Life is simple in cartoons

Roger Bolton introduces a Sunday morning religion programme on Radio 4. I usually don't listen because Sunday I like to lie in bed cosying up to a hairy devil of a hangover.

But of course round those blogs I'm catching up on the discussion about last Sunday's programme. The one where Roger Bolton interviewed Schools Minister, Diana Johnson, about religion and home education.

Diana says home education is under scrutiny today because spooky home educators might be doing religion (but we're only doing evangelical Christianity, obviously, because she possibly can't mention Islamic fundamentalism; that would sound too provocative).

Diana probably thinks all school choosing parents should know that something religious and sinister is going on behind lace curtains near you. She doesn't know what though. It could be anything. She worries that she doesn't know what home educators are up to. You can hear it in her voice. She even cried out, 'we don't know what's happening!'

Well Diana love, take a tablet and read this blog. That'll save you a few hundred quid on the wages to OFSTED and your staff at the Local Authority. You won't need to pay them to come peep through our letterbox to find out what we're doing, and whether I'm evangelising Christianity, or Islamic fundamentalism, to Shark, Squirrel and Tiger, while chaining them to the radiator. You might even learn something about how children learn while you're here.

But it wasn't Diana wailing about her own ignorance and overactive imagination that tickled me. It was Roger Bolton.

There may be cases where a child is with very authoritarian and dominant parents and doesn't have the fresh air of school and mixing with other people, and if you think back to those Victorian periods where evangelical parents, usually fathers, intimidated their children, threatening them with God, with Sin, with Hell, if they don't do things, some people will worry that this is possible now under home tuition, that this could happen and you'd not be able to do anything about it!

Well I barely know where to start, there are so many options.

So I'll keep it personal. Mr and Mrs Timms are evangelical Christians who live in our town, and they home educate three daughters, just like us. In Grit's world, I nod hello to them, because I know them from the local shops, the library and Shark's drama club. They hold jumble sales at the Church. Squirrel used to play with one of the mini evangelical Timms at tennis until the idle Squirrel couldn't be arsed to roll out of bed for Tennis club at 9am on a Saturday morning. I think the mini Timms still attends.

In Grit's world, we mix with people of the Timms and non-Timms variety every day of our lives. Shark, Squirrel and Tiger attend events with people of many religions, and none; they see schooled children, and home educated children; they play with kids of all colours, shapes, sizes, dispositions. And at some events, I've even seen the mini Timms.

In this world, I've also known a complete nutcase on the religion front. The name of her shall never pass my fingertips; the memory of her sends shivers down my spine; and I still live with the mental horror of her throwing herself to the office carpet delivering prayers to God. Incidentally, she sent her child to the local primary school. That same child had seven kinds of shit beaten out of her, mostly for having a lifestyle where she couldn't celebrate Christmas, birthdays or Easter.

The point is, being a religious zealot, or even authoritarian, is not the preserve of home educated parents. What you gonna do then, Rog and Diana? OFSTED all parents? Last year that suggestion would've sounded ridiculous. This year, it sounds like a government plan for next year.

But in Roger land, Grit's description of meeting ordinary folks who have a diversity of beliefs doesn't work. In Roger land, there are schooled and home 'tutored'. The two never meet! There is no 'mixing with other people', because home tutored people like us, or like the Timms, have no neighbours, use no community, and see no-one.

Where Roger lives, in a Victorian cartoon, Mrs Timms wears a mop cap and a look of ruddy-cheeked satisfaction, knowing she is saved, and the rest of us are damned to burn for all eternity. Obviously, she is never to be parted from the five-foot crucifix she grips between her scrubbed clean fingers.

But she is merely a cover. Mr Timms is the malign force behind the home tuition and inflicts mental torture on all the mini Timms at every waking hour of their miserable, wretched lives. Mr Timms is striding about a dusty Victorian parlour even as you read, stroking his mutton chops, plotting his sermon on Sin, Despair, and Saturday Tennis for the chastised and beaten mini Timms. The fact that they are home tutored, as everyone knows, means the Victorian mini Timms never leave the house, and never see another soul. Look carefully; you may see their wide and terrified eyes staring from the broken window pane in the attic window.

