We all have our secret desires

Shark, Squirrel and Tiger have been asking for months for this experience. So today I let them have it. Aerial Extreme, Willen Lake. (Satisfying.)




Of course I am motivated not by the education or socialisation on offer, but by self-interest.

While the offspring are twenty foot up, and cannot do or say anything to stop me, I run off to the big city. Sue the make up lady peers at my face and nods, consolingly, then sells me some mascara.

Completely bewitched and in thrall to the solutions for premature aging offered confidently by a woman with neat hair, a label, and a tub of white stuff that looks like PVA, I make an appointment to be completely done over and lose ten years.

(Shut up. Let me keep my fantasies intact. I know them for what they are. I have worked hard to get them, they are mine, and I don't want anyone robbing them from me now.)

Pixar and the total truth

You can't ever be let down by a cartoon, can you? You have characters smashed to the ground with a frying pan in the face, but they get up and carry on, maybe running off a cliff until they realise gravity exists. Then they crawl out the hole in the ground with lumps all over their face.

I love those fantasies, because they're so human. I don't know about you, but I already skulk between the emotional worlds which give those cartoon moments their compelling power. I lurch between predictable sequences of blind optimism and crushing realisation towards quiet resentment, driving grudge and self pitying misery without any prescience whatsoever. It's like experience teaches me nothing! I am destined to fall off the cliff after the frying pan moment time and time again!

So it's an easy leap from here to totally believe that houses can be lifted by balloons, cars can talk and toys do live. It's a great world to inhabit, where anything can happen! Except intense emotions like joy or despair, such as arise with sex or death. Cartoons can't do either of those properly, so even that is pretty much like most normal life round here on any average day of any average week.

The result of inhabiting an emotional and thematic landscape much the same as Toy Story (e.g., maturity, loss, loyalty, optimism, self-delusion, crushing reality), means of course I must visit the exhibition Pixar: 25 years of animation. It's opening in Hong Kong but travelling round to you soon.


The delight I feel on seeing the behind-the-scenes stuff which makes up real/cartoon life must be like getting high on drugs. But who needs those when you can see a beautiful 3D crafted model of Darlene from Finding Nemo? Or find out that there is indeed a job of fur grooming on a computer animated pink teddy bear? This is fantastic reality indeed, and I take to bouncing around the exhibition like an irritating six year old, pointing at stuff and squealing.

Shark, Squirrel and Tiger put up with it all, and tell me that none of it is really real. They try to persuade me that dogs do not really talk when you strap an electronic translating sound box collar to their throats, and neither does an elderly person carry a lone party balloon up a garden path to a solitary house, itself about to be airlifted to a jungle where humans must struggle with their place on the line that threads together brutality and civilization.

But children, they do, they do.

Rock porn

Rocks are very satisfying. Don't ask me why, they just are. We all have our wobbly knees and swoony bits. Some people like to dress up as a horse, and others fancy pigeons. Me, it's a matter of teeny tiny earth sparkles and crumbly layers of sediment. They bring me out in goosebumps.

Of course I have to pretend that fondling rock is educational. Otherwise I will never get away with this stuff. So I drag Shark, Squirrel and Tiger to the geopark at Sai Kung and intone in a teachery voice that now we are academic and note-takery geologists of all things rock and mineral.




See? It works! There are the children, examining mineral composition, sedimentary layers and basalt columns! Once they are busy, I can sneak off and give that rhyolite a damn good licking. Then I can take home trophy pictures for my secret rock porn album.






Ah! Aren't they beautiful!

Ahem. Now, please excuse me while I disappear to conjure with trachydacite lava and banded granite. A woman just has to give in to these things.

Thank you Richard Vaughan! Grit's new job is PROSTITUTE!

Hey, Richard! Writer of the article on HOME EDUCATION for the TES! Yes, you! You wrote the article published 12 June!

Richard, you might have saved us.

Since I gave up a full time job to HOME EDUCATE my children, I've become used to making decisions, like, do I buy new boots at John Lewis for £180? Or do I buy used shoes at the RSPCA charity shop for £3? Well, sometimes there's no real choice, because my kids need books, resources, outings, computer stuff and art materials. And tell me about the cost of those acrylics!

