Do you love us mummy?

A huge amount, I blithely say. More than all the tea in China.

But perhaps not quite enough to repeat those last ten hours in my life, ok?

I know that you Shark, now say you love camping. And you Tiger, say tents are fun for a first night. Even you Squirrel, my diamante daughter, add that you enjoyed the idea and now are we going home?

But let's not mince words. Let's say that for mama the first night in a tent was A LIVING HELL.

How do I count the problems? Let me do it in order, procedurally. In that way, it will be like basketry, and I shall weave out my peace and calm.

My first problem is the countryside sinks into darkness and there is no electricity.

I admit. I did not actually think ahead when I said Fantastic! Let's go live in a tent! I will blame the kids and say my total lack of speculation was guided by my children. And they never think more than ten seconds ahead. Which at the time of agreeing to camp in a field, seemed a better guide than planning. And my outlook is, your attitude to a new situation predicts how much you're going to enjoy it. So of course that all fits. I wanted the children to enjoy living under nylon. Say nothing about dangers, horrors, spiders, creepy crawlies in my socks. I did not think of these. I did not want to think of much at all.

In my defence, that lack of planning was also a protection. Because I might betray to myself how much of a town girl I really am. While I love striding across those fields feeling the wind on my face by day, I also like, by night, brick walls, electric light sockets and warm beds.

But look! In the countryside it falls dark! How beautiful is the grey cloak of dusk settling upon us in the wooded glade.

Where are the torches mama?

What torches?

What do we have apart from NO TORCHES? Well, we have NO TORCHES. Aha! We have one wind up lantern! Where is that? Oh yes, where is that.

Remind me now, where is Shark? Shark has declared she is not staying with us thank you very much. We are undignified and our tent is embarrassing. Shark has found herself somewhere else to stay. A nice cosy spot in the organiser's tent down the other end of the field. And she'll have that wind up lantern, thanks.

So with a falling down tent and one child disappeared to someone else's tent in the dark dark woods carrying the only light we have, there is only one thing to do. GO TO BED.

Oh dear. Let me pause to weave another therapeutic basket.

My second problem becomes apparent twenty minutes after climbing in a cold sleeping bag. I am lying on the world's quickest deflating airbed. Once Grit's fat arse climbs aboard it sinks quicker than the Titanic. Thanks mainly to the FIVE HOLES. How many holes I do not discover until daylight, when I drench every inch of that airbed in cold tea and bitter tears to discover at which point the little air bubbles ooze up and prompt me to slap on another rubber patch from the bicycle wheel puncture repair kit.

But it is daylight.

And the next problem is the composting toilet.

Now I'm sure there are many models and makes of composting toilet. You can tell me they are very worthy and good. Then you can slap me round the face for pining after a draining system that will destroy the earth.

Because this particular model of composting toilet has a sort of partition inside the bowl, where you aim the pee in one area and the poopy in the other. I know really it is straightforward, because unless there is something tragically wrong with your body, then pee comes out the front and poo comes out the back.

But you try getting those in the right order after four hours of broken sleep on a hard cold forest floor, a torture interrupted only by the dream of pain that you are being eaten alive by badgers who are mocking you because they have torches and you do not.

Now, my darling Shark, Tiger, and Squirrel. I love you more than all the tea in China. But after the first night of living hell I am ready to up sticks and leg it out of that tent quicker than a rat up a drainpipe propelled by rocket fuel. I know now it will take more than LOVE to make me stay one more night in this tent, even if it means you get to flit about in Shakespearean mode coached by Danny Nussbaum.

To stay here, I can no longer force my brain to shut off and shrivel to the size of a pea. Let's face it, I did that already. And it did not work. No. I now come with a LIST OF DEMANDS.

1. I want a self-inflating mattress like Michelle's otherwise the deal is off.
2. I want a proper set of wind up torches otherwise the deal is off.
3. I want a proper sleeping bag, and extra duvet, otherwise the deal is off.
4. I want to go home today, use the toilet and the shower, otherwise the deal is off.
5. I want to stock the car with beer, red wine, bars of chocolate and those delicious breadsticks from Waitrose, otherwise the deal is off.

And on those terms, and only those terms, I might stay just ONE more night.

And love, ladies, has nothing to do with it.

There is a path that leads the other way

One pro school argument I've heard is that school offers such fantastic educational opportunities, that you simply cannot match what they do.

Do I believe that? Like in an average school exam mill little Moonbeam has the opportunity to be beaten up in the playground for wearing the wrong socks, or the opportunity to be taught indifferently by a maths teacher coasting to retirement, or perhaps the opportunity for the French lesson to be taken by the maths teacher again because Miss is having a breakdown apres le hammer incident.

If the look on my face says to that pro schooler not convinced about those fantastic opportunities, I may hear about how the Year 9 group got to work with a real! live! artist!

And if I question that claim closely I find that last year in a desperate bid to crawl out of special measures the school sent in the community artists, and 5 out of 150 kids were given special permission to attend a workshop for an afternoon. Today the school still crow about it like they'd dug up Picasso and found he was alive and well and buried by accident.

Or then there's the fantastic school trip to London. Whoopee. The type of school trip where two hours in the Science museum is all you get and you spend one hour queuing. Or try me on the fantastic trip to Switzerland. The one of astronomical cost, where Bazza, Gazza and Wazzer were airlifted to a hospital for alcohol poisoning and Tinkertop came home pregnant.

Honestly, I have not yet found any activity in school that home educators cannot do better out of school.

Likewise, there are a ton of activities home educators can do that schools can't do or won't do.

In the worst case, what schools won't do includes science lessons. And don't tell me that's not true, because I've covered classes for the science teacher on sick leave after the gas taps incident. I've been told by year 10 kids that a cover teacher makes no difference, since they don't do the experiments anyway thanks to Mad Pete who cannot be allowed near rubber tubes. Either that or the four day risk assessment that must be carried out because Tinkertop might come near wood, or water, or whatever is this month's killer. So the science class watches the experiment on video and kids write up the procedure at home. Or at least the A-C candidates do.

