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.

It could be called a holiday. Or the way we've lived life

I cannot sit still. Life is urgent. I cannot waste a moment, don't want to come away without doing, feeling, smelling, seeing, touching, being.

Where the need comes from, I don't know. It might have been a blow to the head. Perhaps I have dwelt too much on Memento Mori. Perhaps I yearn to live different from another generation, one who told me it is a long-established way that adults must rest, and I must sit and watch the clock tick.

But this week, we have been doing. And our activity and energy have been so right, so normal. With my children I have done so much, and we have packed so many moments into our time. We have toured like tourists, played on the beaches, found the rain and the sunshine, said hellos and goodbyes, lived how we wanted to, made our decisions, followed what we thought, been free to choose.

I have been away, of course, from the place where people without right stood in our way, took a role for themselves in my family that I did not give them, made it their job to malign, bully, push me into doing what they want, told me what I should do, how to bring up my children, how I should live, how I should comply, what I should say, what I should teach, how I should be.

I've been away from those voices. This week, I have had freedom again to turn to the children each morning, and say, Hey! What would you like to do today?

We built each day from scratch, and they, like me, don't want to waste a moment. Today, our last day on the island, we buzz, eagerly and happily, from garlic farm to lavender farm, to museum, to cliff walk, to beach.

But before this week, before this year, many of our days were like this. This was our home education life, and for this week, here it is, back again.

Which makes me know that this year, unlike any before it, has been so draining, so destructive, so damaging. It was brought, not by our doing, but by the interference of others who think themselves perfect engineers for my family; those people who would try and fix something that was never broken.

I can only say that in all our time together, our family has made our own decisions, followed our path, built our own lives. Shark would lay down her head on the pillow each night and say to me, I don't want the day to end.

You're not alone, Shark. I know we have had an extraordinary life, and we won't give up our freedoms.

But we also have a community of people, scattered all across England, who will support us, and we them. They would never say you're doing it all wrong. They would never say this is how you should live life. They would never dream of telling us what we should do today, making out that what we do is wrong, telling us our instincts and feelings are the wrong ones, that they have better, and know better.

When we return home, we'll continue living the life we choose. Because, my children, you have always lived this way. And I don't want the day to end either.

How could we resist?

A day spent at Brading Roman Villa with its remarkable mosaics, followed by a walk through Brading Marshes RSPB site. And it is breathtaking. I cannot miss these spaces, winding paths, cool greens, shimmering grasses. My journey companions say, yes. Please can we come back.

Grit awards herself 10/10 for organisational skills

It's one of those days when I bet you wish Grit was your Business PA.

Because thanks to Grit's super efficient organisational ability with a computer, clock, and diary, I am picking up Big Kate from California at the titchy Sandown railway station on the Isle of Wight this afternoon.

Howabout that!

Not only can I support a week's home education from a discount chalet on a hill arranged less than one week ago, I can also schedule in an overseas visitor with jet lag to share with us the delight that is Dinosaur Island!

Grit is swelling with pride about this because normally she is a messed up old bag who doesn't know what day it is.

All I can say is that it must be the invigorating air on this lovely island.

In fact Grit is so smart about maximising efficiency, coordinating labour, and managing the best efforts of all our team players, I set Big Kate off looking for fossilised turtle shells on the beach at Fort Victoria.

We can't find the bloody things. Despite being told you can pick them up like shells. And neither, incidentally, have we eye-spied any native British red squirrels, which are apparently bursting out of this island by the bucketload because the evil grey murderous ones haven't invented inflatable dinghys. Yet. So Big Kate can look for red squirrels too. And add the dinosaur prints near Brook. Put those on the list. And some neolithic flint tools would be a neat find, Big Kate, if you wouldn't mind looking.

Which is more or less what she does.

Here she is, all the way from California. Looking.


While Big Kate is maximising our efficiency by Looking, the rest of the team players have fun mucking around on rocks, digging holes, swinging on interesting trees and trying not to fall off cliffs.






And so long as a Business PA is not actually judged on their ability to find turtle shells, red squirrels, dinosaur footprints and neolithic flint tools - because we find none of those things after Big Kate spends most of four hours staring at the ground - then Grit could just have found herself a whole new career.

