Evolution at the Horniman

To the beautiful buildings of the Horniman Free Museum in Sahf Lahndan.

Fortunately, the practioners of Arts and Crafts design were prescient enough to engrave the word Free in stone in the original 1901 edifice. Hopefully that will cause a bit of a nuisance if English museums ever try charging entrance fees again.

Also, I should warn potential visitors, the gardens are not up to much in mid-winter. Maybe try spring.

The anthropology exhibits are wide ranging and well-presented, however.

I couldn't help feeling that the Horniman has lost a bit of an edge since it was voted Museum of the Year in 2004. Maybe it could take a leaf out the book of the lovely Ipswich Museum!

But we're at the Horniman for a specific reason. To join a happy band of home edders in a Key Stage 3 workshop, Evolution.

I checked it out on the website, like a dutiful home-educating mama. We were promised Darwin, Lamarck, and Mendel.

Because I am also a girly-swot home-educating mama determined to drill some academic approaches into the junior brains of the mini grits, I then delivered a packed lecture on the history of evolutionary thought while travelling two hours on London Midland, into the underground, and on the overground train to Forest Hill.

I hope, fellow travellers, if you listened in on that, you found much instruction.

Then we had the workshop.

Horniman, I think you need to match your workshop to your promise. The leader had two points to make (apart from publicity puff for the museum and the rules of workshops). The first was how the theory of evolution didn't need all the evidence, so there.

I thought maybe I had been picking a fight again. Had I become disoriented and begun defending a corner for creationism? It didn't seem likely, since I am not a fan of creationism, not even as a devil's advocate. So I assume it was just a dialogue the leader felt it was necessary to have with an invisible interlocutor.

That is okay by me. I keep a blog.

Her second point was about adaptation. I have to make that point for her, because she didn't. It got lost somewhere between the snake vertebrae and the shark mouth. Disappointingly, adaptation was not mentioned. Darwin, not much. Mendel never got a look in. And Lamark? Who's he?

Horniman education department, can I help you start here?

I will leave the last word on the workshop to Squirrel, since she sums it up accurately: 'If that's Key Stage 3, I could do that when I was seven. It was all just Do you want to stroke a dead badger?'

Otherwise, I am hugely grateful that home educators continue to use up the resources, times and staff of museums, and it is not all lost. The aquarium guard, for example, provided us with a proper learning in museum culture, guarding duties, boyhood reminiscences, and an accent Shark couldn't understand, so at least she got an education from that, as well as a lot of fish.

Called to prayer in The Merry Wives of Windsor

Take the kids to Stratford-upon-Avon for the RSC understudy performance of The Merry Wives of Windsor.

I loved it. It is an excellent production, with glorious sets and sharp acting, the Shakespearean wit stitched into a setting of present day suburbia with a shade of Alan Ayckbourn; from which place we can know that these wonderfully enduring themes - secrets and lies, marital compromises, infidelities, tricky moral arguments, jealousies and neighbourhood conspiracies - they never end, they merely continue rolling on from one generation into the next.

Go and see it. It is a brilliant way to fill your belly for the start of 2013, with laughter, at the weaknesses, follies, triumphs and humanities of us all.

There was only one annoyance to spoil it. About 2pm, what sounded to my ears like a tinny electronic Call to Prayer. At first I assumed it was a ring tone from someone who couldn't be bothered, was too dense to find an off-button, or (kindly), they just forgot about the phone in their pocket. The audience sighed and the distraction caused Martin Hyder, excellently playing Frank Ford, to slip a line before deftly picking up the drama.

But then it happened again, about 4pm. This time Falstaff sighed and laid his arms heavily on the table.

Later, because I am a nosy girl and have listened to the Call to Prayer early in the morning from hotels around the world, I checked the times. They fitted.

I'd like to imagine I'm wrong. Stupid Grit. It was just a ring tone! And the holder couldn't turn it off because the phone button was jammed!

But if I'm not wrong, and the electronic Call to Prayer issued across the theatre was a new manifestation of ill-mannered selfish ignorance, the imposition of someone's belief system on me, mine, in a context I value, then no, I'm not going to find it in myself to be tolerant.