Then again, home educators are saved from plenty of activities in school that would boggle your mind, if only you knew, and you would not want them replicated anywhere near your darling Tinkertop Moonbeam.

Seriously, there is such a range of activities home educators can choose or create for their kids outside school - and I would stick out my neck and say there is nothing we home educators cannot find - that far from me being overawed by schools as fantastic places of educational opportunity, I have to question why they exist at all. Unless it is to provide child care while parents go to work.

The only problem is, of course, is that to drag Tinkertop out of school, take on those educational responsibilities and support her while she teaches herself - to actually do this home education thing - you must effect a lifestyle change; you must compromise your cash, time and home. You must be a parent of bloody minded determination, thick skin, and fistfulls of knuckles made of steel that won't snap when you chew them down. And your place in the neighbourhood? Social status? Out the window, along with free time, a disposable income, posh friends who invite you to lunch, and all fantasies involving clickclacking about shopping centres footswathed in Jimmy Choos.

Which brings me to the nitty gritty of our home ed life - which is what this blog is about - and what the home educated Tiger and Shark have opted to do for the next few days. They will be working with an all-age group of kids and a team of actors and artists to recreate Midsummer Night's Dream on a five-day outdoor summer school. And it's only for home educated children, so the pro schoolies can go queue at the Science Museum. We'll wait until school starts again and the place falls quiet before we go to see Wallace and Gromit.

But here's the rub. Having Tiger and Shark running about in a field for five days dressed as fairies requires one big lifestyle commitment. From mamma.

And that one big commitment - not the food supply or a continuous smile of support no matter how crap everyone is - is to break her rule forever and sleep, for four nights, in a wet field in Hertfordshire without phone contact, computer, sense, or sanity, and worse, with a composting toilet, in a construction which looks shockingly like this:


Now those parents who next time try and tell me what fantastic opportunities are available to Tinkertop, while scuttling back to work and contemplating the purchase of kitten heels over lunchtime, I can see where you are really coming from, and what you are really saying. You are saying Lifestyle change? Not bloody likely.

And Grit doesn't even pray, so get this!

Because guess what? Four good things happen in one day!

1) Tiger's bike, the one stolen Monday night, is returned.

A call from the lady at the local police station tells me they have a girl's bike, so come and look at it. She adds her life would be very easy if we said this bike was actually the one stolen because it is a revolting heap of a thing and she has nowhere to keep it.

Fortunately, Tiger says the bike is hers, so that's settled.

Apparently a bloke with a limp and a twitch walked with it into the local library. Perhaps my entreaties worked. I'd splattered the back gate with posters, inviting all comers to take a heavy guilt trip on account of the weeping nine-year old with a stolen bike. Suggesting a life filled with psychiatric treatment for the nine-year old and a hell up Satan's bottom for the damned may have helped.

2) We sit in Northampton Fishmarket and hear about the history of the trumpet.

Yes, this is Good News. This music session is totally fascinating, lively and fun, and we hear a live trumpet performance which sounds not at all bad.

I am so transported I whimsy that now is the time to encourage one of the little grits to learn the trumpet. That is, until I slap myself to remember that a trumpet played by a professional musician who practices five hours a day is a damn big difference to a trumpet attacked by Shark at 7am in the morning after one enthusiastic half-hour lesson with Grit who doesn't play the trumpet but who, in a blind and deaf fit, has bought a trumpet for £500 and taken a teach yourself book out the library.

3) Wandering back through Northampton to the car park we tour the charity shops and discover not one, not two, but three blue cotton dresses that fit Shark, and which she says she will wear.

Given that these three dresses are identical and cost £1 each only adds to the pleasure of this find. Shark is a lady who cannot be bothered to waste more than five seconds thinking about what she will wear. You could use those five seconds wondering about killer whales, or Tintin on the moon, or Harry Potter, or any infinite subject. Everything except what you might wear, because that is totally pointless.

4) There is still time after arriving home to declare today is Tiger's naming day, make a chocolate cake that Tiger proudly asserts is a clock when everyone else says it is a stegosaurus, and then welcome Holly to tea.

Holly is a beautiful retired lady with perfect manners who does not put her elbows on the table or slouch. She is a constant improving presence for Shark, Squirrel and Tiger and I am pleased to report that in all her time with us over tea, the little grits never once shouted ohmygodbloodyhelldamnpissoff, picked their noses, or farted.

About the most satisfying day we can have. And probably a calm before another storm.

There's always a feeling of satisfaction knowing something is complete

We put aside our weeping and wailing for one day to visit the Northampton Fishmarket for a one-man performance of Robinson Crusoe.

I need to write that here because this blog is very useful for recording these educational projects in the life of Shark, Tiger and Squirrel.

And this performance marks a sort of a closure to our several-month project on Robinson Crusoe.

For several weeks this year I forced everyone to listen to mama reading the Puffin Classics edited version of this Defoe story, starting from the basis that it is a flippin good read for children and they should know about it, because I say so.

Foolishly I never got around to reading this work myself in childhood. I had to wait until I hit an undergraduate course at York when it wasn't fun at all. There, the last thing on Grit's Must Do list was hide in a hole and start working out how to carry blackberries home to a shelter made of twigs and mud. But aged 9, this book would've been a perfect source.

The little Grits have truly enjoyed listening to Robinson Crusoe, although we'll leave the grown up version including all the moral wrangling until later. It has been a perfect back story for all the den building activity and has greatly assisted in Grit's master plan: that cunning weeze where all the gritlets flee to separate parts of the garden and set about creating primitive societies using planks of wood and grass clippings.

But now the day is duly recorded. We have read Robinson Crusoe, talked about themes, characters, plots, narratives, what makes up a novel, found out about trade routes, old ship sailing, Alexander Selkirk, drawn pictures of goats and listed their uses, invented a map, found a variety of islands on the light-up globe, built some dens, waved to passing ships from a perch in a tree, and today finally sat in a fishmarket and watched an actor talk to a teddy bear called Friday on the basis that teddy bears lack colour, religion, dietary requirements and anything else which makes them controversial.