So feel sorry for Roger, living in a two dimensional cartoon world where mutton chops are in fashion, and we hope just for the men. A world where Dan Dare is real. Tin Tin, Snowy and Captain Haddock dash by on their latest adventure. Mickey Mouse may be hiding round the corner.

But there is comfort there, Roger. When there is wrongdoing down the Evangelical Hall, and some people fear for the evangelically oppressed home tutored, you can hope that there will be Diana, shining and resplendent in her Superwoman costume, come to find out, and she, bringer of the fresh air of school, can do something about it all.

But don't draw in Grit to your cartoon.

A bit of this and that

It has not been a very good day. Grit has had a headache thanks to yesterday's ill-advised Martini and this morning's consumption of a left-over Indian take-away for breakfast. She has also set off the fire alarm which Dig suggests might now be termed the dinner bell, and she has gone to war with Squirrel over a fish made out of tin foil.

Added to that, Shark has inexplicably started speaking in an American accent. Tiger has had a big squeal while making a New Year wreath to hang in the kitchen. And Dig, who was in charge of supper, boiled enough potatoes to not quite fill one small serving bowl, opened a tin of tuna, and suggested supper was ready. Bear in mind that we are five hungry people with a potato appetite; three won't eat fish and one is a resolving vegan.

On the other hand, Shark has visited the neighbour to dutifully hand her a Christmas card and I have taken a Happy 2008 card. Then we have exchanged pleasantries about kitchens and bathrooms.

I have also taken down from the kitchen the autumnal leaf wreaths that Squirrel, Shark and Tiger made in September 2003, giving me the satisfaction of claiming that things are moving, albeit slowly, on the household organisation front.

While I'm thinking about achievement I should say I have spent some time transferring dates into the new 2008 calender so that I do not forget the kiddie RSPB and drama groups again. And Squirrel's dance and the French.

Because of this perhaps I should count New Year's day, despite its minor setbacks, as one of achievement, and one which starts off my resolutions admirably. Except for eating standing up, which I am still working on.

Dig, meanwhile, apart from his humiliation over the potatoes, has within the last 24 hours had two unsettling experiences, one with a modelling balloon and one with a rabbit. I may post the rabbit dilemma later. It is not an easy one to solve. We have had an unpleasant experience with a rabbit before, and not surprisingly, it has made Dig cautious.

Another gate

Sasha, the German au pair who is taking over from Ermintrude, arrives tonight at 11.30pm.

Well I hope Sasha is agile. Because all day long any visitor to the house has had to climb over the front gate if they are to get into the garden and to the front door, because Dig wedged the gate shut this morning by accident. Ermintrude has found the whole incident very funny as she's clambered over the gate with Squirrel, Shark and Tiger to get out into the street, several times now, to go about the day's business to the shops and the tennis courts. But she's used to us now, and that helps.

Anyway, I needn't have worried about Sasha's introduction to the Pile being 'Would you mind climbing over the gate?' delivered in the street darkness at midnight, probably with Smalltown's police sirens wailing in the background, and Dig looking like everything's normal.

No, because Gert, the neighbour, comes to our rescue. Think not that she is aged in her 60s, has a hole in her heart, and a deaf 16-year old dog that can't bend its knees but which still sends Tiger screaming into the house. Think not, either, that Gert is the neighbour who owns Trisha the cat, who is on the receiving end of the Grit family's hisses as we hide behind bushes and may, sadly, now be in need of psychiatric cat counselling while Gert wonders why it seems to shake and run whenever it sees Shark coming.

Gert probably doesn't know the full story of what we've done to Trisha. And if she does, it probably helps. Because Gert kicks the gate in. She takes aim and gives the gate a good thump several times with her foot and Pow! it pops open. She has magnificent strength, she says, because until she discovered she had a hole in the heart in May, she used to go scuba diving.

