thought, If you ever catch me listening to Radio 2, shoot me. But I hadn't been withered by death, despair and winter then, when making it through the shrunken ages to the first of May simply wasn't the achievement it so clearly is today.

A grand day out

I introduce Shark, Tiger and Squirrel to posh, attending a performance at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden.

The evening already followed on from a cultured day out at the British Museum with Life and Death in Pompeii and Herculaneum.

Here I photographed the back of Squirrel's head to prove an (upper crust) education is indeed being provided. (As you can see, she last combed her hair in February.)

But I was not told off by the museum guard, not at all, even though photography in the British Museum exhibitions is strictly not allowed. I like to think I avoid any challenge to my actions thanks to my natural command of the situation. A striding-about confident manner and a sense of righteous entitlement that I obviously share with all English posh.

Also I have found the technique useful, of sidling up to anyone in even a minor position of authority and attempting to divert attention from my inevitable transgressions by wheedling and whining, and using my extensive repertoire of grovelling and ingratiating. (And if all fails, I can kick off Tiger so she can create a diversion and I can get away with it.)

My posh also did not glide quite so effortlessly at the Royal Opera House, it is true. I had a fight with the ticket man. He started it. But I am gracious enough not to punch him on the nose. That is another feature of English posh, which I include for the benefit of the American reader in Minnesota. We do not like to put anyone in an awkward situation. Like flat out on the floor, even though they deserve it.

Afterwards myself and my young charges sat outside hunched over a Tesco value meal (cold and reduced) not at all looking like hobos in hoodies, nor fending off an aggressive pigeon, nor commenting in loud voices about how pointless are ballerinas and how they have no bosoms.

Also, I should confess, the performance at the ROH was not Die Zauberflöte so I am maybe stretching the posh. It was Marcus du Sautoy, Professor for the Public Understanding of Science, taking over the underground theatre, running through a set of number-related stories to explain how Mozart was a freemason and hid stuff in his flute. Which opera, incidentally, we are not seeing because I cannot afford to chuck 200 quid on a seat and by the time I got to the website, all the cheap seats without a view were sold.

Anyway, it is something to do with polyhedrons.

Nonetheless, bar for the fight and the small amount of hissing, I conclude that we are probably quite posh today, enjoying the sort of upper-class education usually reserved for young ladies of gentry folk. Oh, except for the tomato dribble down the left bosom, and the squint. Don't count those, either.

Introducing the kids to opera

Tonight, home ed outing to Milton Keynes Theatre for Welsh National Opera and The Cunning Little Vixen.

There can't surely be a better kid introduction to opera! Not counting The Magic Flute set in a caravan park. That was good, too.

But although it seems to me perfect material for encouraging an enjoyment of the operatic singalong, I have found this problem with volunteering to be the group ticket buyer for one of your local home ed tribes!

ATG Tickets make it shockingly easy and friendly for you, and you get the discount rates for booking ten or more seats, sure! Then, when you blithely say to your tribe Oh, don't forget it's the opera! the elders go all quiet and claim they are busy washing their hair, rearranging the bathwater, and growing their toenails, so they can't possibly come.

Well, you people missed a treat, of course you did. There were naked men and free beer and everything. And the staging, costumery, dragonfly dance and singalong was all superb too.

Now I know you home educating types are jolly enthusiastic about introducing the offspring to opera, so if it tours to a venue near you, of course it's worth the group rate tenner to see it!

Simply organise your group and go. Even if you have to sell on the spare tickets at the last minute to friends of friends, who then sell on the tickets to their friends who you have never seen, so you turf them out the tribal group, then apologise and glare at them like it is all their fault, then snatch the cash from their terrified fingers. WNO's The Cunning Little Vixen is totally worth it.

Middle class and ruthless

My mother would be PROUD.

I made it to THE MIDDLE CLASS.

What I failed to achieve by marriage, education, aligning my cultural norms with the preferred socio-economic group, I made it thanks to Barry Sheerman, the former chair of the Education select committee who says My home educating kind? We are not only middle class, we are RUTHLESS.

I'm cracking open the cava!

To celebrate the public reading of 'You can't drive education like a sports car' I get Shark, Squirrel and Tiger in the car and drive them over to Cambridge.

