Posted on the 5th

I hate April 1st with its great big false nose and stupid fake beard. It is a pointless, annoying nuisance of a day. It is one of the few days of the year I actively wish could be kicked around town by people like me; embittered, past-it old hags with no sex life and no desire to join in national fun. If anyone invented this day, they should stand up now and claim the credit. Then I can swing a sign round their neck and boot them into the canal as well.

I know some people will think this is a slight over-reaction to a calendar date, but I am sure there are many more who will agree with me.

For a start I can't read the newspapers because I can never find the sodding funny joke. When it is pointed out to me, I find it so unhilarious it only raises my thirst for vengeance, knowing I wasted seconds of my life looking for it.

Then I can't bear the thought that some large corporate will have felt duty-bound to turn the pointless day into some great PR success. Desperate to get their brand mentioned in Campaign or talked about on the Media pages of the nationals, they'll have been busy for months thinking up a tortured, obscure marketing stunt which they're convinced makes them look cool on the street with the kids, when it only makes them look like idiots.

Stupid enough to have once found employment as an advertising copywriter (don't ask: I was shit) I was unfortunate enough to witness six men in identical suits and ties locked in an office convinced they could think up something funny. These are people who spend 364 days of their life in account handling, product management, and corporate finance. It was agony. The best they could come up with was an in-joke about a car. Yeah, Dave! We could say it's just like the XJ! (Five men roll about laughing.)

Of course April 1 is made a health hazard if you have kids, so don't tell them about the ritual. They will want to do stuff to each other which ranges between pathetic and pointless to stupid and downright dangerous. Kids have no sense of scale or fun when they set about concocting a practical joke. Making an apple pie bed will be in their minds just as funny as pushing grandma under a bus. What's worse is that of course they won't be able to confine the hilarious pranks to a single day. No. The day will merely fuel an ever escalating April-long revenge saga which will leave the house looking like a stage set of Hamlet.

There is only one thing I am grateful for in this enforced march through contrived, painful, national humour, and that is I have such a chronic sense of the calender that I didn't realise it was April until yesterday.

And we're not missing an education, thanks.

The Grit&Dig Story: Doing it our way
The GritandDigFamily have been successfully delivering topical and incisive educational events to the little grits for over 10 years, reaching communities and experts in Geology, Mathematics, Biology, Science, Arts, Crafts, Drama, Dance, Physics, Botany, Astronomy, Cultural awareness, Languages, English Literature, Cuisine, Unicorn maintenance and Running about the garden without your knickers on.

Supported by key people - including Museum curators, Gallery staff, Education officers, Community workers, Medical and Health professionals, Sports instructors, French teachers, Musicians, Artists, All the librarians roundabout these parts and Doreen at the Co-op, Not forgetting most human beings - our unique lifestyle educational events keep the little grits up to date with the key ideas in all academic disciplines, including what the bastard politicians are up to now, and best practice in home education.


Forthcoming Conference: Taking place on a field walk near you
Our mission is to be at the forefront of education, providing total opportunity for living and learning. Every day, the little grits are faced with the freedom to take to the great outdoors to learn about themselves, the world, and their society, engaging with professionals who bloody well know what they're taking about and who are not Miss Timms covering class 3D for French again because the regular teacher is still off sick with stress.


And if you haven't yet got it, here's some more.

• We don't need a personalised consolidation learning manager to streamline the individual educational attainment target of our every child.
• We don't need an interactive working partnership to identify re-engagement strategies for efficient and cooperative mainstream opportunity educational delivery.
• Neither do we want effective roundtable discussion processes to better enable our informational target setting and policy sharing practices deliverable to all monitoring methods.
• What's more, piss off with your strategic information sharing database resource.

That feels better.

Now, here's the walk over Whiteleaf Hill Nature Reserve. We took the walk with practising geologists, map-makers and botanists. We had freedom to explore soil characteristics, vegetation, and a chalk quarry. The little grits felt the clay beneath their feet and the chalk between their fingers. I watched the faces of my daughters greet the sun and the rain and the whip of the wind, and I delighted when they, wiser than I, showed me things about the world that I never knew before.

Then everyone came home covered in chalk dust and mud.