A smack in the kisser with Hotel Chocolat

Will I do a product review?

Reader, I wrestled with my soul.

My soul wasn't up to it. I tried to bash the stupid soul around a bit, but it curled up all quiet and non-confrontational, then looked at me with its familiar expression of miserable resignation. It just wanted to be left alone.

I write back to Hotel Chocolat and let them decide.

I say, Are you sure you want me to review your chocolates? You should know my excellent advertising skills had me threatened with court action and that was after the ad agency asked me to clear my desk. And what is that name you've given to a box of chocolates? Sleeksters? WTF is that for a name on a praline fancy?

The PR lady says she couldn't give a toss, take them or leave them.

Maybe she didn't quite express it like that, but she conveyed a quiet confidence that I would adore her box of funny-name Sleeksters, which impressed me.

A package arrives promptly. Chocolates! By post! I immediately resolve to send chocolates by post myself, because it seems a very chi chi thing to do, and the sort of glamourous thing we ladies who lunch like to do. Chocolates like these are, apparently, designed to slip through your letter box on your special day! Well, nothing comes through our letter box ever since I positioned a chest of drawers in front of it. Postee has to knock. He checks the address several times before handing it over when I say the parcel is chocolates and it is for me. He looks doubtful. He probably thinks it is a replacement set of Tupperware lids.

I decide to have a ceremony about this upscale moment. I mean, it's not every day Hotel Chocolat posts me choccies. I place the package ceremoniously on my most classy nylon and polyester fur cushion cover.

But I think I need to sex it up a bit. If I am to be the type of upmarket lady who sends and receives chocolates by post yah, then brown cardboard isn't quite the presentational statement I want my chi chi Hotel Chocolat choccies to make! I think I should dangle my stocking over it.

I haven't got a stocking. I found a pop sock instead.

 
Then I do what we ladies do and make space for myself, by brewing a fine cup of coffee for my very finest tableware, and locking the door.

Time to open the parcel!

Oh wowowowow. At that point, right there, with all the little cards spilling out over the lovely black shiny parcel with the quirky cartoons I am instantly converted to the thrill of receiving a whole box of amazingly dainty chocolates by post. I think Sleeksters is an excellent name, even if it does sound like a brand of roller skates and even if the brown box was a bit underwhelming.

Let's go!

Five seconds later...

Yes! I have completely reviewed this dark selection of Sleeksters! They were delicious! Bravo Hotel Chocolat!

Um, I suppose you want tasting notes?

Er. I am sure I began observing buttery texture and firm shell balanced with silky caramel and delicate aroma with a smooth, lingering aftertaste. I think I sat on my tasting sheet by accident somewhere about the chili confection.

Which, incidentally, needed more chili to punch me properly in the mouth. And the sour cherry. I want the sour cherry to bite me back with its astringent deliciousness. More intensity needed on your cherry, and all the flavours where we upmarket chocolate ladies reach for our extremities. Make your dark, dark, and your light, light. That's what the art teacher told me, and it serves me good as a general rule of life, so you could apply it to your chocolate mixtures.

But the soft fudgy and truffly confections? Deliciously textured. Like licking a painting of a cloud. The champagne smoothie thing, beauteous. And the soft caramel thingys that look like bosoms? I want to live in their melty wondrousness forever.

Dear Hotel Chocolat. If you would like me to review, say another 500 boxes or so of your chocolates by post, just to check them out for palm oil and ethics and stuff, you know where I live. xx

Sleeksters! Possibly one of the bestest presents I could ever imagine receiving through the post, and even beats the Tupperware lids. My soul agrees with me. Send them to all your friends, now.

Outsider Art of Japan

Took the little grits to see the exhibition at the Wellcome, Outsider Art from Japan.

This is well worth - as you rush between trains at Euston and King's Cross - preserving an hour or two in your day to visit: stop, look, and wonder at the borderlands of obsessional madness and gifted creativity.

After five minutes in the company of the outsiders and their astonishingly complex and provocative art, I secretly want to be in their club, and long to count myself as one of the gang - if only I can get there by running a blog, forgetting about the audience, and let's not say it's the kid home ed record, I claim it is my driven madness to rearrange letters into wrods. Maybe they'll let me in?

