But I do turn into an Edwardian candelabra at midnight

Dig is all up for attending this year's ball at Oxford.

I include these photos for the benefit of passing American readers.




Why we are going, do not ask. It is inexplicable to me.

But tonight we dump the kids with Aunty Dee who trailed us yesterday on our halting journey down England's main drain otherwise called the M1.

Yesterday, the amiable aunty took Shark out of our equation. Today she is sleeping with the mice, mould and spiders in the cellar (how well we treat the relatives!) but with the sole purpose to give us parent people some time out.

Maybe she has caught wind of something final, like Dig is whisking me away to say, now he has had time to think about it, divorce is a good idea, but just one thing: would I stay on to do the laundry? That would be helpful.

That matter aside, and on the Oxford issue instead, be less than impressed.

A college administrative assistant (who probably should know better) put me on the graduate invite list, possibly by accident. At Oxford I merely did a Jeffrey Archer; I slipped round the back door of the august institution to crawl out a year later with the ignominy of a vocational qualification (aka PGCE) and I have been on the invite list ever since. Unlike him, I play the connection down, and I never go, if only to spare the blushes of Fellows.

But tonight Dig, who has far more claim to these events than me, has something in his bonnet and wishes to go.

Easy-going Grit (yes! I am! it is true!) thus complies. But what do you expect that I go along and pick a fight with a bouncer, true gutter girl that I am?

The problem I have is that someone is apparently keeping their eye on me, because I have, in a crowd composed mostly of foreign graduates and a few gently moulding academics, craftily managed to get my ungainly mitts round a glass bottle. (Wine, not beer, if anyone is alarmed.)

A glass bottle in my hands is not allowed. (Do not mention the bottles all the waiters have been swinging round.) I may be aged over fifty, have had three kids wrenched from my bowels, suffered enough indignities and disgraces to make you put your fingers over your eyes, and be old enough to be the bouncer's mum, but from all this life experience it must be assumed I have neither learned nor grown, not one jot.

I must not be trusted, perhaps for fear that with my age, experience and disposition I go berserk, glass the aging historian propped next to me and I swing the fragmented bottle round my head while dancing naked in the quad.

So the glass bottle is removed and I am given the dregs in a plastic cup. A PLASTIC CUP. Yes, dear Americans, I may be standing at an Oxford ball and be dressed in designer Marella, but I can only drink from plastic.

Well of course this sets me off. I hunt down King Bouncer and discover that to have this legitimate authority to remove glass from old ladies I have to pay two hundred and fifty pounds every three years to the Security Industry Authority run by the Home Office. Once I am in charge of putting a team together to bounce the venue I can more or less choose who I would like - maybe a few pals - and they can eye-spy glass bottles clutched in the claws of dodgy old birds like me and act appropriately in the interests of health and safety of you all.

Suffice to say it did not all end too well, but at least from the evening I managed to gain a gentleman to accompany me back at 3am to the hotel, so I can reassure any concerned reader that I never glassed the historian, never danced naked in the quad, am not returning to prison, have no black eye, nor am yet irrevocably divorced.

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.

Then Dig got up and moved.

I sat on the ferry the other day and got quite angry.

Scowling, muttering, eyeball rolling, and finger-in-the-air jabbing is exactly how you can tell.

Fortunately, this time Dig was sitting next to me, so I wasn't surrounded by a widening space and people peering from behind their newspapers.

Today, they probably assumed I was cross with Dig. Like, he fails to put out the rubbish! It should be his job! What else does he do around this house? (Apart from earn all the family income.)

But I was not cross with Dig. No. I was cross because sometimes I do not feel I have a voice.

Incidentally, if I did have a voice, no-one would listen. People lose all consciousness the moment they see The Hair. I wish I could say that my hair looks as generous and fulsome as a pair of Pamela Anderson strap-on breasts, and that is why most people are struck dumb on meeting me for the first time. It is not. Looking at my hair is like looking into a scaled model of the Big Bang. One that has gone terribly, horribly, wrong.

