Primary to Secondary with Whipsnade

Primary home ed? Piece of piss.

I was mostly terrified by the awful responsibility but, looking back, it was easy. You can base the junior years on play, footling, and spontaneous inquiry, and I reckon the adventure would mostly go okay.

Thinking about it, you would have to lock the primary kid in a box and put a bag on their head to prevent them actively inquiring about the world or soaking up all their knowledge like a sponge.

It's difficult to go wrong with primary. Give them the freedom to explore, together with the support they get from their own home, and everyone's happy. You don't have to be bullied into spending squillions on lessons, certifications, CRB-checked tutors or school-based curriculums; you can bring these in as the child wants and simply drop them when it's no longer working. Getting off grid, away from the treadmill and the timetable, is part of the active process of learning.

But secondary home ed? Of course I'm nervous, all over again, but in a different way.

This time I'm worrying over GCSEs and qualifications while the little Grits confidently assert they are going to universities A, B and C with ne'er a thought to the interviewing or selection process. Shark, Tiger and Squirrel are beginning to fall into that way home ed kids have - the one which I suspect attracts the label weird - but it is the manner called confidence. They look at the world with a level eye knowing what they want to do and where they want to do it. Let's hope they bring, alongside that confidence, good dollops of pragmatism and awareness of the expectations of their interviewing lecturers.

That is my brain dump, for now I am covertly casting around for workshops which map onto the school age my kids have reached. That is, no thanks to the primary workshops for sticking and gluing, chanting and colouring in. In schoolwordology, I'm open to suggestions with workshops Key Stage 3 and Key Stage 4. Really, they are thinner on the ground. Are you listening, you museum people? Put on a good one, and we home educators will travel to you from miles around.

The KS3 workshop we already took at the Horniman was a big disappointment, watching it descend into D'you wanna stroke a dead badger, but I have high hopes today for the KS3 workshop at Whipsnade, on Behaviourism and Animal Training. Still, I am so terrified of disappointment, that it will become D'you wanna stroke a dead badger, I don't go in, but sneak off round the park with Mich, whose brain I can pick about free resources, places to go, and cheap ways of travelling through edu-land.

Picking up the kids an hour later, I find the wandering talk we had at home really did come in handy, and the little Grit workshop approval rating was high so, if you, like me, are fearfully scouring KS3 resources while wondering what is going to become of us all, then Whipsnade is not a bad choice. And it had a great group rate for educational entry, so don't let anyone pull the wool over your eyes about the cost.

On the whole, good day, with friends old and new. I am delighted by the whole of the park on a return journey after years; I am seduced by a Wolverine (which I imagine is like a giant kitten until I find it will casually rip your face off and indifferently chew on the bones of your skull); and I am pumped up most effectively and delightfully by a couple of strong gentlemen who rescue me from my own flat tyre.

See? Whipsnade has everything. From an educational workshop...

to a Wolverine

and a delightful view to a fantasy romance.

Come with us to the Peak

We all need to relax, right? We can't slog away with population density and carbon groups all the time. Some days we need to fill our lungs with pure Hong Kong air!

First, catch the ferry to Central. It's relaxing, I promise. Nothing to do but stare out to the harbour passing by.


Then run and catch the bus, number 15, Pier 4. But DO NOT sit in our favourite seats otherwise we will stare at you with menacing scowls and mutter curses at you under our breath.


Ha! Good choice. Now you can relax!




The number 15 winds towards the Peak; I recommend you double-check the seat belt, and let's pray the driver didn't turn up at 5am saying I can have a go at that! Drank 18 cans of Stoutbeer until 2am when my girlfriend threw me out. The eye injury? Nothing.




Phew! Arrived safely!

We must stop here for general fooling about and redeeming the monkey stickers. (That won't make any sense, but you opted to come with us today. Now this is what it's like.)





Enough of a rest! Now, WALK.




This is excellent bum and thigh exercise. And if Hong Kong weren't so polluted it would be a great view.


Five minute rest, then off we go again...


Ta dah!


Here you are! The gardens at the top of the Peak! The grown ups might loll about somewhere.


But the feral kids can climb trees, whittle wood into spears, and strew leaves all over the pavilions because this is a hide out. Just make sure you dodge the park wardens. They have a mean Chinese stare.


So! Three hours runabout! Feeling better? Now you can call this next stage orienteering, because you must find your own way back to Central. Take the tram, bus, minibus, taxi, or walk.

If you get lost, we can always wait for you at the ferry.

A world picnic where everyone is nice to each other

See? Milton Keynes can organise the equivalent of the Notting Hill Carnival anytime it likes. This particular carnival day was set up by a lady who went off to be a primary school teacher.

She thought the world would be alright if all we people - with our different ideas, faiths, beliefs, attitudes, and opinions - would just decide to be nice to each other; if we sat down for a day together on the grass in the park, brought our picnics, and listened to all the bands play different music.