The Gritlets - to whose child-sympathies the art immediately appeals and makes sense of all - emerge delighted, gawping open-mouthed at new pleasures to pursue with thread and sticky tape, and taking away loads of ideas for further scribblings, sewings and clay-making.

I leave, feeling not only that I want to be Outsider of Buckinghamshire but somehow curiously affirmed in my approach to art with the little grits, which is, more or less, do what you like. If your art needs a twisted coathanger and 2m of duct tape, so be it. I have worked on that art principle, more or less, since the little grits could stand up; the only rules have been a) tidy up after yourself (ignored) and b) if it is messy, do it outside or in the garage art shed (also ignored).

As an unexpected side effect, it renewed my contempt of the sacks-of-rubbish brigade. It doesn't take much wit or wisdom to put a sack of rubbish in a gallery and call it art, but it took hours of concentration with a needle and thread for Satoshi Morita to produce the beautiful Untitled.

Spellbound Me

Useful presents for Hecate.

Lazy Sunday

It is Lawnmower Day at our local museum.

I didn't go. Dig, who is home en route from his tours between Hong Kong to Brazil, took the little grits to enjoy this delightful event.

Understandably, given my propensity to the obsessional and eccentric, my love for people driven by a collecting passion such as Shiny teapots 1950-1952, and my delight in the child-like pursuit of old men as they fondle non-functioning mechanical organs and miniature train sets, I was a little jealous.

To my way of thinking, the eccentrics in this country are simply a wonderful part of what it is live in England today. (I can't count Wales, Scotland and N.Ireland simply because I do not know what you do with your passions, but down here in the home counties, we put ours in the shed then see what happens.)

You are probably not wondering what an old woman like me did with her Sunday off. I spent the day in a Suffolk pub.

 

For the benefit of the American reader, pubs in Suffolk are like sheds with beer pumps.

Honestly, it is not all vague. Here's my relevant reading.

Into how many parts can a Saturday split?

See the photographic evidence arraigned against me?

I upset everyone and take Tiger to her windsurfing club. We've been on the waiting list for two years. Two years! I'd completely forgotten about it. Then they call and tell me there's space, so bring her down if she's still interested.

You bet she is; Tiger has the sort of growling determination you might expect of an Olympic athlete driven to pursue victory and glory, except for Tiger's level it is more Can I stand on the board without falling in? and How much can I show my know-it-all sister that she does not have the world monopoly on water?

So yes, Saturday morning you can now find me at the windsurfing club, watching Tiger fiercely not fall in, and grip that mast like she might be holding on to the final sword of vengeance and justice.

But there is a problem. There always is, isn't there? Because of the stupid grip exerted from the local schooling institution on the Mondays-to-Fridays timetable, then any alternative child instruction in anything has to take place in evenings or weekends.

Frankly, my Saturdays are already chockabloc with dd activities.

Which means, for the forseeable future, I am going to have to lever off a couple of limbs to stay with Tiger here on her lake in Bedfordshire; I must deposit the other limbs with Shark in her lake in Bucks; and I can strew the remainder of my torso with Squirrel down at the quarry where the rockwatchers meet. My head I will leave on my own Saturday morning craft stall, where it can sell delightful leather-bound notebooks to all the passers by.

Overheard

I went out in my new 1950s-style dress last night. I looked gorgeous. Seriously. All pinched in at the waist, tight bodice and full flare skirt. This boy I've seen for ages comes over, and I'm really thrilled, I'm really feeling great, because the first thing he says is, 'I love your dress'! Then he's asking questions about the fit, and the net, and the zip, and how it's cut, and I'm thinking, er ... is this normal? Then he asks about the wash cycle. And I think Oh. There goes another one.

To improve and entertain, switch on the TV

Yes, it is true that instruction round here is done by sticking the kids in front of the TV. Tonight it is with the DVD combo, which takes 15 minutes of laboured button-pressing, accompanied by cursing and wheezing, to fire the damn pile of junk into life. But then! We are up and running!