Alright. I admit. I am won over.

I admit to being a bit swayed towards the delights of island living following yesterday, finding it quite easy to navigate round to areas in which the children are interested, and becoming steadily aware of the extraordinary history, prehistory and geological scope of this remarkable and beautiful land.

The final blow is probably delivered by Steve, curator of geology at the Dinosaur Isle museum.

Because this morning I take Shark and Squirrel to the geology walk at Shanklin organised by the museum and led by Steve, who is one of those people we are lucky to meet in our world; passionate about what they do, and committed to explaining and communicating their ideas with energy and enthusiasm.

And yes, I will stick out my neck and say we meet a damn sight more of these people in our home education world than I ever did while teaching in a secondary school. Not that the people who teach are not enthusiastic and committed to communication with children. Just that after a term in the classroom, they are usually tired out and worn down through struggles with classroom control, students who aren't interested, a system that can't personalise the education yet has to talk as if it can, colleagues who are dispirited and cynical, and a testing system that is unrewarding and thankless.

So when we meet people like Steve in all the worlds we enter into, whether it is arts, science, history, paleontology, sailing, or jumping up and down on a trampoline, we can recognise them. I wish all your kids could meet teachers like this.

And this geology walk is the point when I realise we are going to have to come again to the Isle of Wight, and why, come next Saturday, I shall be kicking and screaming when they try and drag me off this island.

I think the Isle of Wight might be getting to me

Yesterday, I brought this fashion to the Isle of Wight.


Yes, that's a groundsheet, and I'm wearing it.

Of course my great fashion statement has a proper history. Me and Galliano. We both reference our work to cultural movements and historic moments.

Like, last Friday Shark and Squirrel packed their own bags, and I was too busy to check the contents.

First, I've been packing Tiger's bag for her PGL - attending to six pairs of this, three pairs of that, extra ones of the other and two pairs for wet and dry - and second, I would very much like Shark and Squirrel to live the consequences of their choices, suffer, and regret their actions.

Checklist Shark. She has brought for a cold and rainy British summertime: one cotton dress, one cotton top, two pairs of leggings, twelve books and a home made dolphin.

To her credit, Squirrel has brought a variety of clothing but, for the beautiful weather, of which there isn't any, one fancy stitch flimsy pink glitter cardigan. And no coat.

My fashion moment might just turn the course of Isle of Wight history. But I do not recommend making children responsible for their own packing. It is a crap idea, because it is mother who suffers in the end.

With clouds scudding this way and that and a will-they-won't-they? approach to rain, today I donate my woolly jumper to Squirrel and a waterproof coat to Shark, with the result that I face a future mostly freezing and wet. There is only the groundsheet left. So be nice and help me along. Call it fashionable. If Kate Moss walked down King's Road in it, you'd all be calling them rain bags and everyone would want one.

Now with Grit dressed like an abandoned tent, and two kids attired in clothing that can best be described as offering plenty of growing room, we start out on a full day of education.

We begin in Yarmouth Castle, which bears this fantastic sign:


but which also teaches us a great deal about shipwrecks in the harbour, and the history of castle design from Medieval status symbol to Tudor garrison for soldiers.


Then it's over to Shark's choice at Fort Victoria which is the Underwater Archaeology Centre and the Marine Aquarium where we snap blurred photographs of baby cuttlefish while everyone sighs aaah.


Not to waste a moment we make for the tiny planetarium and the Robert Hooke exhibition, which fires Grit up to educate everyone about how even eminent seventeenth century scientists can argue like two year olds.

Which is not what happens on the beach at Yaverland this evening, walking there spotting gatekeeper butterflies, bramble blackberries, mallows and thistles, then hunting for fossils, and making sand castles, and where, after a mostly splendid educational day out with only a small amount of rain to show off my new fashion garb, I am indulgent, even of Dolly.


I think I might be liking the Isle of Wight.

And that was one type of normality

Last night we dropped off Tiger at her PGL adventure camp, which means today, we look like as normal a family as you can get. We are two adults, two children, on holiday at a major tourist sight, and at that July time of year, when people think, for a family holiday, that's normal.

This version of normality is interesting.