I don't want my beloved Shakespearean performances to expect the electronic call, where we all must wait while the devotee of this particular practice leaves the audience to respond as required. What I want is for the RSC and all theatres - when faced with anyone who leaves for a Call to Prayer and then expects to be let back in - is don't. Do not allow re-entry.

Instead of lobbying for change in the British workplace - in this case, the stage upon which the actors at the RSC work to a superbly high professional level - I would like to see the theatre workplace space protected, and the attention of the lobby for change focusing instead on any institutions who require such anti-social practice.

Taxing the spirit of forgiveness at Christmas

The local home ed group meet for a Christmas party in the woods.

What on earth possessed me, at that meeting point, to volunteer to wait at the car park, in order to direct late-comers?

What? Anyone who reads this diary knows that you can stick me in a wood and within ten seconds I am hopelessly lost. I do not know what happens to me, apart from I discover I have no sense of direction and never had any. Suggesting that I might actually be able to lead someone else to a meet-point in a wood is asking for trouble.

It was, it did, and I got it.

But wait! In my defence, listen to these instructions. At the time I heard them, they seemed perfectly reasonable. BUT YOU TRY FOLLOWING THEM.

Grit to leader (happily, obviously demented): Shark, Squirrel and Tiger will come along with you! I will wait here and bring the late arrivals! (Clearly defective in the brain.)

Leader to Grit: Great! Go along the path, through the gate, up the hill, and there's the tree.

Grit to leader: Fine! See you later! (Someone should knock some sense into her.)

TWO HOURS PASS

Grit (to party blindly following her in circles through a wood, except for the wing who saw what was coming and legged it back to the safety of the cafe): I think the tree we're meeting at is in that direction! Wait! What time is it? Oh! Is the party over? Hey, everyone, the party's over! (Long pause.) Does anyone remember the way back to the car park? (Lucky to be alive, quite frankly.)

Education, everywhere

Look! I have taken the little grits to Church!

We pass through the lit up entrance door and are not struck down for our godless ways by the Victorian archangels carved into the porch, so there is enough welcome and mercy here for us foolish sinners after all.

But like most of the rest of you however, I'm not coming here for worship, or for a service.

The thing about churches is, they make great community halls where your local independent cinema group can dust off the 1951 Alastair Sim version of Scrooge, crank up the old projector, and screen this fine black and white film alongside servings of mulled wine and platters of Co-op mince pies.

Personally, I think cinema is a fine use for a church, and is at least one means of embedding the little grits into our local history, culture and community without actually doing the God bit.

Oh yes, and I'm also ticking the boxes for literature and film studies.

Not quite the effect intended

Peeple are coming round! For my Evening's Entertainment in the spirit of our Great Aunt Laura! It is so exciting. I will candle-light the house. Or at least the bits of it we own and which haven't fallen in.

I am so determined to offer up my theatrical Victoriana, that I even clean off the flotsam that has washed up on the fireplace mantle. Books, final demands, rubber rats, tinfoil, more Squirrel stones, that type of wreckage. On my delightfully naked surface I then collect together an assortment of candlesticks turned out from every cupboard in the house.

I proudly light the candles, and think the effect is so very chi-chi I might sell photographs of my Period Party Decor to Tatler.

Dig agrees. But he adds the mantelpiece now so looks like an altar, it has brought about in him a strange anti-social urge to sacrifice the postman.

Bathroom wonderings

I am having a critical moment regarding the house.

Tomorrow, Peeple are coming round. Worse, I invited them.

For this sorry state of affairs, I blame the children. I suspect they have become intoxicated by a character in a book, like an eccentric Great Aunt Laura. She will be an ancient of a woman, smelling of man's cologne and dressing in Edwardian black lace. It wouldn't surprise me if she conjured up all manner of excitement at Christmas, like decking halls with holly, lighting wax candles, smoking cigars, and dispensing cheese. Naturally my impressionable offspring expect the same thing round here.

Well, we will all feel sadly disappointed tomorrow.

While Great Aunt Laura will live in an inviting mansion with seductive turrets, winding staircases, and faded red velvet curtains that hide locked oak doors, I live in a house that is a practical demonstration of the laws of chaos theory and entropy.

And, unlike Great Aunt Laura, I have to consider practicalities. When Peeple visit me, I have to think, What if they need to use a toilet?