Now see how Grit's policy of keeping on good terms with the neighbours pays off.

Neighbours

Well at home we piss off the neighbours for miles around by shouting in the kiddies playground, arguing in the street, rolling about in the gutter, screaming at passing dogs and hissing at everyone's cat. Now we're in Kent, we have to find a neighbour and piss them off by screaming outside their bedroom window, setting traps for them and stuffing a unicorn down their drainpipe.

It all starts when Shark, Squirrel and Tiger decide to play together outside the van while I contemplate whether going home early would be a signal of failure, or whether I can get through the ordeal of single mothering in a prison caravan with a blocked cess pit and a trampolining magpie if I just drink heavily to midnight and start off each morning at 4 am with a dash of single malt.

Then I'm aware that everyone seems to be quiet outside. This is trouble. Sure enough, they're digging up the grass with their spades. They do this at home and it is very irritating. They dig a hole in the lawn which becomes a bear trap when it's covered in grass; I come along, misplace my foot in it, twist my ankle and fall over. Now they're doing it here outside the neighbour's van.

'Do not dig up the grass!' I hiss. Squirrel ignores me as another piece of turf, levered up with her spade, goes flying over her shoulder. 'Do not dig up the grass!' I shout. I'm running around, trying to put the turf back into the soily holes; Tiger, Shark and Squirrel squeal that this is the blue tit's nest and here's the baby eagle, and there, now I've done it, I've just covered up the owl nest which just goes to show what a horrid mother I am. Now the little rolled up balls of toilet paper in each soily hole make sense. They're eggs. Of course, I should have seen that. But digging up the turf outside the neighbour's van probably contravenes some sort of rule so I say they can't play eggs-in-nests until they get to the beach, so play something else.

And they do. It's called put your cuddly toy unicorn into your flip flop and throw it up in the air. Your unicorn likes this. The flip flop is his microlite and this is his first flying lesson. This is hilarious until the unicorn lands with a thud on the roof of the neighbouring caravan, rolls down the gentle curve, and gets wedged with his microlite in the guttering.

The first I know of this is when I hear 'Mummy! Mummy! Furryhorn is on the roof!'

Since I cannot reach the pesky thing discreetly, I have to get out the wobbly stool from under the dining table in the van and climb on that. By waving a ruler at the guttering I can just about flip and squeeze the unicorn and microlite along to the end of the van where I hope to bounce him over. He's having none of it and wedges himself in the drainpipe. Now if I push him down any further it's going to look deliberate, taking advantage of the neighbour's day trip to Dover Castle to creep out and shove things down their drainpipe. So it's out with the coathangers, the confiscated spades, makeshift hooks sellotaped to 30cm rulers and hope no-one notices.

The rescue mission takes fifteen minutes. When he finally bounces out, I confiscate him along with the spades and force everyone in the car to go off and explore the Romney Marshes Wildlife Centre. If I don't, Squirrel might well decide the whole site needs a spot of redecoration and head off to the neighbour's van with the crayons.

The only positive thing I can say about the assaults on the neighbour's territory is that it is a fine example of cooperative teamwork because there is very little screaming all morning. We save the screaming for when we get back from the Wildlife Centre and the neighbours are staring glumly from their little kitchen window at the patched soil, probably wondering what else we've been up to.

Pink seals

Now here's a bizarre moment in a turbulent day.

It's Sunday afternoon, sometime after lunch. I knock on a stranger's door. The door opens. A tall man with grey hair and a weathered face appears in a hall filled with boxes and coats and magazines, stacked to waist height. He leans against the wall, holding a can of lager.

I smile and say, 'Excuse me, I'm sorry to bother you, but there's a pink seal in your garden.'

I bet he was expecting Jehovah's Witnesses or the bailiffs, so I reassure him by holding up an identical pink seal. 'It's a lot like this one' I add.