I proudly press play on the latest film to arrive from lovefilm!*

Tonight in Film Family Fun Night, I am introducing my Grits Jnrs to culture: specifically the dark and shady practices of the press, and the ethics you'd expect to emerge from the relationships between publicists, criminals, and ruthless columnists with power to weild.

Yes, it's Sweet Smell of Success, one of my favourite films with a superb snapping dialogue, edgy camerawork, believable characterisation, and brilliant use of lighting to illustrate the murky world of the press and the depths to which we probably all would sink, given great gossip and a story.

I totally recommend it to your teens. We have Leveson Part 2 yet to come, and I have proto-citizens to educate. I can't think of a better story to illustrate the points to be discussed. And no-one comes out of it well.


Lovefilm is my most recent enthusiasm, and I recommend it too, unless I am the last person in the country to use the service (possible). I expect the romance will wear off. Maybe when they finally admit they can't supply me with Humphrey Bogart in The Treasure of the Sierre Madre.

Bike solution

Day of up and down.

On the up, is the sunshine, breezing in on the back of the roll and clap of cloud and rain. Perfect, because it's the day when a home ed youth club is meeting up for a bike ride round a lake, over the other side of town.

On the down, finding a safe route to the meet point when we haven't got time to taxi two kids and one bike, then one kid and two bikes. I could say, Never mind! Take the A5 - it's got a dual carriageway - and if the police pick you up, tell them it's alright because in home education land, we take risks.

After some discussion about this specific bike transportation problem, we solve it to my great satisfaction. I put the bikes in the boot and I strap Tiger to the bonnet, shove Squirrel in the glove compartment, and tell Shark to run very quickly to catch us up if she falls off the roof.

King Lear

King Lear at Shakespeare's Globe. This is a production on tour, so obviously I'm urging you to find where it is touring, then go and watch it. You get raw gratuitous violence, bitter family feuding, and a prolonged dose of royal stupidity.

Yes, I know. All of the above are available in your locality; you merely substitute Lear and the heath for the local bus shelter, the kiddy playground park, and your usual harvest of summer newspaper headlines, but this comes with fancy diddly-do language, dammit.

The production is of course, excellent, so you won't be disappointed. Joseph Marcell as Lear is wonderfully, believably, dotty. Bewildered by events he brings about for himself; unconscious of consequence; pitiable in his lost, and profound, confusion.

From my mama's point of view, it is endlessly rich in moral examples, thus perfect for family viewing. For example, to the Gritties Junior I can reinforce that point about age appropriateness. As in, Tiger, if you are going off the rails, do it when you are supposed to. Between ages 13-15. Then we have time to address it.

Of course I worry about this.

Being home educated, the little grits will misfoot themselves in the manner of their off-railing, and they will get it wrong, mess up their social interaction, and end up drinking cider down the back lane aged 36.

This will never do. Thus I am instructing them in age appropriateness. If you miss your off-railing violent and promiscuous anomie in the teenage years, then yes, you can have another crack in your middle years (age appropriate actions: violence against administration officers, inexplicable weekend disappearances) but if you miss it this time round, you must wait a long stretch, probably until you are aged after 70. Then it must take the form of push-up bras, micro skirts, and more poudre rouge than Dior has licence to manufacture (men, you may do this too).

Other moral examples abound. What happens when you piss off your sister; what happens when you lose the map that shows you the way ahead; what happens if you don't show due regard for your responsibilities.

Indeed, there is something for all the family to enjoy in King Lear. Especially for the over-50s mama, because Mad Tom gets his kit off, and reveals a rather fine semi-naked young man with a pleasing thigh caked in mud. I didn't notice that, obviously. Shark simply asked why I had that funny look on my face. She is not likely to recognise the sad drooling regret of the semi-ancient woman exiled in your own land, so I let it pass.

So yes, go see. Take the family. There wasn't as much comedy in it as I now hope for, especially after last year's Red Rose Chain brought in Pimp My Mobility Scooter and a glove puppet, but it was a great addition to a Shakespeare-dedicated summer. And for a better review of it, go over here.