I bet that moment doesn't happen in Laurel Towers. When the children disappear into the turreted room and the door slams shut, I bet everyone has a great lark of an adventure, creeping round passages and discovering concealed treasure. I bet at no point does anyone say, I'm busting. Where's your toilet?

Of course it will happen here. I could direct them downstairs, to the cellar bathroom. The tiles fell off in 2000-and-something and the shower stopped working and another problem, but I can't remember what. Suffice to say, the solution was costly and expensive, so let's find another bathroom to use.

Unfortunately, the original bathroom (it's complicated) is now a cupboard. I tip the hamster cleaning fluids in the bath, and I have wedged pieces of wood over the top to serve as shelves, in the spirit of There, I Fixed It. On my improvised bathroom shelf system I stack Shark's fish buckets, all home-made calligraphy ink from boiled onions, and the river stones that Squirrel collects to grind up slate. The vacuum cleaner sits on the toilet.

Of course if people were brave, they could attempt the toilet at the back of the house. They would have to squeeze safely by the pipe cleaner construction in the schoolroom which resembles a scale model of a nuclear power station, then they must pass through my craftroom the reading room, where they may be assaulted by hanging wet leather skins. Maybe it does look a bit like the cutting room of a psychotic serial killer inspired by Buffalo Bill, but someone's got to suffer for my art, apart from me. May as well be the person who wants to use the Fishy Toilet. Which, if you make it, you will find out why it acquired that name.

If none of these celebrations of bathroom artistry appeal, I could always direct Peeple upstairs. Not to the middle of the house, which we do not own, but the attic, which we do. In the attic is another bathroom which is okay but the flush broke, so until it's sorted, fill a bucket from the bath.

I suppose if it all fails, we could knock at the neighbours, and ask to use their toilet. There might be a slight problem with that plan, in that one of the Peeple coming round is in the middle of a taking them to court, so we might not get the positive response we hope for. In which case, I will feel justified in telling everyone to piss in their privet.

Now, having written all the sordid details of our bathroom failures, I cannot help but think that inviting Peeple round is not a disaster in the making, but a jolly good idea.

Once they are all here and bursting for a wee I could detain them until I have extracted a fiver from each of them to go towards the cost of bathroom repairs, and in this way turn my Christmas Entertaining Event into a type of Bathroom Charity Appeal.

I bet Great Aunt Laura would approve of that plan. I will take a leaf from her book, and also dispense cheese.

See? We don't even miss out on the school party

It's Christmas! I understand this means the school terms are now drawing to a close.

With the approach of Christmas, your secondary schooled child will naturally assume this run-up confers complete and total right to do sod all, watch videos, play games, turn up late for everything, generally doss about, cover all their folders in glitter and, for a too-brief time, experience the life of a home ed child. All because It's Christmas!

Normally, the end of the winter term and the approach of Christmas holidays make no difference to your average home ed kid. We do each of the above, and more, all year round and only have ourselves to blame. Except, however, when we hire a local ex-school teacher to lead our scholarly Latin groups. She imposes on us a sort of school-based pattern of lessons and terms which end with her becoming a bit giggly and saying This is the last lesson because It's Christmas!

Thus a group of home ed kids studying Latin are commanded to sit in a circle and snatch each other's hats shouting petasus! The game is followed by hunting words, responding to phrases, eating biscuits and learning Latin while pretending not to.

But because this event is led by a retired teacher from the local school, that is enough fun for now. The homework goes IN THE BOX on the way out.

Thank you very much and lessons start again in January.

A frosty start

Dig has returned home in time for winter! And England is obliging! Hasn't the frost shown us all the exquisite detail of life? For every tender stem, slender twig, and crooked coil of bracken passing this freezing winter night out of doors, nature provides a sparkling coverlet, a perfectly formed crystal coat, better than any gem wrought by human hand!

What poetry! What perfection! Enough to make me leap out of bed, cry yes! yes! YES! and click away with my trusty camera, to try and know I'll fail to catch the wonder of winter's coat! But the very attempt to know the precision of nature merely adds to my marvel of it all.

Dig, inspired by this poetry and the novelty of frost, because you don't get that in Hong Kong harbour, picks up his travel-worn camera and delightedly steps into the street to photograph a tree; it hangs from the garden over the hedge and drips into the road. 

Within a minute Dig is assaulted by a passer-by who harangues him for attempting to photograph their movements, then threatens to sort him if he doesn't delete the photograph now this instant. 