I hold up a small furry pink seal on a silver ribbon and for a moment we both watch it twirling round in the air. Mr Tall is having a bit of difficulty focusing. 'Hang on a minute' he says with a voice that's slightly slurred. Within a moment he produces from behind the door a squeaky Eeyore. 'Is this his friend?' he says, smiling.

'It could be' I say. 'Would you mind having a look in your garden for me? His name's Sealy.' I point down at Squirrel who's doing her best to hide behind the drainpipe outside the front door, and managing quite well.

'How did Sealy get in the garden?' he asks, taking a sip from his can.

'He was taking his first flying lesson.' I can hear Squirrel giggle and whisper 'It wasn't his first flying lesson mummy. He's been doing it all up the street.'

Mr Tall smiles hazily at Squirrel and disappears into the gloom of the hall. A few moments later he returns, with a furry pink seal twirling on a silver ribbon.

'There's a problem', he says, holding up the seal, just out of Squirrel's reach.

'What might that be?' I say.

'He's eaten all my fish' says Mr Tall, guffawing, lowering Sealy down to Squirrel's reach and steadying himself against the doorframe.

By the time me and Squirrel emerge with Sealy, the street ahead is empty. Dig has scarpered, taking Sasha, Tiger and Shark off home. He probably thinks that Sasha has had enough trouble in Smalltown now, what with last night's Saturday night streetfights, the insistence of this morning's police sirens, the screams of fighting triplets since breakfast, and Mahmud sweeping the floor around us in our local Indian restaurant on Sunday buffet time. Dig probably thinks that a punch up with the neighbour over a fluffy pink seal is perhaps one bit of local flavour she could do without.

Dig, you just have to remember that the neighbours are fine, and no matter how bizarre the request, just smile.

Never put soil down the toilet

Everyone's got their windows open today, enjoying the sunshine and fresh Spring wind. I've chatted to Anny, the neighbour, and Shark, Tiger and Squirrel have been playing in the garden under the trees. In the few five and ten minutes they have popped into the house to gulp down a fruit smoothie, complain about a sister, fetch a plastic bowl or have a wee, we have learned the words soil, boil, coil, foil and oil.

Shark says that the word oil is also in the word toilet. 'You are absolutely right!' I applaud. Clearly, my daughter is a genius, and may publish her first novel by age ten.

Later, when I haven't seen Tiger, Shark or Squirrel for some time, I do my rounds, just to check that Tiger isn't lying flat out dead under the blackberry brambles while Shark says 'We told her to come and get you mummy', or that Squirrel's not locked herself in the little play house at the bottom on the garden and is screaming her head off in there because she's just turned round and found the cat that someone lost last October. But nothing's wrong. Everyone's fine, making Roman cities in the mud, and populating the Circus Maximum with toy unicorns. I wave to Anny, and think what a lovely day it is; just how home education should be.

Then I come back up to the house and go into the bathroom. Now, how do I describe the scene that meets my eyes? There is no delicate way. Inside the toilet bowl there is no ceramic visible. The sides are etched in black, with what looks like unmoving rivers of black slime making no progress into the bowl. The long black chains of slime cannot make any progress because inside the bowl there is what looks like lumps of grey and brown, with tiny black seeds mounted atop. Thinking this has come out of someone's bottom, my first response is to bellow 'Oh my God!' at the top of my voice. It's as the words, 'Get a doctor!' are forming in my synapses that it dawns on me that this is not any ordinary bottom-made soil, but garden soil, complete with mud, rotted leaves and ivy seeds.

There's only one response now called for. Burst through the door into the garden in a fury, tea-towel waving, index finger out, shouting to a startled Tiger, Shark and Squirrel, 'Do not put soil in the toilet! And under no circumstances are you to experiment with toilet, soil, oil or foil!'

This is why, once a year at Christmas, we get ourselves on our best behaviour, get out the bottle of port, and invite the neighbours round. I want them to see we can be normal.