A rewarding day

It's Thursday. I look on Thursday as some sort of reward for living through Wednesday.

The first Thursday reward wasn't much of one. It was a notice of an impending county court judgment. This is for a contract that ended in 2002, and was ended by the company involved, and is a demand for money we don't actually owe, which we have paperwork to prove, but instead of accepting that, company X nicked a few hundred quid from our bank account, which resulted in our bank designating this as an unauthorised payment and taking it back again on our behalf, at which point company X dumped a debt collection agency on us and, despite them promising in 2006 that the matter is now closed, have pushed the paperwork onto their solicitors who are taking us to court.

Well, good luck to them. If it continues I'll name the lot of the scoundrels and rogues in a name and shame exercise. Before that happy moment, which may involve a drive down south with a banner in the back of the car, I may consider starting my own campaign which involves sending the same letters to the same people every day for a month just to help nail home a small point about harrassment.

The second reward wasn't up to much either. I look in the paper and see all this stuff about the National Curriculum for the 0-5 year olds. I have to howl with laughter and smash something up with frustration all at the same time.

Apparently, sticking your fingers in your pasta at the age of two can be taken as a sign of literacy. Actually, it's not the total ludicrous nonsense of it which raises my hackles, it's the agenda behind it. Stuff like this suggests that every action by the likes of Squirrel, Shark and Tiger, is available for public assessment. It also suggests to baby Squirrels, Sharks and Tigers, that each of their actions is not part of growing up, but part of a national system of achievements and failures, all of which is going to be watched and assessed by someone else with a tick-box sheet. My, that sounds empowering.

Well childhood takes a long time. And thank goodness that I started that process being able to hang spaghetti on my ears, show off my scribbly pictures, boast about the scab on my knee where I fell out of Big Bro's trolley, delight in what I'd found in the garden soil, hide my failings, mistakes and shames and threaten PigFace Bins that if she did that again to me I'd smack her in the mouth. Say what you like about the 1960s, but after a day like that I could fall asleep without the neighbour filling in a set of ticky boxes about me. And as an adult, I'd like to continue the same, if the National Curriculum for 40-50 year olds is going to allow it, of course.

After I have to put the soap box away for fear of crashing right through it, we're onto the third reward of Thursday.

Well this isn't much of a reward either. Dig pushes off to the airport to catch a flight to Middle earth. He's gone for much of a week, and I'm single-mothering again, with only the solicitors of the debt collection agency for company.

Not surprisingly, I've had enough now of Thursday, and of the kid who just put up two fingers at me while I parked outside the Co-op, of the tut I got at the Post Office when I asked for stamps, of the unfixable internet radio which stops working within five minutes of Dig leaving the house, and of the git who threw a Pepsi can into our hedge where the birds are nesting.

So for the rest of Thursday, I'm rewarding myself with a raid on the fridge for the banana pie we made yesterday, and the remains of the wine bottle upstairs by the bed.

Of course I could always look forward to Friday.