A mere 24 hours in England! In Dig's first day he is assaulted by London Midland, children, a disfigured cherry tree, and me, demanding something is done about the fallen down office ceiling. The second, by a random stranger in the street! 

And winter has only just begun! England hasn't yet offered him drizzle, grey cloud, constant rain, a flooded cellar, and his Christmas present.

Oh what seasonal delight yet lies ahead.

It's all an act of faith

Am-dram, at the local theatre. An Evening with Charles Dickens.

Interview with the writer, readings, dramatisations, fond resurrections of those moments we know from the books; you get the idea.

Unmissable!

No, I don't expect the theatre critic of the Observer or The New York Times to tell you that. But I am working hard to support local am drams in the face of the steamroller that is the Lloyd Webber franchise. So what if occasionally I have to clench my buttocks, curl my toes, and bite my knuckles? It is no more than I do on any ordinary home educating day spent in the company of my own children.

Anyway, I have to support am dram now for another reason. Last month Tiger wondered if she might not become an illustrator after all; she might like to design theatre costumes and sets for a living instead.
 
I do what any home educating parent does who believes practical experience trumps 20 starred A-grade passes at GCSE, and that is, shove her in with the practitioners of her wondering career, let her think about the practicalities of the choice, and find out what skills she needs to win her way in or create the job for herself. Do it, don't sit and swallow facts about it while sat behind a desk.

So far, that philosophy and practical approach has worked fine. I have submerged Shark in the local lake with a dive team and sent Squirrel down a quarry with a bunch of geologists. Theatre visits should be straightforward, considering they continue a family way of life.

Of course it will all fail when Tiger reaches the age of 17 with one GCSE pass in Art taken part-time at the local college and declares what she really, really wanted all along was 10 starred A-grades in Science.

It's a time for children, so I'm told

Tigger, the irrepressible bouncing chum of Shark, Squirrel and Tiger, is off her face with joy.

Mostly thanks to having the world's best parents. They know exactly how to set her Christmas Joy Switch to a permanent state, ON. Simple. Turn your entire house into Santa's Grotto.

Result. Tigger is bouncing off the walls because did you KNOW? It is CHRISTMAS! Come and see our LIT UP REINDEER and SANTA and FAIRY LIGHTS and it is all WONDERFUL and mama makes a GROTTO and it is BRILLIANT and there are STARS and that is usually the point where I pass out, and someone has to slap me round to bring me to consciousness.

But Tigger makes me realise how awfully wrong I have got this Christmas lark. Here I am, with my strugglings to regain a patch of front room decorum, I have totally failed to lie about fat men with presents entering your bedroom late at night. Then there is all my Soviet-style military marchings backwards and forwards to the 10p bauble sale at the Community Re-use Shop, where I come over all control-freakery with the front door wreath.

No darling DON'T CHOOSE THAT ONE. It is so vulgar! Choose these discreet silver baubles instead! They are much prettier, ARE THEY NOT. Right, shut up crying. We're having them, because every time I enter the house, I have to look at your choice and quite frankly a dangling thing that looks like a tinselled stool on a stick will make my face melt as well as alert social services to what we get up to behind closed doors.

What I should have done, I now realise, was proudly and defiantly tip the contents of the local skip onto the front door step, chuck six foot of fairy lights over the lot, garnish it with a blow-up Santa, and declare it a grotto. Then I would have raised three children similarly off their heads with joy at the spirit that is Christmas.

But I fear, with my curmudgeonly ways, that I have done the stiff and judging British thing with my offspring. I have introduced them to social anxiety, made them aware that they will inevitably get on the wrong side of the scales of social judgements, and I have brought them to that point where they must apologise it is Christmas and they are not even Christians. That is what I do, and I can say it is not exactly healthy.

Well I am going to change my ways. Tigger, with all her uncomplicated joy and delightful bounce, has taught me wisdoms about the needs of children. It is not enough to shove the plastic Christmas trees at my offspring, then tell them to decorate them up to the eyeballs with crap in their bedrooms where I can't see them, I must proudly declare my altered child-led vision of Christmas in public.

I am going to tell Shark, Squirrel and Tiger to decorate the cherry tree that stands in the front garden and which is visible to the WHOLE WORLD.