Really, we have enjoyed ourselves, but I do not know whether all this Crusoe inspired study counts as educational in the eyes of the local authority. Anyone there could of course say we have failed. If Badman has his way, they probably will, and could choose anything they like to show us up as an example. Like, we did not convert to Christianity in the course of our labours.

However, I feel secure that should the local authority knock at the door demanding to see evidence of education, we can easily show off our knowledge by recreating that discussion about whose leg we would stew first if we were all stranded on a desert island pissing each other off.

We were on a roll for mostly happiness and delight this summer

But now that the bicycle thief has wheeled off with our treasures in the night, there is pretty much a grey wet blanket of despair flopping over this house right now.

Part of me simply shrugs my shoulders about the theft of Tiger's bike, because hey, it's summer, kids are out and about, her bike was a beat up old wreck suitable for museum display, and I wouldn't mind a White Bicycle Plan round here, so I can hardly shake my fist at the local bicycle entrepreneur.

But then there are those welling tears and the heaving sobs from my little girl. Those little crystal droplets rolling down her pink cheeks do not signal her forgiveness and understanding, and if I could grab that bicycle thief by the scruff of the neck, show him what torture he's wrought and then give him a good sharp kick on his saddlesore behind, I would do that. I would call it revenge, and probably be fined, but that's how I feel on behalf of Tiger.

Fortunately for us all, the sun comes out and I take Tiger, Squirrel and Shark to the weekly Wednesday summer playdate in the woods. Here the hammocks, nets, swings and weaving stuff are all scattered about and the kids scamper off. Tiger would like me to take photographs of her on the swing. I say that this week I would but I have left my camera behind. I really hope I have done that, and I haven't left it carelessly thrown on the passenger seat of the car, where a casual thief with a chunk of rock might pass by on this sunny afternoon, and simply help himself.

Tears, tears, tears

Because Tiger shot off in the garden last night to collect her bike for cycling to the Co-op with daddy Dig, and found her bike, stolen.

Tiger's bike should be leaning against the wall under the shade of a sprawling fig tree. Along with the old purple-framed, spiky saddle, boneshaker of a bike me and Dig have wobbled about on all summer. Both were missing. The back gate was open.

I guess whoever took the bikes needed some late night transport. They would have been able to see the bikes through a gap in the gate caused by a missing wooden panel. Incidentally, that's the same wooden panel that Mr Pod upstairs has been routinely kicking in morningtimes, and I have been routinely hammering back on, nighttimes.

That's the neighbourhood for you.

Tiger is inconsolable. I have sticky-taped guilt-inducing messages on the back gate, we have trolled around the backstreets looking for the dumped remains of her precious bike, and we have visited the local police station to report it lost. Lost, rather than stolen, because I think there's more chance of it being found like that, and we don't need a crime reference number for the insurance. All our bikes come from freecycle or the local tip, and we just do them up with oil, inner tubes and washing up liquid, then mostly we can wobble down the road and back.

I've spent the evening on freecycle and Bumblebee and said we will do all we can, because tears alone don't bring things back.

But Tiger has gone to bed feeling the worst thing in the world is other people, and I raise my eyes to the sky and think we've just got off lightly in Smalltown.

No, we don't teach everything

Grit keeps her eyes open, like all keen home educators, for workshops, classes, lessons, practical experience and social activities at all times of the year, not just six weeks over the summer holidays.

We can sniff out a good deal within hours of it on a website or in a local newspaper or because telephone signals are tingling. I swear it's a sixth sense that all home educators develop and become total experts at exploiting.

Like I stood in an ordinary queue at the start of this ordinary summer holiday and I earwig a conversation behind me. And one woman, probably about thirty, is saying to the other about what can kids do in the holidays? and the other woman says, Yeah, I think there's a playground at the lake. I don't know where it is. I think there are ropes or something.

And I had to physically wrestle myself to stop my face spinning round and saying the playground is open all hours but the coffee shop which overlooks it opens only 11am to 4pm and the ropes are 50 metres turn left past the family pub, steel gateway, book at the hut, cost £10 per child, try for a multiple entry discount, and the lake also offers sailing, windsurfing, knee boarding and kayaking, and here's the course start dates, and the instructor I recommend, plus telephone number, and the off peak price structure that they may not publicise but don't forget to ask.

But I do not share this information. Not one bit.

Now I have nothing to do with the education industry as such, but I know where those local resources are and I have no doubt myself or one of our home educating families round here will find out within a click of your fingers where the best opportunities are, the best deals, group discounts, free testers and cheap deals.

Basically, we've done nothing for the last few years except take up these local services, and that involves a lot of intensive negotiation over desks and telephones with people in our communities. Try it. As a home educator you will soon be buttonholing that woman at the entrance desk and arguing why your group should all get in at a ten per cent discount because it is Wednesday and the least they can offer is a free annual pass for the kids.

And with this attitude - the sort of attitude that says these are our services to negotiate, encourage, use, demand - throughout these last years we have done some fantastic activities, straight in there with musicians, artists, performers, linguists, with people who really love doing what they do, who do that job whether you pay them or not because they are so committed to what they do and passionate about doing it. Possibly nothing on earth would stop some of the people I've met lead these services, and I feel so privileged to meet them through this world of home ed.

So today, when we sniff out a fantastic opportunity to work with artists who are - get this - prepared to take all three of my children away from me for five hours, then I absolutely know why I do not share the information that I have with any non home educators who may be standing behind me in the queue for the toilets.

Because, ladies, places today are limited. And the art workshop is FREE.

I know just what we need. Another den.

Four planks of wood and one side of a Mothercare cot, a lot of nails, a hammer, two plastic chairs from the tip and a bit of shouting and we have this.


Some discarded emulsion paint, lace curtain from scrapstore, and a small Squirrel with a book, and we have this.


Dig says it is so well constructed it should last until September.

Someone grounded them in reality

Grit: Look! Squirrel, Shark, Tiger! Isn't the Wye Valley beautiful! Let's live here forever!
Squirrel: Mummy? Can you see that house down there? It costs more money than you have.