I'm driving a clapped out Citroen van, which demonstrates just how aligned I am to the 'right to private and family life', and how fast we aren't travelling while I concoct my next ruthless, middle class scheme to dangerously visit upon the heads of the vulnerable home educated children, Shark, Squirrel and Tiger.

That scheme, incidentally, is to march them round the Polar Museum, eat student-style at Gardenia, then go sit in King's College Chapel listening to Bach's St Matthew Passion.

Surely qualifies for middle class and ruthless, right?

My dangerous scheming works splendidly! Except for a few minor working-class problems, like failing to realise Bach's St Matthew Passion actually does last three hours on hard seats, and cheap five-pounds unsighted tickets means you can't see a damn thing about the choir except the back of a tenor's head. It also means having to grudgingly get a taxi to redeem the stranded van because I cannot read a park-and-ride timetable, and walking about Cambridge with a vegetarian hamburger from Gardenia stuffed in my handbag because Squirrel refused to eat the blasted thing so I threatened to serve it up for breakfast, then pride wouldn't let me part with it. APART FROM THAT. I am so totally delighted to be middle class and ruthless.

Frobisher's Rock. I became unreasonably excited about this geology and history combined. 

I started photographing any geology collection I could find from that point, although this is not really the main draw of the Polar Museum for the happy visitor. It is the letters, of course, from Scott's doomed attempt on the Antarctic. They are deeply moving. I may have had to suppress a quiet working-class sniffle.

Then three hours! On hard seats! With never a word of complaint from the little Grits! An attempt on the Antarctic clearly put an evening's sore bottom into perspective.

Here, have a snatch of the Passion, and let us all thank Barry Sheerman for our elevation.

It's a steal

Feeling pleased with myself. And a bit guilty. The sort of mix which comes about as a result of doing something you know you shouldn't but you can't help yourself. Like chickpea theft from the upmarket tinned goods range at Lidl. One tin of chickpeas up! But that is bad, people, bad.

The contrary state of my soul is the upshot of a last-minute freebie offer where the kids go cheap and one goes free. All I have to do is incant simple magic words into the telephone (bogoff cheap kids free) and Whazam! Four tickets are ours!

I feel immediately pleased with myself. I spend a fiver and save fifteen. This is good indeed! But when we arrive, then I'm feeling guilty. The theatre's half empty, and here I am, skanking the system, getting us in cheap, going round the back door, and denying them the cash they need to keep alive. Orchestras around the land are begging for help in these hard economic times and what do I do? Strip the flesh from the bones.

Here they are. Milton Keynes City Orchestra. Pretty good, too. Playing tonight Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra plus a lot of strings and some big Russian piano. They deserve your support. They need your cash. Go on, put your hands in your pocket and support your local orchestra. They're worth it.

That wasn't very exciting after all, was it? I bet now you wish I had nicked a soft porn DVD and a bottle of Tizer from Lidl, don't you?

Lodho Joue à Tom Waits

HesFes is over for another year! Book us in for 2013. It's the only week I can take off duty.

But it's time to return to the party life that is home education chez Grit! Of course we have an appointment with the bizarre arts. This evening, with L'Orchestre d'Hommes-Orchestres.

You'd almost think they were British, this lot, with their uncanny ability to simultaneously celebrate and undermine.

They're not, they're Canadian. Along with the New Cackle Sisters, gloriously exploring the music of Tom Waits.

The gritlets are a little bemused. Unsure what to make of the tea cups, wine corks, chocolate bar, golf club and crash helmet.

I loved every second. Perfectly suited to this niche market of experimental music theatre, in homage I might now declare myself Canadian, so long as Canadians are welcome at HesFes.

But now I must drag the tent out the car. The festival pop-up tent that I can't pop down, so must drive with a popped-up tent squashed painfully into the boot, obscuring my windows.

Meanwhile, as I undergo trial by tent, I leave you to amuse yourself with Lodho. Interview. Review. Youtube.

Larging it

I would tell you about Saturday but it was taken over by some music celebration held halfway down a hill.

The event involved listening to middle-aged men playing guitars in someone's back garden. They have normal jobs like office professionals and admin supervisors and logistics experts but come the weekends they all rip the sleeves off their shirts, wrap guitars about themselves, and bash out Pink Floyd anthems. It's like watching some universal law of nature.