This, I feel, will be a sign that I am finally led, totally, generously, and fulsomely, by children at this special time of year.

Thank you, Tigger.

Edited to add: When Dig enters the house from his long, long journey home from Hong Kong for the Christmas holidays, his first words are not Hello my lovely family! But Call the Police. Someone has tipped rubbish all over the front garden. Honestly, the vandalism that goes on in England is one reason why I stay in Hong Kong.

Pineapple and Ginger Jam? Avoid.

I have a to-do list as long as my arm, growing more fingers by the second, but I dump the whole lot this morning.

I have to. If I do not, I must listen to BUT YOU PROOOOMMMIIIISSSEDD howled about my ears from one of the three banshees I keep chained to the radiators.

Pineapple and ginger jam.

I promised it, obviously. I assumed I would be safe, not delivering on this promise for a few years yet, because I refuse to buy full-price pineapples, and everyone knows that pocket meanness always overrides stupid promises made to children.

But then. I walk into the local Tesco and, between dodging the truancy patrol and trying to pretend my emergency shop in the biscuit department is really a fully-scaled up maths/business/marketing lesson, Tiger eye-spies three pineapples, unceremoniously stuffed, bottom up, in the reduced price veg bin. Horror of horrors - three chunks of reduced-price ginger root sit right next to them.

Fate came into my world. I dumped the emails about booking the theatre, planning the chemistry, organising the trip to the British Museum and generally sorting 2013, and I rolled up my sleeves to get stuck in creating the promised land of Pineapple and Ginger Jam.

In hindsight, I should have looked at them in the reduced price bins and left them there. I could have bluffed my way out with Forty pence for a pineapple? You must be joking. Come back when they're a penny, then I might consider it.

The problem is, with Pineapple and Ginger jam, after two teaspoons you're gagging for a shot of emergency insulin. It is so sweet it peels your throat off. And it never set properly like jam should. It stayed as a liquid, running out the pan as a gloop of disgusting yellow gunk, packed with great wodges of pineapple and ginger knobs as thick as your thumb-end.They fell all over the working surface while I was trying to coerce them into the Kilner jar. I shouldn't have bothered with that, either. The escaped banshees were licking up the semi-hewn pineapple wheels faster than I could find the camera to photograph the end result.

So now I have a sugar bath all over the kitchen and another addition on my to-do list: Make an appointment with the dentist to have new false teeth fitted, because for certain those old ones were just digested by a sea swell of syrup with sugared pineapple wheel.

Stranger, don't 'ee come into town on thissum night

The Smalltown procession.

Shark, Squirrel and Tiger have made lanterns to walk the walk. I paid for them to attend the workshop this year, so off-loading me from the actual lantern-making job. It's better for everyone concerned. With me they get last-minute frenzied shouting and some thrashing about with a hair dryer and Copydex while sprawled over the kitchen table and positioned under a gigantic fish. By the time the procession starts, someone's usually in tears. I didn't think I could withstand the dramatic tension of it all this year, so it was worth the fiver for the workshop fee.

Anyway, here are the photos of the actual event. It all looks normal to me, processing round the streets following a giant cat in a top hat and a robot with a slightly disconcerting grin. The town's inhabitants take to this ritual wicker-and-tissue-paper-fest with great enthusiasm, making double decker buses, space rockets, wolves, something that looks like a medical experiment and, from the House of Grit, a type of shark or whale or whatever. I forget. Not having to care about the precision placement of willow on a dorsel fin was just another reason why the preparation was totally worth a fiver.

There are limits, apparently

Inevitably, to the new stables. Recommended to us by a fellow home educator; one who owns a similar horse-stolen daughter to Tiger.

Get them together, and this pair of horse-turned juveniles are obviously demented. Within seconds they are hopelessly absorbed in conspiratorial whisperings of polo mints and hoof picks.

The young woman/horse slave standing at the wooden board in the cold shed who ticks Tiger's name delightedly and withdraws money from my purse for more horse nuts promises they can meet Tiger's wishes for hacking and horsing; they'd be perfect, no problem! Just ask, whatever it is!