Grit: I can see people kayaking on the river! I want to go kayaking!
Shark: Mummy, you do not know how to kayak.
Grit: Not knowing how to do something has never stopped me having a go!
Tiger: Yes, and it is embarrassing.



Grit: Shark! Can you see the wild peregrine falcons nesting round the Symonds Yat cliffs?
Shark: No. Did you get these binoculars from freecycle?


Grit: There's one! Look! I've found one!
Tiger: Mummy, give that model back to the RSPB man. He thinks you're stealing it.


Grit: Let's take a lovely walk together!
Tiger: Run! The watties are coming!

Grit: Here we are! Clearwell Caves. These are ancient. Let's imagine. People have mined red ochre paint in these caves for seven thousand years!
Shark: And now you can buy it at Hobbycraft.



Grit: Feel these rocks and look at the iron pigment on your fingers! Imagine if you were a stone age child digging this rock by hand! What pictures would you paint?
Squirrel: A telephone.

Grit: This tour is amazing! There are miles of passageways underground! Would you like to come caving?
Shark: No. Unless there are fish.
Squirrel: Are we allowed down here?
Tiger: Mummy! Stop taking photographs. It is completely dark and they won't come out.



Grit: That was a fantastic day out, wasn't it, girls? Now we're in the car to go back home, you can tell us all about your adventure week at PGL, Squirrel.

Squirrel?

Squirrel

Yes Squirrel, I miss you. And this week I know exactly why you came by your pet name. Squirrel.

The first time, I was shocked. I discovered exactly what you had stowed away in your secret bed each night. That first haul may have included a plank of wood and pair of scissors. But now, they are normal.

When I gulp down the weekly anti allergy tablet and swallow a medicinal brandy to gather the strength to face that skip, the place you call my bed, to shovel out a landfill of junk, I do so carefully, and I try to be respectful.

I know that it is not crap. It is treasure. Worth more than gold.

The chewed blue shoe belonging to Sindy, fourteen rubber bands, and the old tissue box cradling a furry sea otter, two crayons, a letter of complaint, and a plastic toaster, are all cherished items. They did not arrive here at this waste disposal unit without being loved and caressed by you en route, and placed here to be watched over with all the ferocity of a small squirrel guarding their Class A hazelnuts.

Some stuff I leave where I find them. I won't say anything, but I urge you to return them discreetly. Like Shark's bed knobs. She has been eyeing you suspiciously and complaining that you nick them since the day you started sharing this bedroom. So far she has yet to find hard evidence. Even Shark approaches your bedclothes with trepidation.

But there's more to your squirrelling behaviour than your bed stash.

You especially like small things. Tiny shapes woven with microscopic textures that you hide inside your little hands. Fragments of gravel, threads of fabric, infinitesimally torn fragments of paper and sparkles of beads and sequins are all treasured items that you find beautiful. You will squirrel them into your pockets, behind curtains and down between cracks in the floorboards. The last, you will cry about later.

Over the years I have learned to be careful about removal and disposal of your treasures, and not shout too loud about the bloody crap invading my once delightful home. Your box of small things might stay there for a week or two. The pile of soil in the bedroom, three days, because mama does not sweep the floors of this house on daily rotation. But even then your cute ways and tales of sparkling soil allowed you to get away with it.

Of course I think all this squirrelling instinct comes not from my genes, but because you are a sibling. From your birth point you became painfully aware that right next to you there is an enemy who looks exactly like you and who is always ready to snatch treasures off you. You have probably developed your small stuff tendency because of those early beginnings.

But my goodness, how that strange little quirk of toddler mine!mine!mine! behaviour has grown into what folks might think of as some sort of compulsive disorder rightly calling for the scrutiny of a team of trained clinicians with clipboards.

Because now you troll the house and garden seeking out small things to classify before squirrelling.

I know you like databases. Like the database you keep of all the cats in the area. And I know you have been ordering your stuff in degrees of shininess, size, and whether it bends. The way you have started labelling stuff has helped, because now I can see the broken object for what it is. Not a piece of plastic insect nose snapped off from Build a Beetle but a carefully catalogued sample of yellow. Give it two years and you'll be adding heat moulded, poss. polymer, length 1.2 mm, date of acquisition 12/3/09.

In fact so advanced are your sorting, categorising, recording and squirrelling skills, that you may make a fine museum attendant, librarian, or lawyer. We of course aspire to the latter, on account of how you can present all details in such excruciating, drawn out precision, that we often give in and feed you ice cream to shut you up before you have finished explaining why (paragraph 2.3 subsection 1.2.2, clause 3) your sister deserved locking in the bedroom by covert removal of doorknob for thirty minutes while you came down, ate Shreddies, and then walked upstairs to calmly reinsert the doorknob, and let her out again. And that, thanks to the precise and punctilious manner of your explanation, comes across to me as a totally justified and reasonable thing to do. You see? Lawyer.

With these fond memories, and your bed littered with broken objects, I turn to your desk, and I miss you there too. I would clean that up while you are away from us this week, but I dare not.

I can see you have been filling hazelnut shells with scrapings of wax, then sticking threads in the centre. Those, Tiger tells me, are candles for fairies. I could probably put those safely somewhere. But it is the sand and dust particles on your desk. They might be sand and dust, or they might be significant. I just do not know. You might be classifying eight different varieties of sand and dust by colour, silica shape, and dustiness, finding it all beautiful, and intriging and delightful.

Which is what I most love about you. Not the mountains of crap you refuse to discard but the way you interact with all your precious squirreled items with absolute joy in their concealment and disclosure.

Squirrel, I look forward to you being back home. This house strewn with junk will all become treasure again.

At least this has stopped the damn den building

The next obsession sweeping this house is here.

Consequently I am sweeping the floor of paper cuttlefish, squid, killer whales and fried eggs.

This is all thanks to the origami workshop I coerce Shark and Tiger to attend down the library at the last minute today as a distraction from the damn den dwelling.