That's what we do, more or less. We all manage ourselves very well. We sit around, probably like they do on the first day at primary school, ignoring each other, watching the strange ones behave oddly over by the giant speakers, sharing our sweeties with our friends, and suffering the occasional opportunistic exhortations to find Jesus with a curious patience and without resorting to kick boxing.

So there are no punch ups, no effing and blinding round the teapot, and no offence taken. Well, Squirrel tried, but it just wasn't enough to cause a riot.

Leisure time

Anyone would think there is nothing going on here in the subtropics, except Grit lurking shiftily behind a marble pillar, jumping out only occasionally to spook some innocent woman while I wave a camera phone at her fur framed foot.


I need treatment. For a moment there, it even seemed like a good idea.

I blame the shopping malls. They shrink my brain. I'm beginning to hate them. They make us all consumers, eager to merge reality and advertising. The only way for me to resist them is bring out my bolshy side.

Yet it's hard to avoid those malls in Hong Kong Central. Pragmatically, they are a way to cross the road. Seek refuge from traffic, and you're locked in a shopping circle with no exit.

Once inside, there is an immediate sense of unreality. They are so far removed from people living urban life at street level that when we pass through a shopping mall on our journey, it feels like we wandered into the overground set of Metropolis. I find myself peering through the endless panels of smoked glass to see the workers down below; the ones on the treadmill who light the whole building.

One of the issues I have with the endless malls is their crushing uniformity. They contrive to appear as streams of elegant halls, laid out in easy-to-view long straight lines, offering simplicity, light, and air filled space. In reality, they are crowded, noisy, confusing corridors. Within seconds I am disoriented and fearful of losing my left from my right. One branch of Armani looks much like any other branch of Armani, and when it's brand identified against a hundred other up-market names aligned in routine regularity, I cannot tell where I am, which direction I'm headed and, at worst, why I came here in the first place.

And these places lie. The advertisements say the shopping mall is the place to come to express your who-you-are. But these places are not built for people. They are built for power, prestige, business, money. They are here to display wealth and celebrate the pointlessness of making a stupid judgement between those who have more money and those who have less money. They are here to show off, with no function beyond display.

Once inside, you can only slide forward, breaking your step in the cold marble slipway to enter and leave Versace. There is nowhere to rest or sit, unless you make for Starbucks or some other labelled coffee brand. In those long straight lines, there is no human warmth, no congregation space, no slipway, no hollow where you can pause and take your companion's arm, hold it and say, 'Shall we stop a moment?' There's no heart, no soul, no place to build a memory, no place to laugh and recall 'That was a happy time', and not a public clock in sight to stare towards, and say, 'Yes, I'll meet you, here, later'.

I am glad to get through the unavoidable mall today, make it alive to the other side, catch the bus and reach the park.

Here, I can sit on the warm, dry grass, feel the sun sting my arm, feel the wind rub my hair, hear the children rummage in my bag for biscuits, listen to them grumbling about who ate the last banana, then watch the growing pack of kids follow each other up trees. Meeting there, they hang off branches, pretend to be leopards, hold on to their sun hats. They all squeal when a littlest one shrieks out an alarm of an inquiring wasp. I can laugh at the sight of ten kids up a tree try to scramble down without breaking a leg or an arm. One is left swinging - mine - while another tugs on her legs and a third stretches out arms. I can sympathise, say wasps can be very dangerous, rub one daughter's belly where she grazed it on tree bark. I can think, they might try and sell me aspiration with fur lined shoes, but they don't yet sell me a memory of how we can simply enjoy a day, playing in the park, laughing in the sunshine.

A relaxing day watching pole dancers and a giant tea service

Thank you, Milton Keynes, for the World Picnic and the IF festival. Bravo!

Forty-seven different ways to die while pond dipping

Gawdhelpus. If yesterday wasn't bad enough, what with the killers that lie waiting for us down the local spoil heap, then I get another ear hole full of it today.

I take the kids off to a pond dipping session run by our local parks department. Normally I won't say a dickey bird against them, they are so lovely and kind and tolerant to the mad people.

But the leader turns up today without pots, without field guides, without pencils, papers, clipboards, or sense of audience.

We get a ten minute health and safety list of how dangerous we are about to become while holding a net on a stick.

Because did you know? You could trip over an old bicycle hidden in the reeds, or drown in a puddle, or be knocked unconscious, or be infested with rat wee, or swallow pond water without thinking, or be splashed in any number of ways into open wounds that are pouring with blood, or slip on mud, or fall over each other, or have someone's eye out and they would be blind and fall into the pond and be licked by rats and we would all DIE.

All this could indeed happen. But the twelve adults looking on would DO NOTHING because by then we have all decided to take up occupations as murderers and gone stalking people to kidnap and shove in car boots.

That could happen too.

Or we could bloody well get on with it, go pond dipping, then come home and order the field guides ourselves over the internet.

PS. We found a newt.