Well you obviously appreciate that home educators don't usually receive money from the state just because they've chosen a different way of education from you. Not a bit. Usually, it's a big hit on our time, commitment, energy, and pockets.

Which is why your suggestion is just tickety-boo! It could be a nice little earner, no? Don't be SHY! It was you, wasn't it Richard, who conflated the article on HOME EDUCATION with this paragraph on PROSTITUTION?

The Department for Children, Schools and Families has issued new guidance with the Home Office to safeguard children from sexual exploitation and prostitution. It revises guidelines published in 2000 in a report, Safeguarding Children involved in Prostitution. Delyth Morgan called all frontline professionals to work together to identify children at risk of sexual exploitation and take the 'best steps to keep them safe from harm'.

Of course you know that home education often means learning things together with our children. So if my child is now living in a world where HOME EDUCATION and PROSTITUTION can be dealt with as if they are pretty much one and the same thing, of course they should know about it.

Well, I'm their teacher! I'll find out first!

Now bear with me Richard, because I'm new to this game, and I may not have all the lingo just yet. I've done my advertising on the back lanes.


And I've had a little rummage in the wardrobe and come up with this. Do you think it will help?


Look a bit closer, Richard. Something might tickle your fancy.


Sorry, I don't have all the face mask stuff yet. I found these eye patch things that Dig bought back from an aeroplane.


Ohh la la, Richard!


And when we are very naughty, Richard, I could read to you about THE BATTLE OF BOSWORTH.


And then we could get down to some serious work. Again, you'll have to forgive me. It's just what we've got in the cleaning cupboard right now.

Well, Richard. Big Boy. Thanks for suggesting this angle. Me, I would NEVER have THOUGHT that HOME EDUCATION AND PROSTITUTION BELONG TOGETHER.

I should give you a discount.*

*But sadly, due to irritating ideas about accuracy, decency and fairness in this country, I've been forced to accompany the opening of my new business with a letter to the Press Complaints Commission.

On reflection, is this home ed lark such a good idea?

I think I may have reached the state of parenthood I've longed to reach. Possibly for eight years.

This desired state is one where I roll out of bed one morning and say Uh? Where is everybody? and then, when I get no answer, go back to bed with a cup of coffee and today's Independent.

This state of parenthood is novel to me, and a bit like a magical transformation from anguished, care-worn, beaten, down-hearted, frustrated, lonely, miserable and hoarse, to invigorated and relaxed. In fact I may indulge in one of my favourite fantasies, now I have time. Not the one involving Dig, naked, with antler horns on his head as he dances around the garden. But the one where in the cafe I tentatively inquire what's the vegetarian option for the day? I sigh as I hear the microwave ping and expect the answer, omelette. Then the woman at the counter actually looks straight at me and smiles a warm smile and says Crank's Pepperpot Soup – the one that gives your weary soul a great, delicious hug. And with it you can eat, for free and as many as you like, fresh cooked garlic croutons that explode those garlicky kisses straight inside your mouth. That one.

Now I'm not sure why I feel in this relaxed state, or what has created this phenomenal change. There is no logical reason to this, after all. It could be, of course, that I have mislaid reason completely, and am now benefiting from unselfaware insanity. While I was sleeping, some Buddhist nirvana then sheltered inside my brain and kicked out all fears, self doubts, frustrations and angers, and put in their place happy thoughts, freshly brewed coffee, and today's unread newspaper.

But I have to face more fearful possibilities, too. Like this strange relaxed mood comes about not in spite of Shark, abstracted entirely, but because Shark is abstracted: enclosed in a field in Wales some hundreds of miles from home.

This Sunday morning, someone else will wake her, hopefully not by pelting her with a puffin or screaming at her head, then she will be offered a breakfast choice which I have not had to prepare, cook, or wash up for. From this point someone else will get her ready for a mountain ramble and hopefully she won't complain, squeal, argue or drag her feet, and if she does, that's not my problem. Then someone else will feed her lunch, busy her with quad bike challenge, feed her tea, fuss about 8 o'clock cocoa, and sort out the bedtime routine. None of which will include me.