Okay then, I want you to air-lift a horse outside of Tiger's bedroom window, stick jingle bells on it, and wave it about come Christmas Morning. Then give her the horse to cuddle, ride, stroke, nuzzle its mane and plait its tail. By the way, you pay all fees, bills, invoices and expenditures for vets, shoes (day wear and evening), little rooms with straw, big rooms with carpets, glitter for arses, then add saddles, reins, hats, wings and ballroom gowns. Forever. And ever.

See? I doubted you would make that particular Tiger wish come true.

Won over once again

Ipswich! You have won me over! Your winsome market day, your lovely fruit & veg stalls, your v. trad. horse chestnut seller and your delightful pizza woman!

And Ipswich Museum! Not on Museum Street! Isn't it fantastic? Okay, don't go by the local council's website. They obviously don't do it justice. But I can say, Go along! It is superb.

Their moth-eaten stoat, Great Auk egg, and fake woolly mammoth, renowned all over East Anglia (well, across Ipswich town centre) are, since 1881, housed together in one of these beautiful old Victorian constructions, made to patterns across this land, and designed as public service buildings, exhibition spaces, lit & phils, museum houses, lecture halls, and a place where you can properly hang flags of the Empire. 

Here in Ipswich Museum you can experience it all, including a walk-round upper gallery with metal railings to stop you falling over onto the mammoth, plus lines of glass and wood exhibition cases, old fireplaces, domed ceilings, real doors and skirting boards, a big central hall, an indifferent attendant shuffling towards us, having been disturbed on his pursuit of spinning a pencil end round his finger, it has everything.

Don't take these buildings for granted. Look after them. That is one of my dying wishes - along with please can my children not hate each other, and please sort out public transport - as I'd like to die imagining these stuffed Auk mausoleums will be used in this same archaic way for a thousand years or more. These exhibition palaces are their own living reenactments of dusty history, created by the concerned professional classes for the moral improvement and scholarly instruction of the working ignorants. Well, that's us today. Changed, from knuckle-dragging boneheads to improved citizens! Thank you Ipswich!

 Ipswich? Can't find anything wrong with it. I even fell in love with the dummy. 

(Maybe something is wrong with my hormones.)

Not a lot of options

Travel to the wondrous Suffolk, where the wide fields washed in white may seduce me, but the prompt cold note securely pinned to the chest of drawers certainly doesn't.

Like the tolling of the heavy bell the thickly penned letters set out my clearing duties and remind me why venturing to this part of the country now brings its own set of hazards, disturbances, and miseries.

Put simply, the knot in the Suffolk family dislikes me, my home educating choice, my uncivilised children, my forthright being and my odd way of living. There is nothing I can do to redeem the relationship. My uncontrolled hair, my inappropriate choice of everything, and the way I wear that bling belt suitable for a 14-year old, these all disturb more than can be said. Essentially, I am not in order, full stop. I should behave better.

Strangely, I completely agree with all her observations about the messy hair, messy life, and foolish bling. After then, we part. These half-complete frayed bits of me, these spontaneous wanderings and my noisy announcements might upset her, but I have to make them delight me. I must enjoy my uncontrollable hair! Fuck it, I like my dramatic reenactments! Yes, I thrill to my bling! In truth, I would like nothing better than to find the opportunities for dressing and behaving inappropriately in my way more often. Joy in life would come from these wayward motes.

We will never see eye-to-eye. She has already departed the house ahead of my arrival, ensuring she never has to clap eyes on me nor see my foul brood ever again. On the kitchen calender, a black border confirms the dates of my arrival and departure, like a heavy box over the days I am here.

Maybe I should admire the way she puts her principles into action. By packing her bag in preparation at our visit, she's not putting up and shutting up, like I thought we all had to do from time to time with extended family members. 

But the chill of it means she turns my family visit into a problem and makes me feel awkward in knowing what household disruption I prompt; the circumstance she creates works against me seeing people I love, prevents me staying over more than a night, stops me enjoying my fields, and puts a halt on me gratifying my flung-off desires to trek about a wintered Anglia. All of it makes me feel the full frontal gloom of not being liked. What she doesn't get, not at all, is that my inappropriate life and non-normal choice doesn't necessarily result in a foolhardy irresponsibility.

What do you other home-educating rejected types do, when you are faced with such undisguised  disapproval of your choices and your lives? Can you ever reach their heads or hearts?

I don't know. I can't make it any better.

Hmph. May as well make it worse.