I shall be glad when these holiday activities are over and we can get back to normal.

I will find peace in the woods. Take the noose off me first.

Hobbling, bent double, and limp armed with hammer fatigue. Also, driven mad with constant demands for den building.

Every item of junk from house now strewn over garden. Includes ten-year old sun umbrella found behind hedge, pressed into service as new den roof.

I may sue Interaction for mental pain and psychological abuse, unleashed on Monday.

But I am Grit. I remain determined not to die. And it is Wednesday, and Wednesday means fun in the woods. Rain is pissing down. Never mind.

Hunting down the woodland playworker we find him stringing up netting between trees.


Tiger attacks that while I lie on the cool woodland floor and groan.


Next, swinging on a rope. Her, not me.

I complete a course of woodland therapy by basket weaving a furry woollen fish and hanging it in the trees where I can watch it gently swim through the air.

Fule Grit speaks too soon

Because I have entered the dark pit of hell, otherwise known as the garage and hauled out from there an old bed. Then I have scattered bits of the old bed on the patch of land visible from the kitchen window. Until now I had been pleased to call this delightful shady border the wildlife garden in an attempt to romanticise over the fact that it is really a patch of soil round the side of the house undisturbed by any creature except rats for the past ten years. Now it resembles an overflow landfill site.

But anyway, the bed is there. In bits. Some parts are strapped together with duct tape and the whole resembles what we are calling a den.

Like I thought I might get away with not turning the entire house and grounds into a den building activity area following yesterday's session down at Interaction.

After I'd hauled the old bed about from garage to garden, grunting and sweating and covered in bee droppings and twigs, of course a fight breaks out immediately over whose den it is. Mine! I shout, hoping that by offering Shark and Tiger a common enemy I can unite the warring factions and they can both play in it and defend it from the mummies, otherwise known as the Watties (why I don't know, don't ask).

That tactic didn't work. Shark is now standing guard over the old bed in the rat garden with a snarl on her face looking like a particularly bad-tempered, snake-strangled Medusa.

I am pissed off that my total devotion to the den building enterprise, even at the cost of myself, our once delightful grounds, and the relinquishing of an old bed that I'm sure would have been alright somewhere should we have needed it - all of that was futile. Not for a moment did my labours create the joyful garden day I had fondly dreamed about, and which I might have called, with misty tears pricking my eyes as I speak to Dig on Skype, that yes, the children are happily playing in the summer sun.

So I took a box containing a hammer, screwdriver and lots of screws and I set about spitefully making a den only for Tiger out of some old wood and a lot more grunting and thrashing about. Here it is. A work in progress.


Soon it looks like this.


So now I have two areas of my once beautiful garden covered in old beds, bits of wood, the contents of my fabric box, and piles of junk. Along with two daughters who aren't speaking to each other, and a mother who looks like she has dragged a bed from a disused garage infested by bees and mice and creatures of the swamp and has been thrashing around in garden undergrowth for three hours before hitting her finger with a hammer trying to bang in a screw, then losing her temper and having a big squeal.

And somehow, I do not think I am going to get away with having only two den areas here when Squirrel returns.

There is only one word to cover this mayhem and mishap. Let's call it education.

And not in my back yard, so possibly perfect

Den building day. Thanks to the fantastic people over here.

Shark and Tiger amuse themselves for hours with old junk rescued from skips, landfill and scrapstore, which makes a change from the junk they sweep out of the house to chuck all over the garden for this particular summertime activity.




And like we haven't got enough junk at home, I visit a charity shop, buy a new outfit and fifteen more books.

And a good time was had by nearly all, in Gloucester

It starts here, and thanks to breakfast, Premier Inn totally wins. Tiger is gleeful. Last time we stayed in a Travelodge I force fed her cornflakes with a fork at 7.25am and she's never forgiven me. Shark is simply licking her lips at the sight of the Sunday morning spread which, coming down to £2.50 each - and I haven't had any hand in the preparation, cooking or presentation, and do not have to wash up - means that by 9.05am my first preference is to come and live here forever.

If staying in a Premier Inn with their delicious breakfast wasn't simply the best start to a budget day out in Gloucester, we then hoof it over here, to the cathedral


where I am delighted to find the tomb of Edward II


who gets my vote as the most entertaining and pointless king Britain has ever had, possibly until we arrive at Charles III.


From there it's over to Gloucester docks


where we take to the National Waterways Museum to continue an educational day and find out about the history of the canals in England.*


* Actually, read there, 'play with the toddler water table until we are forcibly removed from it yelling like an albatross because the woman from reception will come round with the keys to lock up. You can tell by the sour look of misery on her face she has been on reception all day putting up with this sort of customer when she should by rights be sat at home in front of half a roast Sunday cow'.

The Cotswolds are very pretty

I crash around single track lanes over the Cotswolds, driving leftrightleftright.

I wish I'd taken the motorways. After an hour of leftrightleftright, the idea of sitting on a wide stretch of motorway tarmac for four hours seems a better deal than zigzagging across hills smiling with bared teeth and ferociously declaring how PRETTY everything is.

Incanting how PRETTY everything is while pointing at little crooked fifteenth century houses laced around with walls made from honey coloured stone will, I hope, ward off any ugly moods from the back seat. Incantation, and the disc set of Tunnels.

Unwisely, I chose Tunnels for this journey on the basis that it had something to do with archaeology, which we like. It does. But it also has lots of scary mad people and exclamations of Bloody Hell! and after fifteen minutes of listening while driving leftrightleftright, I wish I'd noticed this lot in the five seconds choosing it down the library.

Shark, Squirrel and Tiger of course prefer grimness, death and insanity acted out underground to mama repeating to infinitude how PRETTY everything is.

When I am not incanting and regretting, I am panicking and intermittently steering the car onto Cotswold grass verges, jumping out, and photographing road signs.


By this means, I reckon, when Satnav runs out of power because I haven't charged her up properly, I will know where I was, when last seen.

Sooner or later we cross a sign for Bourton-on-the-Water and I think we will stop there for lunch and visit the Model Village.