For a start, we have walked round this earth for ten years being a family of five. At the moment you move away from the safe zone of four, then your travelling life becomes downright difficult. Cars, taxis, entrance tickets, seats round tables, overnight rooms, beds, hotels. They're all geared up for four. But suddenly, today, we are four, so we fit. We can be normal. And that feels odd.

And then there are the children. When I have the uncanny triplet set, they draw those surreptitious glances and sliding eyes, back and forth between looking-alike faces. Today I have a matching pair, but they don't draw the eye as much as a set of three. And anyway, Shark refuses to be seen with us and is marching on up the hill. I can be normal here too.

And then there's the home ed. I won't feel compelled to explain to inquisitive passers by why we are walking down the High Street on a Wednesday morning at 11am. I don't need to fret about the police or a truancy patrol. The scrutinising gaze of strangers is absent; the ones who watch us about our normal Monday morning business in June, then with a flick of the eye, judge me, condemn my parenting abilities, and sentence all of us to death by hanging. It's school holiday. I can be normal.

We normal, normal family walk up the path to the tourist sight that everyone who comes to the Isle of Wight must see.


It's probably here, at The Needles, that I start to forget about what's normal or not. I can just watch the waves and point out the way the rocks curve and bend. Now I can confess I like the Isle of Wight just a teensy weensy bit. And I am probably ashamed that I have travelled over the world and am ignorant of what's on my own doorstep. I was unaware of how splendid are the rocks round here, how astonishing and spectacular this geology, and how beautiful is this scenery both far away and close up. From a distance you can see the cliffs cut away to reveal many layers of colours and rock types; pinks, blues, greys, yellows, whites. Clays, chalks, sandstones, mudstones, all layered, one after the other, the rocks cut away like a perfect set of samples just waiting for the amateur rock lover to come along and start learning and exploring. Close up, you can see these vertical lines rise up from choppy waters, strata layers of black held up in white chalk. They should be gone, eroded by wind and sea and rain, but skyward those sea teeth still rise, defiant, and bite the sky.

And this is our normal. We are looking, feeling, learning, exploring, talking, finding out about the world. To us and the rocks, it doesn't matter if it's July, or October, or March.

But if for one afternoon this year, we looked normal, by the end of the day, we have given it up.

Settled back in the car, windswept and weary, I am missing Tiger and wishing she could take part in the chatter and I could share everything I've learned about this point in the world, and where we are now.

Yet there is one more family member to depart. Daddy Dig is travelling back home again this evening, and leaving me with Shark and Squirrel to our own devices on the Island.

Which just shows how determined I am

Tra la la! Off we journey to a happy holiday on the Isle of Wight!

We will have loads of fun.

On that, I am determined. And for the journey I have a 12 disc CD, a picnic hamper stuffed with carbohydrates, an assortment of small people, too much luggage, a newly stocked medical emergency kit, and a map.

Daddy Dig is with us too, so I can be cheery. I won't think how he is leaving us tomorrow. For now, he is driving us all to the ferry at Lymington.

Anyway, I don't have time to be forlorn. Because Sexy Wife Grit has done what she normally does when Daddy Dig drives, and that is fall asleep and dribble. The only task then is to wake up, realise we are in the New Forest, see horses, and be delighted at England.


I may face a pile of speeding tickets on my return home next week, but we have ample time for a leg stretch before the ferry, so it's everyone out the car for a walk. I can enjoy seeing a Tiger beside herself with joy faced with the very beautiful wild ponies and their wild pony babies.

In fact I am in such a holiday mood I then pass my phone camera to one of the small people.


Look out Squirrel! The horses are sliding down the hill! They will land in a big heap at the bottom of the New Forest if you carry on photographing them like that.

As usual, fate intervenes to try and make Grit miserable where a car journey, Dig, and her children have all failed. Half way up Squirrel's hill, the heel of her sandal drops off.

I shall not be thwarted. I am determined to enjoy the lovely stroll in the New Forest. Solution. Pull the other heel off as well. That way, I might make it back to the car and still look normal, rather than the only idiot for miles around who wears one heel to limp across half a mile of forest.


Now let's hope there are no more disasters in store. And if there are, of course I shall smile! Onto the ferry that will not sink!