Anyway, the afternoon proceeded very rock n roll with packets of digestive biscuits, rugs for the mothers to sit on, and children wandering about. Mine pushed off to hang about with the other offspring who are at an age where they feel humiliated by all parental behaviour, including shopping in the Co-op, so watching anyone's father breathlessly cavort about the shrubbery with a bass guitar is pain 11 on a rating scale of 1-10.

The evening descended much as you'd expect in a wild and busted scenario of the over-50s with a takeaway pizza and a nice cup of cocoa when everyone got home.

Godblessem.

I am in disconnect

Strange. I could have sworn that lunch was composed of lemon-flavoured cold remedies, and pudding was to have my lifeless body propped up in an audience at the Hong Kong Cultural Centre to experience two hours of Cantonese Opera.

From what I can recall, Cantonese Opera has the sound equivalent of a parrot in a claw fight with a tom cat, and has the visual puzzle of two or more giant fluorescent faces hanging expressionless amongst five hundredweight of sequins.

But I may have been tripping on Strepsils. At some points the faces started spinning, while the sequins waved fake weapons then lunged at each other with sticks.

By the end I became numb. I may have floated off into some sort of cocooned out-of-body experience. From a long way away, Tiger turned to me and said now she could see the point of learning Cantonese, because then she could understand the amazing opera with the fantastic costumes, beautiful make up, and lovely singing, all of which she enjoys so very much, so please can I buy tickets for the full five hours?

There's a ladder here somewhere, right?

Everyone who knows Grit knows that she home educates for social advantage.

This is, after all, how the otherwise word fell into law. To provide the toffs with an escape route from the tedious restrictions of school.

Grit has already done quite well, climbing up the social ladder of success, what with marrying a public school boy and sticking Tiger on the back of a horse.

There have been notable achievements too, like scrounging a paid year at Oxford and wangling an overnight stay in Windsor Great Park. And she totally denies it was spent smashed out of her skull flat out under a bush.

But, unfortunately, despite her best efforts, Grit has some crushing disadvantages which prevent her upclimbing mobility.

Like being born gutter class. Or remaining sullenly resistant to the charms of the upper English; finding royalty intensely annoying; resenting nineteenth century opera; despising matching hats and handbags; and possessing a history of running about the countryside with the hunt saboteurs. Stuff like that.

Now she home educates as well. That, in some eyes, puts us not with the gentry and the governesses at all, but outside all normal classy society. Forever.

But it doesn't stop her trying. Of course not, because she has the spur of the delightful Tiger, Shark and Squirrel. Three gracious daughters who, despite the failings of mama, must be launched upward. What if, in future years, her fragrant trio drag home some pond-dwelling little oink with tattoos and a pit bull?

So I must aspire, on behalf of my children.

Which explains why we fetch up here, this evening, at the National Trust Stowe landscape gardens for their graceful event, 'dining at dusk with string quartet playing from the temple of Concorde and Victory'.

The old lady gatekeepers clearly think something is wrong, because it takes five minutes passing the entrance ticket back and forth between everyone's fingers while they turn it over and over, peering at it for tell-tale signs of forgery. Grit and the gritlets obviously do not look like deferential National Trust dusk dining types.

And they may be right too, because once we're in, it is out with the plastic Ikea picnic plates, the value Tesco salad, and the wooden cutlery I nicked from Woburn.

When the strings start up, Shark, Squirrel and Tiger slap each other about a bit and then take off to throw themselves down a hill. I am left to be ignored by the charity muggers and eaten by a swarm of gnats.

Not quite successful then. But not a social disaster either. So maybe a start. This time we never had anything confiscated, we never resorted to weapons, no-one had a hysterical screaming fit, I did not wet myself,* and we had cutlery. In my book, that's social success.




* I freely admit to wetting myself in public in Stowe gardens, age 43. Thanks to my uncontrollable laughter during a decorous reenactment of English eighteenth century garden games. I thought it might be fun to strap the little grits Squirrel and Shark together in the three-legged race. They took one step, realised their sister was impeding the race, then splattered to the ground in a torrential downpour of tears, swinging fists and cries of blue murder. At the insistence of the captain I hauled them off the track five minutes later while they carried on brawling, still tied together. This was the day I accepted that one measure for social success, Team player, would never apply to la famille Grit.

Call it our music education

Tonight we took the little grits to hear Jonglaresa.

And we flew away hundreds of years into Europe, travelled the Middle East, and came back home again.

Go over here, for a listen.

And see if they're touring near you.