At this point I heave a heavy sigh. It is the place I recall from my childhood. Every September we would stop here for run-and-eat on the drive from Nottingham to Devon.

My dad chose here because the Model Village backs onto the Old New Inn. He could sit in the Beer Garden while my mother, over the hedge, could let me out to ramble around a miniature Cotswold village. As if she hadn't seen enough of them already, and as if she hadn't been sitting in the passenger seat of the car for two hours being driven leftrightleftright, saying how PRETTY everything is.

Now, because I am older and wiser, I know she did that in order to deflect the growing argument between my brother and me. We were locked into the back seat listening to nothing, except the sound of each other breathing, which was as good as a declaration of war to brother and sister on a five hour car journey with, from my brother's point of view, only a Model Village to look forward to. And that was entirely for his sister's benefit and one more reason why she should be pushed over the Church of the Model Village five minutes after we'd arrived.

Anyway, Shark, Squirrel and Tiger are delighted by the Model Village. I have mixed feelings, but I'm not writing a novel here, just a blog post, and have fifteen minutes left on my daily allotted blog time.




I would just add one thing about this trip down memory lane, and that is you did not misread the month.

We visited the Model Village every September, just as term started. My parents asserted their right to remove me from school for 10 days just after the start of the term for the family holiday. As far as I'm aware it remains your legal right, although schools may send you death threats, push cow poo through your door, and threaten you with Social Services and child abuse if you try and exercise it.

From my point of view, I cannot thank my parents enough for this annual act of rebellion. Driven mostly because my dad disliked all kids and would not, in a million years, have been tempted to take a break from work simply to be surrounded by the pesky creatures. But his antipathy helped create in me a love for rocks and sea shores, but not particularly Model Villages, and opened up in my brain the idea that actually we have some control over our lives and are not just here to do what institutions tell us to do.

Anyway, the Grit family is not just aimless today of course, wandering in the Cotswolds and Bourton-in-the-Water Model Village just for the love of England. Oh no. We have a purpose. We are driving leftrightleftright to deposit Squirrel at her PGL adventure holiday somewhere Wales-way.

After another six years driving leftrightleftright we eventually find the PGL place buried in hillsides, where one side of the road looks like this:


and the other side of the road looks like this.


We meet up with Michelle here who is also giving her child away for the week on a buy-one-get-one-free deal.

With child deposited into the tender care of the PGL groupy, Michelle is now able to have fun like adults are supposed to, and her blog should be filled with diversion of ladies who lunch, evening drinks, shopping for handbags, dinner engagements, adult chatter, wild parties, sex on the stairs, orgies, and wasp killer. I shall look forward to it all.

Because my lot in life is now to drive leftrightleftright on the road back to Gloucester incanting how PRETTY everything is to dispel the ugly mood growing from the back seat after turning off Tunnels to spare my ears from another fifteen minutes of mad people clawing their way insanely underground between repeated exclamations of Bloody Hell.

Even home educators take their kids to the dentist

I could let their teeth go yellow, black, rot and drop out of their heads, but I decided that the better vengeance for all their irritating little ways, like street brawls in public places, was to subject Shark, Squirrel and Tiger to the dental chair once every six months.

Quite frankly, there have been times in the past when I have looked forward to the hour when I process Shark, Squirrel and Tiger in solemn contemplation along Rosamund Street to the impending doom that is the local dentist.

One interpretation for my quiet moment of joy about this could be that I am a total bitch who likes to inflict pain on her own children.

But it is better than that. Because by taking this lot to the dentist I seize the moral parental high ground. By this very act I justify my daily whining and complaining about teeth while someone else is actually doing the evils. I can sit there in that dental room looking smug about the endless lectures I have delivered everyday about the perils of NOT BRUSHING YOUR TEETH while Dr Fang is poking about in their faces with a sharp object on a stick.

And not once do I say I TOLD YOU SO which in my book just shows what a superb parent I am and possibly how generously moral am I.

Secretly, I remain grateful that neither Shark, Squirrel nor Tiger have thought so far ahead that they have put in a bid for counter revenge.

Humiliation of me would be easy, of course, if only they could plan it. They could recline deep in that chair of doom and, as they are sinking down to that moment of terrible face poking, shout out in terror at that lowering dentist their best and worst expression of all: ohmygodbloodyhelldamnpissoff!

Really, I am grateful

If you wander through this record of home education, you will doubtless read a whole lot of scorn, mockery, dramatic crap and cynical posturing.

I hope you can see too how much I love these ridiculous kids of mine, whom I am so fortunate to know, even at the moment they are committing armed assault with a puffin and a home-made spear.

Falling in love with your own kids is easy, isn't it? They smell of you and you never forget how they looked like grandma, the one who was mad and had no teeth, but hey, she's family, right?

But there is something in me that also is in love with what it is to be a child. That makes it difficult to hate any one else's kids, even the one who is flat on Tesco floor screaming out his guts because he cannot grab sixteen cans of baked beans adorned with the face of Thomas the Tank Engine.

Perhaps there is a large bit of me that has never grown up. To me the company of children is refreshing.

At that admission, I expect to be slammed in jail, because in the UK today the culture is so anti-child and anti-anyone-who-works-with-kids, it's like I just confessed to pedophilia. But I find children are engaging, honest, clear and inspiring about their learning about the world in a way that adults are not. That is possibly one reason why I became a teacher in the first place, and possibly why I failed at that career.

Now, by avoiding school and choosing home education, I am living the sort of life that is greatly satisfying to me, of that there is no doubt. Of course I worry that I am superimposing my preferences on my kids. I ask them, Would you like to try school? I even go so far as to suggest it might be fun. They have never yet leaped up and shouted Yes! Yes! Please! I guess they glimpse a reality of that life on a Tuesday morning when we are out and about and we see the school party lining up at the museum on their annual trip out the classroom. My kids aren't stupid.