Oh dear. If I wasn't quite so determined to make it to the Isle of Wight with a smile still attached to my face when everything else has dropped off, I might sour the holiday mood on noticing this particular stowaway emerging from Squirrel's luggage.


But I simply say, Squirrel! You have brought Dolly! How lovely! Now every day on the Isle of Wight I can see her lovely face!

Grit is time poor

Thanks to having organised, at the last minute, a week's holiday.

The holiday is to be locked up in a concrete bunker with two kids on the Isle of Wight, England's smallest county. I will be unable to get off the island during peak holiday season and a swine flu pandemic. Come Tuesday I see myself weeping, holding an ear thermometer, a bottle of Calpol and the swine flu hotline number. Dig will be at home preparing to leave for India. The other misplaced kid is abandoned somewhere en route at the back of a horse with a pot of glitter.

It's all less exciting than it sounds.

And a week's holiday with two of my offspring WILL BE a lot of FUN.

I have gritted my teeth in preparation and packed the portable DVD player. By Wednesday, forgive me if I am drinking heavily, kicking myself, and effing and blinding, and the latter no longer under my breath.

Because why and how I have contrived this absurd set of circumstances I am not sure. It is one of those happenings that made perfect logical sense while it is all unfolding and in retrospect now feels like a bad script that I can't get out of, but in the next Act, there appears a burned out Volvo, three snakes and a pygmy. Perhaps then, the Dyson will drive us home.


But while I am making love to the Dyson, tackling the fire, trapping the snakes and defeating the pygmy, I will be internetless and out of communication.

On the bright side, I have made time for a holiday haircut. This is not at the local salon with Kylie, but is upstairs in the disused bathroom with Grit, thrashing around hacking at her head with a pair of scissors, because life is just too short to fit everything in.

And I will leave you with this delightful scrap of almost-conversation which passes for tenderness in our household.

Grit: (Big Burp)
Shark: Mummy! You are not blaming me for that again.

I can't resist it

'...My 16-year-old son has just left comprehensive school ... In English literature ... he has read no single English novel. He took German but on a family visit to Germany last year found it impossible to order in a bakery...

'He has left school knowing no works by classical composers, has no idea how to cook a decent meal, hasn't visited any of the local museums or places of interest and struggles to find cities on a map of the UK. ...

'Rather than home educators being called on to justify their decision, perhaps it should be those parents who send their children to school, without questioning the education, or influences their child will receive, who should be asked how they will be making up the educational shortfall.'

Helen-Jane, I am blowing you kisses.

Letters The Independent Newspaper

Leave them alone and they do wonders

Grit has abandoned her children today. She is busy arranging her life, organising her family, mentally preparing for seven nights in a concrete bunker, and typesetting a load of pompous academic twaddle from an undistinguished lecturer now on holiday somewhere in England who spends his days drawing foolish pictures of verbs.

Since I am occupied, Squirrel and Tiger amuse themselves digging pits for unicorns. Shark, left to her own devices, sails through the kitchen and prepares delicious miniature souffles.

I think if any of those scoundrels from the DCSF are lurking around they would probably deduce, on a judgment of today, that a nine-year old child is probably the primary carer, all the children certainly neglected, and the house is filled with hazards, so that's a sure sign we need to be inspected and closed down on health and safety alone.

From our point of view, we see Tiger and Squirrel follow an extraordinary fantasy of deep play which involves one unicorn becoming a master bricklayer and designing mud houses for everyone to live in peacefully. We then see Shark's astonishing culinary ability, ambition, and confidence. We see not see the coating of soil and not the mess left in the kitchen.

We do not want thanks for what we do, we just want to be left alone to do it.

And here is a blurred photograph of one of Shark's souffles, before I snatched it and scoffed it.

Let's all help the Stasi!

Say YES to

ID cards!
fingerprinting in schools!
CCTV in all private areas including toilets!
security passes to access age-restricted areas
all personal data held on one big database!
electronic tagging for all!
national DNA database!
random healthy home visits from the family inspectorate!
licences for all family members!
suitability inspections on all parents!
curfews!
guided and monitored national curriculum lessons for every child - from birth!
outlawing of all non-state approved and deviant parenting!
training every child to expect monitoring THROUGHOUT THEIR LIVES.