Now even I'm getting distracted by The Hair. Forget The Hair. That is not the point of this post.

The point of this post is that I read a discussion a little while ago, about whether small groups working together can create ideas and act upon them in such a way to impact society for the better.

The writer invited suggestions about how community groups can be encouraged. The first comment to appear in that discussion was of the nature 'teach community involvement in school'. I thought, that is so totally the wrong way round, I could smash up the monitor screen so I never had to read that comment ever again.

Then I wanted to write a comment about the communities I am part of, and say things about how they work in society. But I knew there was no point in adding to that discussion anyway, because no one there would listen. They had already wandered off into how schools could help teach a community how to be a community. My voice would be way out of that discussion, discounted, and lost.

So I thought maybe I should put some of my comment into my own blog, because that is my place for a voice, even though it is sometimes weepy, self-pitying, rambling, incoherent and downright odd.

So here it is.

One of the groups of people I listen to and talk to is the home educating community. I do not know sometimes if I am part of it or not, nor sometimes whether I should call it a community.

Astonishing diversity characterises this group of people. Rich, poor, middle income, on benefits, professional. School-at-home; autonomous; flexi-school; natural learners; learners with very specific needs and qualities and gifts, and kids who just want to draw horses (hello Tiger!). We're all there, swilling about.

Of course we don't all simply agree. Sometimes, when there is a political issue afoot (like whether to draw up new guidelines for local authorities or not) you could lock two home educators in a room together and fifteen minutes later one will emerge with a black eye and the other with a fistful of hair. If we're lucky they might have agreed to disagree.

In a way, that is how it should be. The voices are diverse, chaotic, yelling to be heard, arguing that no-one represents an individual better than an individual themselves.

But from it I can see two things. First, the most incredible qualities. Resourcefulness, strength, wisdom, and bloody minded determination. You will receive a hard and fast welcome somewhere here. Open hands, straightforward talk, and generous warm hearts will help you on the way.

Second, you'll find a willingness to react to social challenge. That might be because, if you home educate, you simply throw your kids in the face of society. You parade them to the library at 10.30 on a Monday morning. You stand arguing in front of the museum exhibit on iguanas for an hour. You march them to the shops while one kid is dressed as a skeleton, and the other has experimented with the blue face paint again. When society notices us, which they do, then believe me, we aren't going to wither and creep away under your gaze. We're going to stand up and tell you what we do.

From that, I'm going to assert that people in this home ed world are natural innovators, both in education, and in society. We push at the mainstream because we face it daily. You can see us everywhere presenting different agendas, a different approach to living and learning, different educational thinking, and different resourcing. That type of innovation should be supported and encouraged. The previous government reacted to it by attempting to control it, micro manage it, and measure its life-blood against a list of dead tick-sheets nailed to the coffin lid of a clipboard.

If you doubt me, compare your mainstream educational provision. There, you're hidebound by years of rules, guidelines, vetting procedures, checks, more checks, inspections, tick sheets. No-one can move from one classroom to another without massive organisational and timetabling input from several members of staff. How inefficient and unresponsive to change can that be? How can you teach community growth, wisdom, innovation, from that?

So you should listen here. People in the home educating community may be very diverse and seem to argue a lot, but we are distinguished from the mainstream, and that is our very great strength.

We have a very different relationship with state authorities; we come to those authorities with different demands, expectations, ideas and resources. We are not going to simply accept what we are told or given. We do not need to be 'taught' how to create a community. We do that already, based on our shared interests, outlooks, and kids.

And as for the mainstream? We will shape your expectations. We will shape your schools. We will shape your educational future. We are already doing that. We do it because we are committed to what we do. We are doing this visibly in your neighbourhood community every single day of the year.

That is why the commentator who immediately reaches for mainstream school as the place to teach community involvement is looking in the wrong direction. Look the other way, to home educators: we are showing you a way forward. And it is another reason why you should take Grit very seriously and stop staring at the damn hair.

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.