At those moments, when I have a sudden perspective on how we learn together, what we do, and how we live as a family, I feel such gratitude for our lives, and the choices we've made. Even though these choices have sometimes led to me being excluded and cut off from other people, and pushed out of what is accepted as normal. Believe me, that feeling of being alone because our choice isn't 'normal' is hard to take. But choosing to learn alongside my kids, being with them, able to see them learn about the world, watch them take on new ideas, change the world for themselves, and have this experience of learning, is all so precious to me, and I value it so highly, I would experience it like a physical pain to have it taken away.

Really my gratitude for this life exists in part because of those brief years standing in a classroom. Two of those years changed my life in subtle ways and the gratitude I feel now comes partly from the awfulness of that teaching experience.

I started teaching about the turn into the 1990s. The first school I taught at was fantastic; warm, welcoming. The staff were inspirational, the kids engaged, free to express themselves and their ideas. For the most part they accepted each other, were friends, fell out, made up, grew up, were tolerant, generous, understanding. They were encouraged, enlivened and it was a creative experience. I have dear memories, and I remain not as an anti-school voice. For some children and their parents school is a rewarding experience.

After too short a period of teaching at this school I took up a place at a school just a short drive away. The first day, I knew I had made the most dreadful mistake. It was not the kids.

There is this intangible part of a school which is sometimes described as the 'ethos'. This is the untouchable ether: the air, the spirit of the place forming the relationships between people as they meet in offices, corridors, staff room, class room.

The ethos pervades everyone in a school; it shapes expectation, attitude, the way of education, of talk between each other, of self, of all children. And in this school there was something mean, withdrawn, withered, abandoned. But it wasn't the children. It was the situation they were in and which, as a teacher, I was suddenly horribly facilitating.

I stayed two years, through gritted teeth and determination. But those two years were possibly the most trying of my life. Every day brought a new challenge, not just the terrible behaviour, the brutality, the criminality: drugs, assault, bullying, physical attack, eventually a shooting, but worse.

I would not walk away. If I stayed, the year class I had as a form tutor I could see leave that school, and enter college, or work. To simply up and go because it didn't suit me seemed like a betrayal of those children who had to spend their final two years at that school. Yet staying seemed like a stupid thing to do.

The leadership from the head was the most appalling experience because there was no leadership. There was betrayal of the staff at a deep level and that abnegation of responsibility was proportionate to my feeling of deep responsibility to the kids in my form.

I wasn't alone. Many of the staff at that school worked hard to bring together their classes and inspire those kids while they were simultaneously being undermined and kicked in the face by the ineffectual head who covered his own back and shut his office door.

I walked so near the line of what was acceptable to that head and his thug of a deputy that I honestly think they did not know what to do with me. But there was no way I would give in. If you give particular people power over you, they will almost certainly walk all over you, kick you in the face while they're walking, then turn around and blame you for being that lump they had to walk over.

So I survived on that boundary line. I followed what I knew was right by the kids, to treat them like people. And when I strayed across that line, I duly received the brown paper envelope in my pigeonhole. I showed the kids in my form the contents, I outlined the scenario of disciplinary action because of my transgression. While they watched, I screwed up the letter and drop kicked it into the bin. We spent a morning talking about responsibilities. That particular transgression, by the way, was to offer the year 11 kids in my care the option to listen to the radio in their lunch break. Listening to a radio was against school policy.

The experience of those two years gave me the determination to start out home educating, if only because I never wanted my children to experience that type of sealed environment. And I determined I would never enable someone like that head to come into contact with my kids.

That head was in such a precious position. That position comes with a duty to provide an environment where children are inspired, where their inquiries about the world, and their responsibilities for themselves and their own needs and respect for the needs of others are never undermined, assaulted, withdrawn, but are always encouraged, supported and developed.

Sometimes I think I cannot be bothered to update this blog. Me and my kids are out living so many exciting times. But despite the fact I grumble and mock, I want to say that this blog exists as a record for our home education.

And underneath all the mockery is a deep sense of responsibility, and a real gratitude for our position and the choices we have been fortunate enough to make, and a deep appreciation for the life we have been able to live. And truly, a celebration of learning, and the humility and joy I feel of being alongside children who learn in the world.

I know what we do here is right because I have seen the struggles that good people do, to try and prevent the damage that happens on the other side.

And all I really wanted to say is that yesterday there was a fantastic, inspiring workshop at St Albans Museum, where my kids were fortunate enough to learn about the Spanish Armada from people who care.

Thank you, St Albans Museum, for supporting our home education.

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.

Sometimes Dig speaks a lot of sense

I need to sort this problem.

This weekend it's Squirrel's turn to throw herself about on a cliff side and I must transport her there, and bring her home again.

That's not the problem.

The problem is, I would like to stay overnight somewhere en route so that we experience the fantastic countryside that is England.

When Dig is here, and we move around the country depositing children, Dig needs a shower, clean sheets, a flushing toilet, lights that turn on at a light switch, and walls. By those facts, we overnight in a Travelodge. We do not stay in a tent.

But Dig is not here.

And we have a tent.

At this point, it is Michelle's fault.

She put the idea in my head because she has a tent. And she has fun in her tent. You need only to read her blog to realise she has fun in that tent. And it is the sort of fun that I would like. I want fun in a tent. Like Michelle.

But we have a tent.

And Dig is not here.

Solution. Take the tent and the children and go and put up that tent in a field and overnight there, and then we are free to do what we want and go where we please and it will be like Mr Polly all over again except this time the drama will be played out with a happy Grit and her charming children skipping in the countryside.

Problem. I do not know how to put up the ruddy tent. It is like no tent I have seen in my life. I cannot find the instructions. I would carry it up to the field and have a go there but it is throwing it down with rain.

Solution. Try and work out how to put up the tent from first principles IN THE BEDROOM.*

* Do NOT try this at home. Putting up a tent in a bedroom is a totally stupid idea. It does not work. It has no chance of working. The tent will lie in a crumpled up heap all over the floor while you cry.

Update: I have not booked a Travelodge. No. I am made of stronger stuff than to give in.

I have booked a room at a Premier Inn instead.

But the outcome is encouraging

Some days everything is much too much; mornings I do not want to emerge from bed or, possibly, wake up. And then I beat myself up because that sounds so pathetic.