Photoblog Newport Pagnell

Trek round Newport Pagnell with a Blue Badge trained guide.

Into this two-hour street pounding we squeeze an indepth tour of brick walls to plaques to window frames to lintels to the little path where the Puritan escaped.

I discover that Newport Pagnell is a charming little town; I almost find myself regretting I don't live there.

And it's ancient! Did you know that? It's not just a service station on the M1 you know.
   

But as you can see, I cannot put captions on the photos. I would do our Blue Badger out of a job.

I have jumbled them up as well.

And missed out half of them.

You will just have to take the town tour.  

 
I feel this is one of the most important gifts I can give Shark, Squirrel and Tiger.

A love of the built environment in your locality.

With all the discussion there needs to be about which buildings do you knock down? Which do you modify? And which do you say, Touch it at your peril.

If we don't take part in that debate, developers can do anything.

And they would, given half a chance.

The only thing that sometimes stands between the devastating lust for concrete infill and the way the river curls on its lazy way out of town is the wisdom and determination of people who know the history of the places they care about, who feel emotionally attached to the colours of brick, or who have fallen in love with the line of a roof.

But hopefully, in time, we can add Shark, Tiger and Squirrel to the voices of the awkward squads.

This one can't possibly fail

I have a great new business idea.

I am going to make wands and sell them to witches.

No, honestly! This time, it is sure to be a success!

Okay, my idea about selling tactile steering-wheel covers to blind people. Admittedly, I did not think that one through. But witches! We have zillions of witches in England looking for circles and covens - I have even seen adverts for them in our local community hall - and I bet they all want new wands supplied with a special spell-collecting Knicker Drawer Witchery Note Book!

Shark is not impressed. As usual, she takes after her father. She pooh-poohs my idea and says I am just trying to fob off witches with old sticks.

Nonsense. I am helping the witches. I am helping them channel their natural spiritual energies into an essential tool of their craft. I know about these things. It is not black cats and Satan these days, you know. It is all healing energies, chakras and crystals. They have gone very New Age with their Druids. And I will be very respectful in my handling of that willow, elder, and oak. I will not simply stick on chunks of plastic to a bit of old wood before slapping on a price tag of a tenner.

Not that I had these thoughts in mind when I purchased my very own wand today. It cooed to me, I am your wand! I am your wand! I simply couldn't resist the calling, emanating from the Wytchy Market in a disused bus terminus opposite Milton Keynes railway station.

You may look at my wand, dear reader, since Shark has so far displayed nothing but scorn (possibly envy in disguise).

See? Half dark; half light; all bitter wood and twisted, with a gleam of false light at the end. It is mine.

I am filling my wand with energy right now, and will wave it about, probably over the washing up, the vacuuming of the stairs, and the clearing out of Squirrel's bed, when it will surely give me the strength to carry on.

And I am dealing with Shark. Becos any fule no that if you try to fob off witches, they turn you into toad.

Birthday presents

Shark, Squirrel and Tiger are invited to celebrate a birthday today. Stupidly, we have left presents to the very last minute. They are a little disorganised and me, I am a lot overwhelmed.

We put our heads together and come up with ideas a near-teenage girl might like. Chocolate, books, puzzles, dvds, charm bracelets and music. The latter is out, immediately, because after Dowland I lose the thread, and Shark, Squirrel and Tiger are disdainful of all boy bands.

We come up with presents, of course we do, and the party is great celebratory fun, with balloons and games and cake.

When you are young, the time can be filled with great astonishment and wonder and expectation.

It is, if you are allowed a moment of it left to yourself, and your own devices, free to wander about and stare at impossible creatures like ladybirds or the fragments of a pigeon wing half-eaten on the path.

These are the wonderful inexplicable moments of childhood we should allow children time for, so they can hold them and carry on with them through their lives, finding astonishment and wonder and expectation as they grow.