Take a step back

We've been doing this thing for a good few years now and, despite what I said, the world hasn't ended.

This thing being the home education thing. And we have been through a few things now too, in pursuit of the home education thing. Some of them involving knocked out teeth, metal bars, head wounds, and a mermaid squatting on the toilet, but at least now I have got to that point where I can look back at those things and say, well that is maybe what this choice of life involves.

When we first started home education it felt very daring and rebellious and courageous, the sort of thing that good parents will do to protect their tender baby offspring, and maybe that is like fighting evil empires to rescue cute innocent rabbits with fluffy fur and big sad eyes.

But on those days when it all went horribly wrong and my hideous spawn knuckledragged their way through the day, grunting and yelling and thumping the shit out of each other, it felt like I was mentally and emotionally not cut out for this intensive life alongside them. On those days, home education is the equivalent to climbing a mountain naked with a cougar strapped to your back.

But then along comes a day, like today, when I feel I have some perspective on the matter. Maybe it is spring. Maybe it is the way the sun streaks through the window, and I can respond to that. I can look around me and see Shark is quietly reading and Squirrel is deep thinking, working out some maths, and Tiger is humming as she sits on the floor sewing a dismembered rabbit head to a plaque, and I can think, right, we are doing alright. This is alright. And now the sun is shining and the air breathes clean. I can look to the sunshine and say hey everyone, would you like to take a walk in the woods to find flowers and Spring things? Everyone gazes up and looks at Spring busting through the window and happily pulls on shoes and out we go.

It's as simple as that. We meet up with other parents and other kids and our helpful Parks people, and we run around in the sunshine and learn about ancient woodland and bluebells.

Yes, here I am living a life that I chose because I thought it was the right thing to do. But I have in many ways doubted my ability to withstand it. Some days it is the most difficult life I could have chosen: a life where the kids can strain me and drain me and hang me out to dry, a life which on a bad day can seem like the worst possible choice and the stupidest thing ever to have chosen; a life with humiliations, sacrifices, and the pressure to locate the yellow embroidery thread to stitch up a penguin flipper before Tiger smashes up the entire house.

But some days it is so right, because look out at that world. Yes, it has horrors and glories. There are woodlands, bluebells, and sunshine too. And I get to share it all with the people I love.

I am never going on another treasure hunt for as long as I live

Yesterday, passed through all nine circles of hell.

It started off alright, as one might expect, with the easy clue number one of the TREASURE HUNT OF HELL being something of the sort like Can you write here what is on the sign by the lake? Well of course we could! Ha ha ha ha ha!


How we laughed, and filled in the answer, and the sunshine sparkled on the gentle ripples of the lake.

Not for much longer matey. Because the next clue was beyond the deathly River Acheron


and that next clue was GIBBERISH. Like, B4 UC GL 5 PT can U C the HEART?

And GL 5 PT is a lamp post! And lo! There was no heart! THERE WAS NO HEART. BUT THEY DIDN'T MEAN A HEART! THEY MEANT THE SIGN ON THE GRATE UNDER THE LAMP POST YOU DUMBO GRIT.


But by then it was all too late. The little grits had begun to cast themselves downward, forlorn, and soon began to weep and hold their heads in their hands with the incomprehension of it all, with the painful process of finding out EXACTLY WTF DO THESE QUESTIONS MEAN?


But we had already strayed with willfulness into the dark wood of the lamenting doomed, and now there was NO TURNING BACK.

We went on and on, FAILING to answer 50 QUESTIONS about Cardiff and rats and barns and Christian Ronaldo and all the Grits weeping louder and louder with the despair and impossibility of it all and REFUSING TO GIVE IN and all of it bringing me close to madness with the constant weeping of the damned ringing in my ears, and then I had to forsake all SANITY and have A BIG SHOUT.

I cannot then recall all the horrors.

No, not the incontinence and violence, the assailing by beasts, the wrathful fighting, the gnashing of teeth, tearing of clothes, pulling of hair, and agonies of TRIPLET PAIN having the BIGGEST FIGHT THIS WORLD HAS EVER SEEN. With mama shouting and children screaming and Here Here! Witness! An imminent physical attack with clipboard!


I ASK YOU, CAN A WOMAN SUFFER MORE?

And all of this horror and mutilation was done in the name of the RSPB TREASURE HUNT which should have taken an hour OF FUN IN THE SUN but which took Grit and the gritlets THREE HOURS OF MISERY.

As we wretched, exhausted half-beings crawled back through the festering sore that was our pain, back to the solitude of our car, the LAST CAR IN THE CAR PARK


now numb with the pain and the sorrow of it all, seeing the organisers locking up, thinking we must have given up and gone home, they produced from Satan's back passage AN OUT OF DATE CHOCOLATE EASTER EGG EACH.

And then the little grits all calmed down and clambered with vigour into the car and went happy home as if nothing could possibly have gone wrong with such a splendid day out.