Dig is not here. Missing a husband should be normal. We are all familiar with daddy absent overseas for weeks at a time. It means I cannot blame his absence on why today I wake up and crash into a brick wall.

I have three kids to look after, but I can't blame that circumstance either. You may not believe it, but looking after triplets is nothing much these days. That may be partly down to the fact that we get on pretty well and we are fairly used to living together. Shark has gained so much in wisdom, independence and confidence this last year I reckon she could organise this whole family and sail the entire ship if I just taught her my PIN number and left her totally to make the decisions.

I could blame the crash on how the whole damn house seems to break down while Dig is gone, what with the boiler playing up, the tap threatening to explode, the kitchen mouse running riot. But those things are normal too, whether he is here or not.

Or I could say that when I wake up I suddenly know, for certain, it is one of those days we are all going to die, and horribly, and disgracefully, and slowly. Just like the rest of the family. I will die first. Then I will leave my children motherless, vulnerable, abandoned. It will be inconvenient. Everyone will hate me. I won't have finished cooking dinner or paying the milkman and people will be upset about that. You need to know, kids, that my body gave up to its process of internal decay and I did not give my permission for that to happen.

Then again, I could put together a neat package of off-the-shelf neurosis to explain this morning's bleak mood: guilt, anxiety, compulsion, a dash of immature behaviour by bursting into tears because it's daylight. Perhaps I could give a psychologist a job by saying I blame backward going moments in the growing up years. Moments that lifted me out the world, unhooked me from myself and opened the way for an alien today to take over my brain.

Or perhaps it is just a self-indulgent post-holiday blues moment, the sort we all experience on a Monday morning. Because it is Monday. In which case, send me hate mail. Today I'll add it to the file of the stuff I'll send myself.

I could tell myself there are people who do so much more than me, maintain lives under more stress, support themselves under many more problems. But sometimes that knowledge doesn't make me feel better. In fact that makes me feel worse, because now for sure I know how weedy and inadequate a person I truly am.

I know what to do. I need to plan rising out of bed. I need to plan the day. Tomorrow. And then the week. Otherwise, without a plan, I come apart fast.

And then I will blame this.


Here's the view on one side of the front gate.


And on the other:


Both the orange plastic fence and the signage have appeared this morning on either side of the gate. On the left side of the house the pavement is blocked off. And on the right side of the house the pavement is blocked off as well. Looks like imprisonment to me.

It might explain why, just after 8am I woke up not only with that feeling of dread and doom, but with the air curdling bright blue and purple thanks to the stream of acidic blasphemies loudspeakered through the bedroom window.

It's a bloke, of course. I don't think any woman would utter these words unless she was trapped in a snake pit screaming mad. Not only is it a bloke, in a vest, he has a bright yellow jacket on. And he's pulling up the road outside. And why the blue air? He cannot get his big digger to work.

So that's what I blame. Imprisoned by some bloke yelling obscenities at a big digger.

Of course I look on the bright side, because that is what a miserable Grit must do. If she does not, she will sink under the weight of the day.

Thanks to the bloke outside I can now claim someone else taught my daughters to use words so bad, one day when they say them the world will stop turning, the paint peel from the walls and the air turn into sulphur. And the bloke they say it to will turn his face to the wall in shame.

Coming home from holiday...

I have a date with a washing machine.

Shh. Don't say I have a roving eye and a cheating heart.

Because upstairs, I have a date with washing machine number two.


(Don't ask how we ended up with two washing machines. Be grateful we don't have three.)

Tales of hats and misdemeanors

Pick up Tiger from PGL holiday.

While we have been cavorting on clifftops, in castles, and at the beach front, Tiger has spent the week on horseback in the mornings and dangling from a zip wire in the afternoon.

PGL comes off well on the entertainment score with a 9/10. She's more shifty on the stables experience. She's not exactly a beginner on a horse, but she's not entering the show jumping competition anytime in the next fifteen years either. She's probably an inbetween kid, and probably needs an intermediate group.

But the stables didn't have an intermediate group. They had beginner and advanced. They taught her how to get on a horse, make it go, stop it, and get off. She was not impressed.

Neither was I. They lost her hat last Monday. So part of this Saturday morning was spent driving back to planet horse and sending the staff off to look for the missing hat because we're not going home without it.

The hat was found on the desk of the woman in reception: the very desk where I'd stood like I wasn't going anywhere unless carried out by security, and where I'd explained to her exactly what the lining looked like and the fact that it had Tiger's name and my phone number blasted all over the inside in black permanent marker. I cannot say deskwoman looked like she was the sort to be organised about things. At no point did she raise one finger in the air and say Oh Yes! I've had this hat here on my desk and been trying to contact you! Not a bit of it. More, flabbergasted expression and You mean a hat? Here? At the riding stables? Whatever can we do?

Anyway, apart from the trauma over the damned hat I also listen to Tiger tell her story about Tinkertop, one of the other kids in her group and a proper little madam.

Apparently, Tinkertop got everyone in trouble. Worse, she made everyone miss the activity because she wouldn't fess up about her misdeeds. Tiger has Tinkertop's name down now in a little black grudge book and will be stalking her over England for something like the next fifty years.

I tried to tell Tiger that the world is made up of loads of different types who do not, like some of your home ed chums, sit quiet and nice in workshops while the leader explains to your eager faces everything you have to do, at which point you go off and do it. Some kids misbehave, and some misbehave real bad. Even when their parents send them to posh schools and pay through the nose to get them on a back of a horse in August. What's more, I tell Tiger, this is one reason why we send you and your sisters to the PGL holidays in the first place, so you can meet and deal with a range of bizarre behaviours beyond the reach of any that your normal assortment of home ed kids can dream up.

And Tiger, now that we have picked you up, driven another hour backwards and forwards to the stables and I have listened to the saga of Tinkertop and her misdemeanors for the fifteenth time, now I need to give you one HELLOFABIGCUDDLE because I have missed your cute face and complaining ways something dreadful.