Yes, says Grit! YES YES YES. All these measures will help keep my children SAFE!

And what could possibly GO WRONG?

The training on all the Stasi inspectors will be faultless. Of course Mr and Mrs Spooky won't apply to work with children! We can trust the state to carefully vet all individuals! More than we can trust our own grannies! Anyway, in the new order, Granny will need a licence too! But if she's got nothing to hide, she's got nothing to fear!

And in the interests of helping the Stasi, let me inform on my neighbour.

He walks in a funny way and he keeps 27 steps in various forms in his house. 13 are connected to the stairs, which is a deviant number, so he's guilty of something; 3 are connected to a kitchen step ladder which I have never seen him use, so he's up to no good with that, 3 are down to his cellar, which should be investigated under the new Cellar Investigation Inspectorate, and the rest are casually littered around his house and garden where A CHILD could fall over them. So he is clearly GUILTY of child abuse and neglect. Hanging's TOO GOOD FOR HIM!

Home educators are sexy

In their various ways the NSPCC, DCSF and Badman all allowed unchallenged the media slur that home educating families are probably child abusers, delinquents and vagabonds.

Why? Because they thought they could get away with it.

And they banked on the great British public mindlessly agreeing. After all! These home educators are freaks, outcasts and hippies on the fringes of our society. They are already on the margins. Strange. Excluded. They have shunned normal society. They are alone. Kill the hippies! Persecute the paedophiles!

But what the NSPCC, DCSF and Badman failed to see is that home educators are a cross section of all society.

Home educators are not solely drawn from fringes, gutters or swamps. No. We are like a line drawn from top to bottom of all society; there are some top nob kids home educated alongside the feral squealers who once saw a comb and thought it was a medieval torture instrument.* Hey, sometimes they are both one and the same kids.

And with them is a huge swathe of kids swirling round the mouthy middle classes, whose ex-marketing manager mums are organising piano lessons on the one hand and Latin lessons on the other; doing it all in an environment safe from knives, drugs, and Jessie of 3b who will beat you to a pulp because you're wearing pink socks.

And these people from the top to the bottom of British society are attending to their children brilliantly and - dare we whisper it - sometimes better, and with more social mobility, than school.

But the NSPCC, DCSF and Badman are rather counting on that outdated old stereotype of home educators - shoeless, covered in grime, and living in a tent.

Well you don't have to travel far round the blogs to see that stereotype is changing. Bloggers who are smart, funny, thorough, determined, and wise.

Grit, who once wrote advertorial copy for a living and thus qualifies for what she's talking about, now contributes her cunning plan to help along our image change.

First, let's look at a case study: Image change and public consciousness: Fat people.

Once, fat people were as socially unacceptable as home educators. They were the objects of disdain. They were scorned.

But then the Great British Public discovered some of those fat people were having fun. More than that, some fat people were having sex. Kinky sex! They are having MORE FUN, MORE SEX and MORE KINKY SEX than thin people! What about those Fat Admirers! Feeders and Squashers! Ladies with big thighs! Men with big bellies! Yes! Yes! We all want to be fat!

Now hasn't it changed? Fat is OK. Fat is something we won't mind a bit more of round our sexy arses. The Great British Public is getting fatter just so they can have more kinky sex and more Jammie Dodgers.

Bearing this case study in mind, we home educators should be able to effect the same kind of image change.

Here is Grit's cunning plan.

We all take on that sexy mama and papa image for ourselves, because sex sells ideas.

So come on home educators! Let's change our image! Let's sex it up!

Mamas, hunt down those fuck me shoes, the sort you hobbled home in before you had the kids! Come along Papas! Splash on the Old Spice, cultivate that manly air, and come-to-bed smirk! Let's tell the Great British Public that home education is done by sexy mama and papas who pack the kids off to Latin, change from this...


to this...


...and then break out those Jammie Dodgers.

Disclaimer: Grit reserves the right to avoid any consequence of this post. Actually, she probably regrets it already.


*Please note that on some days I include Squirrel, Shark and Tiger both in the swamp-dwelling, comb-fearing brigade and in the cultivated tribe of posh kids who dine with daddy at official functions. Which just shows how socially fluid home educators can be.