I may feel confident she's having fun and is safe and will be insufferable when she comes home, but for the interim her absence does something else. It reduces our family status to the sublime peacefulness that is twins.

I cannot escape this observation, that twins play together. They have squabbles, upsets and fallings out, but there is no third dynamic introducing new constraints, knocking all games off course, providing new inclusions and exclusions, laying sister baits and traps, provoking one, playing divide and rule, all while safely knowing that if you piss off one sister, that's OK, because you've got another one to play with who was pissed off yesterday by Squirrel, and who right now will be a co-conspirator for revenge.

The fact that I can sit this morning with a cup of coffee and Gordon Brown in thick black print, and think these thoughts in a logical, ordered line, betrays something else that's new, too. The house is quiet. The house is so strangely quiet I think I may have sent Squirrel and Tiger away for an adventure holiday week and forgot about it. But no, because here are the two of them, sat on Squirrel's bedroom floor, listening attentively to Watership Down. All six uninterrupted hours.

And then I get to really think. Because what if twins became no children at all during 8.15am to 4pm? What if all my kids are occupied elsewhere? Would I spend everyday like this? Peaceful. Ordered. Calm. You people who send your children to school. Do you seriously walk around the earth with this knowledge that responsibility for the day's hours are all elsewhere? This wondrous calm and peace? This ability to think? Like Today I will read the newspaper! To be in charge of your own limbs and not be beaten by a willow fish? To think Hey! I'll use the blue cup! and not by doing so, create World War III and all the earth's destruction? And is the house so blissfully under your own control, with no-one else to pour oil down the toilet, compose a clay horse on the kitchen table, or paint the chairs orange, because it looks like a nice colour and we had a tin of it?

If really to send your children away, day after days, means this much calm and ordered peace, then I'm in. When Shark returns, she may just find the result of her summer camp is a brisk march down the road, dressed in black and white with mummy Grit behind her, urging, Let's not waste a minute now, because I've a full day ahead. After lunch with Laura I have an appointment with the manicurist and then, because I am a busy mummy, I need to hit the gym and book tickets for the opera.

Naked men or Bali?

I spend the afternoon wishing I was swimming. This has to be a pretty bad afternoon, even by my standards. In fact, it is so bad that by 5pm I am reminding myself about the actual benefits of sitting in someone else's bathwater. That would be, I reason, far better than waiting five hours for Shark, Squirrel and Tiger to come out of the pool so we can all go home.

Waiting, in this instance, means the horrible realisation five minutes after arriving at the pool viewing area, that I have forgotten to bring a book. There is nothing to do. I tell myself, in wilful self-delusion, that Shark, Squirrel and Tiger are unlikely to spend more than an hour in the pool, so I could amuse myself by making idle conversation with a stranger about whether they sell crisps here, and then pacing up and down.

After twenty minutes doing that, I then spend the next four hours in the dense and humid atmosphere of the 'Beachside cafe'. After two hours, and with no sign of Shark, Squirrel or Tiger, who presumably have taken themselves off to the bit of the pool called 'beach oasis' or something similar, I give in and go up to the coffee bar and inquire about the coffee. Is it freshly ground? I ask. Nikki, who stands behind the till with half-closed eyes and a vacant expression on her face that looks like her brain was removed for disposal last Wednesday, barely flickers a glance to register my question before shifting her chewing gum over to the other cheek, swallowing, and replying dreamily, Nah. Instant.

By 4pm, my face looks like Nikki's and, like her, I make my own amusement. I imagine that in the middle distance, probably some way between the water slide and the plastic palm tree, there may be a concealed entrance to a mythical male changing room where naked men travel backwards in time to refresh themselves Roman style in a plunge pool. From the little I have read of physics, time holes emerging from the fabric of the universe should be a possible occurrence and may indeed be happening in a swimming pool near you. But only if you keep watching. The space behind the plastic palm seems as good a place as any for this to occur and anyway, the fantasy keeps me quiet, stops me accosting complete strangers for chatting purposes, and knocks 30 minutes off the waiting time. Until a wet woggle hits me at the side of the face and Squirrel emerges. Are you coming out? I ask eagerly, jumping up. No she shouts, and then, look after my woggle. That's the only sign of Squirrel for another 45 minutes, so I go back to staring at the plastic palm, and wishing.