I am grateful, hugely thankful, to my rather neglectful mother, for demanding I push off out of doors and don't come back until tea-time. Because now I am old, now I feel old, now the dead bit of me is eating up the living, I find gorse bushes are still beguiling and treacherous, blossom still needs throwing to the winds, and the feathers from dismembered pigeons still invite my curious gaze.

I am not a very good present-giver; I fall back on bubble foam and flannel. But if I could give any present, it would be a package of curiosity, a burning desire for exploration, a sense of adventure, and time.

Doing (yet more) home ed research?

Home educators, more of it over here. Take it or leave it.

For any person passing, curiously nosing about the world of home ed, this is when I pause, so we home educators can go at each other with windmilling arms, kicking each other in the shins, and hoping to land some bloody-nose blows, until some kindly consensus-seeker drags us apart, yelling Leave it! It ain't worth it!

Then know, passing viewer, that we are truly one big, happy family!

Yes, it may seem unlikely, but in my tribal world, research into home ed can raise a lot of strong opinions.

For a start, for the die-hard brigade, there is the primary problem of the research itself - it comes from within the education 'system' that the old hippies have spent years poking with sticks. Of course they're right! The research will come from people using particular sanctioned approaches within straitjacketed university contexts; researchers will not be able to deviate from particular methodologies and means of presentation if they want that PhD. What's more, they are likely products of a school-based system themselves, so how can they apply their standards of interrogation to the home educating approach? We have knowledge that is other. Researcher, when you begin, consider yourself doomed.

Then we have the mamas and papas out here in the home ed world who can challenge your conventional educational theories with their perceptions and observations about the way children learn. But because they haven't made those observations within the empires, or they don't display letters after their names, or because their observations are gathered from hard-core practical experience - possibly including mud, blood, bone, and a dead badger - those voices are forever consigned to the fringes; they will never be inside the system, and they will remain ignored or dismissed by the mainstream.

But there are those who say Let's help out the poor researcher! Even though they display stupendous ignorance! Mixing up home education with home schooling! But these rational voices, they advise caution: research in itself is fine, but what's the purpose? What use will it be put to? No academic researcher will produce pure information protected from government policies, business interests, or safe from a rubbishing by those who feel their agendas are being damaged or undermined. The message from here is: Home educator, do your research. Pick the research you think isn't just touting for business, allowing someone to build an empire, has a hidden agenda, or is covertly sponsored by Schools'R'Us.

What of those who say it is a downright failure of the home ed community not to be involved with academia? Only by furnishing the mainstream educational world with sound, peer-reviewed, academic data will home ed ever be accepted; it's only by understanding the significance of an academic approach in presenting arguments to defend a belief, can home education, eventually, become a mainstream choice. Think of a time when even Ken Robinson might be able to utter the dreaded words, safe in the knowledge he will no longer be considered a raving loony!

And then we get the bloody-minded provokers. They try and spoil it all by filling in questionnaires with annoying and unhelpful answers deliberately to advance, frustrate, illuminate and piss off the researcher in equal measure. I absolutely deny any involvement with that lot.

Yikes!Bikes!

The most exciting day in the history of days.

It is the day new bikes come to live with Shark, Tiger and Squirrel.

This defining red-letter day is all due to the purposeful determination of our Travelling Aunty, calling in on us, en route to her funeral visit.

Travelling Aunty claims she has had it up-to-here with birthdays and Christmases. And now she expects nothing but trauma thanks to the inexplicable state that is teenage. With what can you possibly equip a teenage niece? Then divide it by three?

I sympathise. Travelling Aunty is a Quaker School Boarding Girl, so her horizons have been limited. And even if she knew about eye-liner (she doesn't), there are only so many shades of black you can get. So, unusually, I agree immediately. Bikes are indeed a very practical choice for birthdays and Christmases 2013 to 2018. I wish I had thought of it myself.

Thus today finds us standing in the bike shop for three hours while everyone discusses gears, the colour pink, what is the point of a cross-bar, and who pulled off the sparkly tassels from Squirrel's bike in 2004? Because she has it writ in her little book as Score To Be Settled On Your Wedding Day.