Here's her stuffed pussy, Grimalkin. Its fur is peeling off, I'm sure from over-stroking.

All our dreams come true

Looks like school, not like school

I agree! A magic momentum gathers when you group a load of kids in a room and say Hey, let's draw maps of Indonesia!

Of course it works: disparate kids learning together can have a positive impact on each other. When the session ends, we parents proudly clutch to our tear-stained bosoms a wad of maps of Indonesia. Now we can truly boast our home ed kids can find Sumatra on a globe!

Without that enthusiastic crowd, faced only with whipping my own kids into cartographic-related frenzy, I would fail in my Indonesian goal. I suspect many of the other mamas would, too. Without their essential kid peer group, Shark, Tiger and Squirrel would each find something more urgent to do, like another three hours clicking away on the all-consuming Animal Jam.

But the evident success we can have with a group of kids in a mapping workshop still, to my mind, doesn't form an argument for pursuing an education through a conventional classroom.

The kids at Grit Towers meet because they want to; the session - lasting two hours and nowhere near thirty to a class - comes with laughter, jokes, and biscuits; there's no hidden agendas of test percentages; everyone knows the afternoon will come with outside play; and no-one has to put up a hand to speak, pee, use crayons, or have permission to talk.

See, Mrs Gradgrind? Have another example of how education can be gained through everyday ordinary interaction with adults and peers. It comes in endlessly possible combinations, groups and approaches. And as today is a resounding tick, and I hug my tear-stained map of Indonesia with all the big islands drawn in, I can thoroughly understand why you just love to hate us, smug bastard that I am.

The little things of life

It's been a busy old few days.

I have barely had time to thrash the little grits onwards towards their autonomously-inspired educational achievements, let alone shackle them to the radiators.

But I had better note here the minor happenings which have passed while I have been a-busy, creating my delicious lovely things to catch your unguarded soul.

After all, you never know how things turn out. Any of the following minor events may be significant for the future.

1. Fish death.
It was sad. There was mourning. With a coffin.

The gas meter man arrived during the grieving process. The wailing had just reached a new height of emotion. I had to explain it, obviously, in case he thought I was up to something with child and manacle. I said there had been a pet death. He looked awfully sad and consoling, then I said it was a fish, not a cocker spaniel. He burst out laughing. Me, I would not dare do that. Thankfully, I shared a conspiratorial snigger with him by the gas meter.

2. Ceiling collapse.
Dig's office. An issue of not if, but when.

For many gloomy rainy seasons I have shuffled the buckets around the kitchen floor. Do not ask why a hole in the office roof has not been mended. Life is complicated. Anyway, the ceiling finally caved in, brought down, presumably, with August's rain, which we have stored there in the plaster and insulation. Well, I have abandoned the ceiling on the kitchen floor as a punishment. I will now source a new bucket, in extra-large.

3. Car crumpling.
I emerge at 9am one morning to drive the car dangerously round corners as normal, and I see someone has beaten me to the crumple point. One side of the car is totally bashed in. I suspect this is a result of the hard economic times we live in; more particularly, the man who runs the car shop down the road, trying to bring about my state of mind when I think it is worth trading in our old beat-up van for a nice new shiny van.

I can tell him now, it isn't going to work, driving your white van at speed towards my sides and rear at 2am. I am on my uppers thanks to filling the van up with fuel the other day.

4. The back door lock.
It keeps dropping off. The wilful disobedience of the thing is driving me insane. I hate the lock. It is telling me the awful truth that I need someone about the house who can do stuff. This is a profound confession, and I give it in a moment of weakness, the lock just having dropped off again, even though I have shouted, several times over, DO NOT DROP OFF.

Yes, I bought the book 100 Things You Don't Need a Man For, which hand-holds me from dripping-tap-mending to wobbly-door-hanging. No matter how helpful the text, I know it is all doomed. The state of my DIY skills are about as useful as a crippled poodle. I can just about wield a hammer, regardless of the task, but in all truth I am weary of taps and doors and locks dropping off. I want someone to sort it all.

On the bright side! I have half-mended the kitchen scales!

But I now look back and see that so many events have occurred! Any could, in the future, be significant. How is one to know? How can you pluck from a million events the single moment which will form more weightily in a life than all the rest? 