Of course I should have been wiser. Before setting out to take Shark, Squirrel and Tiger for their PE lesson (let's call it that, and not 'Fooling About at the Leisure Pool'), I should have checked exactly what is so special about this place, and why everyone from around here jumps in cars to travel to it. I see immediately on entry. Compared to the local sluice we frequent, where on a good day you may avoid the poo, but on a bad day will be enveloped by floating snot, this is a palace.

For a start, the woman on Swimming Pool Reception wears a smart polyester blouse, doesn't have nicotine stained fingers or bleached hair and doesn't, as she glances up to clock us coming, stop mid-flow in a stream of effing-and-blinding to take a sharp breath inwards, and then start off again. This place is definitely upmarket. Not only does it have Doreen in a polyester blouse and the Beachside Cafe, it also has a water slide, plastic palm trees, fake rain, a pool with Jacuzzis and rivers built in, and a wave machine. This last item has to be one of the most intriguing things to have entered Grit's meagre world since she saw the panther on Monday and conjured up a naked Roman athlete at 3.30.

Oh girl of the shires, I can imagine you say, do you not know of wave machines? We have them everywhere in our upmarket cities, possibly even in Sainsbury's. But it is the first time I have ever seen one, and despite myself, I find I'm agreeing with Shark, Squirrel and Tiger on the way home, Yes, the waves are amazing! They've kept Shark, Squirrel and Tiger in delirious excitement and in the pool for nigh on five hours. The staff set the machine going every 30 minutes. Then you can grab a surfboard and pretend you're off the coast of Bali.

Next time, given the choice of a five-hour wait alongside Nikki in the Beachside Cafe, with the sadly dwindling hope of finding naked men fresh from the plunge pool, I may just choose to go swimming with Shark, Squirrel and Tiger, and be in Bali.

A trip to Oxford

Here's a rare picture of Grit, so treasure it. Squirrel, Tiger and Shark are asleep in the sofa bed, double bed and pull-out. Grit's in the bathroom as the only place left to drink a beer with the light on. And the Travelodge Hotel on the Woodstock Road in Oxford is where Grit, Shark, Squirrel and Tiger are staying tonight.

Dig, meanwhile, is staying in the posh hotel in Oxford, eating posh food, drinking posh wine, and being feted by posh people who dress nice, don't scream that they hate the world and everybody in it, and who use a knife and fork properly and not as weapons with which to attack their dining partners.

Staying in the Woodstock Road Travelodge while Dig does important things down the road all seemed like a good idea when I embarked on it. You see it's part of my long-held fantasy of travelling about trouble-free in home ed happiness, searching out art galleries, museums, science parks and gardens all over England. In this fantasy, me, Squirrel, Tiger and Shark stay overnight cheaply and simply in a Travelodge family room, see the wondrous sights, and come home again. A simple vision for a simple life. The Woodstock Road Travelodge is our first experiment.

I cannot say that so far it has gone particularly well. Despite explaining to Elizabeth Hurley at least forty times yesterday that the Grit and Dig family is out tonight, she has affected total surprise at our departure this morning and asked what should she do for dinner.

On the journey here, Tiger has been complaining and angry about having to sit in the car, be near a sister, look out of the window, listen to a story, be taken to a Roman villa site and, she says, being forced to look at a horse when it's not fair because Shark saw it first and Shark does everything first so why should she because there is no point.

Then it gets worse. Once we drop Dig off we attempt to visit a local wildlife park. I get to the pay booth and Tiger's angry complaints have descended into a screaming fit, so I turn away with apologies and pull into a lay-by so that Tiger can jump out of the car and kick her car seat to bits.