Me, I have never bought the gritlets a new bike in my life. So far I have wheeled in 12 non-functioning bikes gathered betwixt the dump and freecycle. I like to think it has become a fond family ceremony, staring in forlorn misery at the broken heaps of old pedals, disconnected chains, bent frames and non-working brakes to discover the reason why humanity junks their old bikes.

Well, not these. These bikes will be loved, fondled, and adored. Or until that point when they are forgotten about, abandoned to the elements, hurled to the ground in a temper tantrum and called That old thing? Put it on Freecycle. I'm buying a motorbike.

Quietly enjoying...

The mini grits are occupied. Quietly busy, they slide away to bury their noses in books, fasten them on computer screens, or worship fish.

This is a strange, translucent time, one state of them blending invisibly to another. Their plump baby cheeks are still there with their fat little tummies demanding pasta, but their shoes are size 7 and their opinions are delivered with withering insight.

They are no longer my little girls, and yet they are completely my little girls, occupying some sort of transitory form between digging up the garden and telling me of things they would like to do: the online maths games they want to boast about, the physics they want to learn about, the morning approach they are going to adopt for learning 20 Latin verbs.

This strange state is both satisfying and scary. As their too-long limbs fold into the postures of students, sat at desks for longer than they should, I can only hope I rise to the challenge to match it with ambitions, books, intentions.

For me, their sloping away to private study increasingly leaves me with whole gaps in the days when I too can creep away, relieved of responsibilities, apart from the usual household feeding, cleaning, and mucking out, to simply potter about.

Quietly daring to think of life post age-16, wrestling with fifty-summer-things-I-want-to-do spread impossibly from Edinburgh to Brighton, Hunstanton to Swansea, and filling the silence with my own quiet dancing; today with Steve Martin and Edie Brickell Love has Come for You.

Under your nose

Don't know whether to come away brimming with smug satisfaction, or unplug my particularly obnoxious sluice of inner outrage to go and find the neighbour's cat, then kick it.

Talking about Start the Week on Radio 4. That one with Jay Griffiths, author with book to flog, sat at the Brighton Festival. (Yes, and me sat 200 miles away I already nurture a sense of exclusion, so I agree, not a good start.) Jay Griffiths is author and now, pronouncer of childhood. Probably doesn't have any children, so she can better pronounce a clear viewpoint, a firm opinion, and all the answers.

I should say, of course, that not having children triumphantly sucking the marrow out of your mother bones on a daily basis does not disqualify you from having an opinion about how children are brought up in 21st century society. Because if it did, the same principle would apply to me. I would be excluded from pronouncing upon, say, the culture of lawnmowers, on the basis that I do not own one.*

In fact, if I have to take sides, I am in Jay Griffiths' camp. She makes many points which in Grit's distorted world make very clear sense. I have met children who have never climbed a tree, or who think a timetable of 15 hours homework every week at age 11 is normal, so I have sympathies up for grabs with any author or public speaker prepared to tell the world that it is frankly wrong to exclude children from the outdoors, control their activities, schedule their days, or prevent them from any independent experience.

But she does not need to worry the world's indigenous cultures, peering over their woven bamboo screens, if she wants to explore theories about social nurturing of a child's will, or compare a child's free state with the way it is claimed we bring 'em up in England, i.e. destroying their spirits for the convenience of the adult world. No, she can stay at home, and come to a local home ed meet.

Jay, I recommend you pick a social where the autonomous wing, the far out crowd, and the followers of Our Lord Holt are all out, combined in glorious anarchic force with sticks, dog, and car battery.

She should know, and they all should know - those commentators and pronouncers about the life of the child in present-day Britain - that there exists an extensive community right here in England sucking on the breath of Blake. Those abstract Romantic notions about the purity, innocence and special sanctity of childhood are not so abstract: out here they are put into gruelling practice, every single bleeding day.

The result is sometimes actual blood, or at least a sordid chaotic mess, this explosion of an unstructured, child-led day. Risk-averse it ain't. But it is also deeply rationalised, explained and thought over in a wide philosophy of which Blake was only a part.