Now I have come over all Proust, with echoes of crunch, memory of buttered toast, and wonder at significant insignificance. Soon I will be rearranging Squirrel's gravel collection, and marvelling at it all.

Knicker Drawer Notebooks does alright

Take a stall at a local Christmas Craft Fair.

It is a total success.

I conclude this, even before 8am when I stagger towards the car carrying 25 hand-made notebooks, all bagged, tagged, and touchy-feely delicious, precariously held in a cranky wicker basket which also doubles as my stall's shonky visual aid.

But I tell the children this day is one of triumph, yes it is, of epic proportions.

For the first time since completing a design qualification in the fourteenth century and acquiring a speeding ticket on the way to display my end-of-course work, I have managed to create something other than a mess.

I bring together zillions of small parts, an old curtain, plus a great deal of willpower, to amalgamate into one glorious burst of design, all prettily located in a cold barn at the back of a destroyed abbey next to the London-Birmingham railway line in the drizzle. This is triumph indeed.

If I sell not one book, the day is not lost. I prove to myself that I can bring events together in a co-ordinated fashion even though everything else about me is dropping to bits.

It is an interesting experience, sitting behind a wobbly table in the middle of nowhere while the Christmas shoppers file by.

I quickly realise I need do absolutely nothing, apart from slump behind it with the ipad. I do not need to perform come hithering if I am to sell you a notebook. I can see whether or not you'll buy one. First, as you clap eyes on the exquisite sueded and leathered offerings, an expression like recognition passes over your eyeballs. It is with urgency that you then head straight over to them, lift one up, feel the weights and textures, then put it down quickly as if there is a bodily necessity you must attend to. That is my sale. Making the book which matches your desires, weaknesses and proclivities. Stitching into it a fragment of your soul, for want of a better word, then you only have to find it to be reunited with it, and for hard cash, it's yours.

 

I can even try and fatally undermine my stall by perching behind it the formidable Tiger, who can rip your face off 

if she takes a dislike to you. It makes not a jot of difference to the final results.

Mind you, the competition's not up to much. 

This is Squirrel, bored out her skull, propped behind a table displaying only the number 7.

She didn't sell it. (Neither did I, but I had a go.)

How can you teach everything?

I had this again. Hmm. Christmas might be an example.

It is one reason why I was driven to home educate, frankly. I want to be in control of Christmas.

Nursery - the experiment we foolishly tried when Shark, Tiger and Squirrel were aged four - gave us a size 24 classroom assistant wearing tinsel elf ears, eagerly anticipating Christmas starting in October when Santa falls down the chimney.

I'm sorry? Isn't it a bit more complex than that? I want the mini grits to grow up with a much wider awareness than offered by a pair of tinsel elf ears. I want my little grits to be aware of how many stories and how many voices compete for our attention and time in our Northern hemisphere's mid-winter.

Relying on Coca-Cola's Santa with his red-nosed reindeer, 200cwt of school glitter, and a school assembly for Christian Teaching Resources delivered by BoxTick.Gov.UK merely glosses over the issues raised by organised religion, commercial power, and social expectations.

Sure, we'll track Santa with Norad, watch Miracle on 34th Street, and read A Christmas Carol (again), and yes, I may even wear tinsel elf ears myself, but I want to take time to position all this in some intelligent and interesting debate.

It comes down to who's in charge of this culture? Whose message do I support? I could not imagine for one minute being able to shut up for long enough to suffer the quickly-delivered school line on Christmas without wanting to punch the classroom assistant and start a fight. Ultimately I'd want to make the event all more complicated than they'd want (a donation to the Christmas Fair organised by the PTA).

So yes, I do think I can teach my kids about Christmas better than any school. I want to convey rounded awareness rather than blinkered ignorance.

Now, December 1st. We are not Christian. I can't pray to anyone how I never want any of my little grits to burst home, declaring their born again evangelical status. I can only hope the family gene for that isn't dominant.

Even so, we're up for the carol service at St Giles in the Fields, the Poets' Church. Listening to Tallis' Videte miraculum, sung by Pegasus.

Christmas discussion starts here.

 

Learning how to turn up at a Church not looking like a scruff-ball;

learning how to shut up, sit down, listen to someone else;

and learning how to take part in a wider cultural event 

alongside an audience mostly composed of those aged over-50. 

(And when the kids have learned all this, they can teach me.)