Once Tiger's calmed down enough we get back to the Travelodge and I drop the keys down the toilet. I have to scoop them out with my hand because the coat hangers are locked onto the wardrobe rail. At least this makes the big fight about the toy unicorns, which get banned from the room and imprisoned in the car, less of a torture than it otherwise might have appeared.

Then tonight Mummy Grit offers Squirrel, Shark and Tiger a drive into Oxford to get some chips. For the first ten minutes in the car, all goes well. Then somewhere approaching Carfax, Tiger's rage returns with a vengeance and she threatens to smash the car windows in while kicking me as I'm driving, thus forcing Mummy Grit to do an emergency stop, stick all the hazards on, and burst into tears.

When I've composed myself enough to move away from the traffic lights where I've stalled to a hazardous halt, I drive on to find a chippie. I take Squirrel and Shark inside with me, and suffer the suspicious questioning of fryer Rocky who is probably alarmed by the sight of a dishevelled, disoriented woman towing two anxious-looking children about at 8 o'clock at night while a third child appears to be locked in the car, screaming. In truth I have left Tiger in the car either to smash her way out or calm down. Fortunately, she chooses the latter and, along with her sisters, is equipped with a comforting bag of hot chips for the journey back to the room.

Unfortunately, because I'm disoriented, I have no idea where I am. This is pretty good going as I lived in Oxford for a year, but at the moment total memory loss seems to be par for the course: yesterday I lost a piece of the oven. Anyway, I reason we are somewhere in the centre of Oxford and will get out. We do get out. But not before I have driven almost a full circuit round the Oxford ring road looking for the Woodstock Road Travelodge.

And there you have it. I'm sitting in the bathroom, drinking beer while the kids are all asleep, and decide to photograph the moment. And if you are wondering where Grit is sitting since there are not usually chairs in bathrooms in your average Travelodge hotel, you are right.

May day fantasy

Being the day it is, when virgins take themselves off to sweet meadows and roll about the dew before dancing themselves senseless with ribbons and flowers around the Maypole, Grit might just have to indulge in some May day fantasies.

Grit's May day fantasies might involve Stefan, the gym teacher where Squirrel, Shark and Tiger take their gym lessons, who is sculptured from material left over from the making of the gods and has a backside... well, enough of that. Or it might be Grit au naturel following her female urges to dance into woods and forests forever, collecting May flowers and weaving scented garlands and singing Tum-tee-hum-hum-hum, before getting cold and fed up, wondering where the toilets are and is there a 5-star hotel nearby for a decent coffee and a slab of chocolate cake.

OK, I might backtrack from the eco-bit, but I wouldn't mind being crowned on a flower-covered throne with May blossom garlands and be The Queen. Then we could pretend the lawn was the village green and Shark and Squirrel and Tiger could dance about. This would be highly gratifying because I could have been chosen from all of the pretty girls of the village to reign over the May Day festivities.

I have to admit this is not likely. I am not exactly the prettiest grape in the bunch and Shark has said she is not dancing ever ever ever, so before I took the throne I'd have to squash the rebellion from the Maids of Honour, then it would turn into a power struggle and would end up looking like a reenactment from the Battle of Bosworth.

Perhaps I could try engaging in some home ed fantasy. Like teaching the children about driving cattle through fire. On second thoughts this might be dangerous because Squirrel sometimes takes things literally and might set fire to her plastic cow set or put them in the oven without telling me like she did with her pretty pink beads.

If all this fails I could try enlisting Dig for some energetic Morris dancing. We could try sticking some deer antlers on him and banging a drum loudly to get him in the mood for a turn around the lawn. I bet he would be a kill-joy though and say he's not playing. So we would have to wait until he falls asleep in his office chair in front of his computer before putting the antlers on. Then I'd get Tiger to start banging the drum.

I don't know. I'm not sure I can translate Grit's fantasies into reality. But I can console myself. I'm sure all these May day rituals are about death or survival. And because suicide's out of the question since it might hurt, the remaining thing I can say with certainty going on every day round here, is survival. But only just.