In the home ed world you can find not only a deep belief in the Romantic vision of the innocent child; you can see ideas about a child's imagination being as clear and pure as a spiritual awareness guiding the actual practice with the paint pots and glue; you can find parents observing in great detail how a child's innocent comment is in itself a social critique, and you will see, if you can last the afternoon, how the home ed child's learning is driven by, and initiated from, intimate contact with the out-of-doors. We didn't come by that slogan - The World is Our Classroom - on the basis of a ten-minute supervised asphalt playtime Monday to Friday.

So this is the bit that irks me, and makes me want to kick cats. Jay Griffiths should know how this long educational tradition of near-anarchy works in England, and the autonomous wing should shout louder and harder so that she, and others like her, know for sure how philosophies about childhood are being put into practice under her very nose, down her local community hall, on her high street, and in that field, the one she probably travelled past, on the way to Brighton.


* Lawnmowers are pointless. If you have a little bit of grass, get kids to cut it with nail scissors. And if you have a lot of grass, get a goat. 

(However! If you came to me and said, Grit, I have one of those lawnmowers you sit on and drive about, then I would probably want a go, and change my mind immediately.)

Funeral rules

Travelling Aunty is passing through, en route to a black-attired funeral party. She assures me the funeral is not mine, which cheers me a little. I yet have time to share with my junior grits a few more observations about the sparkle that is life.

But the very idea of a funeral prompts me to the opposite with pots of yellow tulips and birthday cupcakes (even though it isn't anybody's birthday), decorated and ignited courtesy of Squirrel. Then, over tea, I lay down the laws for my star turn.

First, and most importantly, I plan to die in the upstairs bedroom to cause maximum inconvenience to everyone. You won't be able to get my body round the dog leg of the stairs without knocking the geology collection off the walls. Someone will suggest lowering me out the attic window because it will be easier. This is a good plan. I endorse it. The ropes you will need are in the garage.

From then on:

1. No black. If anyone dares wear black for me, I shall rise up from my coffin and with my bony fingers (possibly broken off in the attempt to hoist me over the banisters) jab their eyes until they swap the sombre for silver sparkle, brilliant reds and pointy heels. Men included.

2. I want laughter. If I do not hear laughter, I will hover about your heads, snatching at your ears and spitting in your hair. Laugh, damn you, laugh.

3. Music. And dancing. The latter preferably not on my coffin, but if you are driven to it, then do it. So what? I will have a playlist of an eclectic variety. It may go on a bit and be a touch WTF? but there is no getting round it. I want it from beginning to end otherwise the hauntings begin.

4. Art. I want a mini book like we did for Granny K, but mine is to be filled with Important Photographs of my life, and must include some from Malaysia where I made a rule to only photograph the ground. If you fail on this, you may hear my menacing screeching howls. Simpler to comply.

5. Flowers. I stole this idea from Peepah and it is a good one. Gritlets, you are to bundle up lots of posies - I want daisies and birds of paradise - then you are to hand them out to all party goers. (There will only be a couple, so it shouldn't be onerous.) Failure to do this will mean I pinch your ankles and bite your heels until they bleed.

6. Party. I want drinking and merriment, tomfoolery, naughtiness, mischief. And only when I feel the event has passed suitably will I let you all go, safe to your own beds.

PS Enjoy the cake.

Photoblog Audley End

I have set the children a reading assignment; the English Heritage Victorian May Day at Audley End seems a great way to start.

Flea market Saturday

Now a regular pitch for Knicker Drawers! Soon I might be bold enough to actually let people know where it is. When I can convince myself that anyone with an interest in bashing me over the head and dumping my body in the local canal isn't likely to show up.

It is a slow day, with several people not turning up, despite having paid for their table. Tsk. Must be the shining sun and the warm air noddling their brains. Who wouldn't prefer to be sat in a local town hall for six hours making come hither eyeballs at passing customers?

The woman next to me did well. I was most impressed when she sold the aeroplane propeller.

The season begins

I have begun my annual back garden clearance.

I expect this Aegean task could overwhelm me about next Tuesday when I shall finally break down and cry. In truth, the emotional labour of it exhausts me more than the physical labour. I can throw stuff about with my old scrawny torso no problem; it is the pain from the broken bits of my rusted iron heart falling clanging about my feet that normally does for me in the end.

I look at my garden now, and I tell myself, if it wasn't for the unicorn hanging by its neck from the tree, everything would be fine.

This is, of course, a lie. I have a memory of my garden filled with the blooms of full-skirted blood-red poppies, surrounded by the late evening scent of jasmine and Mexican orange blossom, all mixed up with the sensuous pleasure of exotic lilies. And now it is nothing more than a torturing mat of brambles, an assortment of plastic buckets, and a horrible hole in the ground where the dinosaurs live. Somewhere, I am told, we have a raspberry bush that no-one remembers planting, so it must have come in with the bird droppings. That is the result of my thirteen years living with triplets.

And now I am going to begin it all over again. This tension over the garden. I could call it a creative tension but it isn't really. A creative tension - whether both sides are exchanging blows, curses or kisses - can produce an offering to the gods much greater than any one side could have fashioned alone. But my garden is clearly anything but the result of a creative tension. More the end product of an annual cycle of despair and despondency with a few bitter tears and resentful recriminations thrown in for good measure.

The problem is, I have had such brilliant ideas for childhood fantasy! If only my children would stop arguing with me and let me loose on my creative imaginings, I could have conjured all manner of magical fantasy constructions! But Squirrel, Tiger and Shark have only ever wanted to fill the garden with holes in the ground, the contents of my crockery cupboard, plastic stuff draped over bushes, old bikes, bits of wood, twenty-four pairs of scissors, the bath plug, and now, somewhere to set on fire.

Gardens that children like, and gardens made for children by adults: here we have a fundamental mis-match of vision.

However. The neighbour has unwittingly helped me identify a positive way forward. Here is their front garden.

They have had that shopping trolley adorning the garden for months, alternatively using it as some sort of plant stand, a refuse collecting point, and a place to lodge the cat.

But it is obvious to me that they are indeed trying, even though they are surrounded by adversity. Look, they recently added a note of rus in urbe by propping up a whitewashed stone rabbit under a selection of dead twigs.

I am taking great courage from this spirited approach to gardening. It speaks to me not of failure and complete hopelessness, but of real grit and determination. It sings to me, undefeated by circumstance, blind to failings, look! it all may be crap, but we can yet achieve!

Thus I am resolved. I will not look bleakly at my wilderness of old stepladders, disused bikes, dead unicorns, matted bramble and holes in the ground filled with sieves and plates, remembering what is past, and lost.

I will look upon my space and know that even if the end result is still Gold Medallist in the Shit Garden Awards, my labours will count: I will measure my endeavours using no comparison with what is gone, but by my determination to effect something. I will work with the children to shape the garden for us all.

And if my final garden landscape ends up with an Asda shopping trolley holding up three pot plants, a bag of rubbish and a tom cat, I shall hail it, success.

Photoblog Wildlife Watch

In this ever-changing household, people are going to and fro again. Marking the day, my ever-evolving teens no longer see friends coming round to play but friends coming round to hang out; morningtime brings one friend dropping in; two more arrive by afternoon as she departs.

I watch the social diary of the proto teen grow in much more complex ways than mine. Me, if I manage to grab a cup of coffee with Ellie and Mr W in a month of Sundays, I'm doing better than thrilled.

Let's leave the junior teens to it. I can simply assure anyone who thinks it can't possibly happen, that yes! Home ed kids have social lives!

I'll record an evening activity instead. A brief few hours walking with the local Wildlife Watch, pausing in the busy day, for heron fancying.

May day celebration

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

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

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

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

Even if, at any point I felt down, sad, and grieving today, which I deny totally, I'm drawing on the bright and shiny art the children conjure up, inspired by light and paint: what could be better for me than to clap eyes on Squirrel's rocks, Tiger's thingummy, and Shark's killer whale?
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And if that wasn't enough to know it's all time for a spring celebration, the evening sings at me from the Folk Show with Mark Radcliffe on Radio 2.

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