Sickness benefit

I suppose I should make a home education point rise from the sick. Okay. It is that in this off-template, non-school household, sickness can take its time.

Shark, Squirrel and Tiger are mostly better. I've waved buckets, twitched blankets, and offered warm water scented with honey. I guessed the vomit would exhaust itself, and it did.

Admittedly the caring maternal halo began to slip a bit mid-way through the second phase (let's say the invalids were grateful to be left alone without Nurse Grit's devotions), but the point is, I could concentrate on the sick.

I haven't lived with any pressure for them to be well before their three-day deadline is up. I haven't needed to write excuse notes, nor feel defensive when I explain how it seems to be a vomit of four days, not a convenient one. I've done no telephoning, fielded no queries from a school office, neither been frightened into pushing the kids back to the classroom regardless of whether they are well.

The gloomy pressure from the school would have weighed on me throughout. I would have needed a doctor's note because the presumption would be after three days that without official sanction, my kid is faking and I am lying.

It's all in preparation for that particular brand of office misery where people must show up at ever more ridiculous times, regardless of their own health, to show how hard they are working and how devoted they must be to the job. Or else. It's a very unattractive feature of British working life. I have seen office administrators out-do each other by alternatively boasting and whining that they have been in the office since 6am, so where were you?

I'm relieved that in my world, people can fall ill, spend time recovering, feel bleugh again, lounge all day watching movies, and the worst that can happen is that I seize the opportunity, pull down the biology books and show everyone a diagram of their intestines.

Slowly I'm finding the virtue of ruthlessness

I don't know what shifty excuses, underhand activities or downright lies you use for the type of problem I have today, but I call it Oh My God the Travelling Aunty is coming to visit.

For a long time I have been respectful of the kid stuff that collects in all the corners, in the drawers, against the walls, over the beds, under the sofa, and on every surface their fingers can reach, but doesn't there come a point?

Round here, the point is, Remember she is a social worker. If she claps eyes on this lot, she'll be calling Childline.

But we have been here before, have we not, dearest readers? You know how clearing up kid crap is handled Grit style.

In the beginning it was all, Aw, I cannot throw out the little pink bead with the threaded wire! It is Squirrel's fairy handbag and I must treasure it forever!

You see? I was so sensitive and respectful of each precious item! Of course Squirrel didn't care about my soft-hearted sensitivities; she had already poured her devotions into 300 miniature paper scrolls describing unicorn laws.

I had to keep them, too.

When the clutter came up to my eyebrows, the need for survival kicked in. The clear out operation became Dig! Pssst! Get the kids out of here for the day and I can do away with their stuff! Even then I boxed up the precious items. I should have been stronger and told myself the peelings of child play were never a substitute for the real thing.

After that, Michelle came round with bin bags. Thank goodness! She saved me from almost complete submergence under a sea of stuff. Under her direction, nearly everything went. Except for those items I snatched from her indifferent hand; cherished items I had already invested with excess love. Like a slice of painted timber, and a hand-made fabric bird adorned with dollops of glitter glue.

Now, in a rented house with a Travelling Aunty soon landing - and no Michelle-type strong woman to lead me to clarity - I must find within myself the gifts of sightlessness and memory loss.

I have to forget these are the paper rooms for the happy match people, this is the cat toy for the hungry leopard, and this is dolly's diary where she writes her angry thoughts.

I must not pick them up, nor handle them, nor recall the play. I must lay down the law of cleanliness and godliness, tell the offspring to preserve only their best and finest, then send any squeamish onlookers out the house on an errand to buy consolation chocolate.

Once the run is free, I can sweep up the remainders, bag them and bin them and, on the way, remember to take a photograph of the paper beads hand-crafted for the disappointing party night.

Oops.

No punches were thrown. Only handbags were used

Do you know, some days in the domestic conflict management cycle leave me feeling distinctly antagonistic towards my own mini rottweilers, aka my darling children.

But where is the parent who, at some point, would not happily pitch their annoying offspring into a lake, then dance about in celebration, singing Hallelujah?

Like today. We visit the Hong Kong Wetland Centre.

The outing starts as normal - the usual muttered grudges and resentments - but not serious enough to deflect the indulgent mama from offering ice cream on condition she is allowed to maintain her fantasy that we are all having a super high-intensity educational outing.

Hip hip hooray! En route to the Wetland Centre! Top of bus 967.

But when la famille Grit arrive at the first pond, the agreeable humour and cooperative family dynamic immediately depart.

I don't know why, but the Hong Kong Wetland Centre never fails to bring out someone's aggressive side. Last time, it began over the fake otter poo. This time, the mudskippers.

The site of mudskipper mayhem.

Yet I discover, edging my perilous way like a UN ambassador in a corpse-strewn tribal region, that the mudskippers are not the underlying cause. They are merely the icing on the cake.

The fisticuffs du jour fanning out across the wetlands, now between Tiger and Shark, careless of the happy home ed group we are here to meet, are really because these children - with their inherited control issues interwoven with their triplet sibling rivalries - have foolishly, on departing the house, and unknown to me, agreed to share a sketch book.

'My turn first. Then yours.'

Uh-ho. If I had known about this I would have nipped it in the bud. Anyone who has more than one child will know how dangerously explosive has been their experience of share nicely.

A bit like putting a lighted match to a bucket of nitroglycerin.

Over the years, along with the healing scars, I have soothed myself with positive thinking. I have told myself that share nicely has been the perfect training ground for your average workplace. There, each person will be placed under a time pressure to compete with colleagues over finite resources. The winning employee will merely demonstrate superior tactics of office weaponry, water cooler manoeuvring, and desk-top backstabbing. These are the strategies learned in the battlefields of share nicely.

But the War of the Sketchbook has now begun. Gentle enough, if you imagine an opening parley of glowering, elbowing, and quite a lot of passive/aggressive from Shark. (So you want me to rip out my mudskippers do you? Fine! I'll rip them out from YOUR SKETCHBOOK.)

From here it escalates to light shoving, stomping off, and a handbagging.

I unwittingly photographed the
seconds following the handbagging.

Then mama hisses you are never to share a sketchbook again, and if there was an old Chinese woman canny enough to sell me sketchbooks right now at $5,000 a pop she'd go home happy, but WAIT. Inside I am boiling with the stupidity of the argument, how I have become a negotiator for a piece of paper, and how wretchedly desirous I feel it would be, given a moment of liberation, to see both of my children FACE DOWN IN A LAKE. Then don't tell me the Hallelujah Chorus is not one of the finest works in the history of parenting.

But so we go on. Finally, after another two hours, the battle culminates; Tiger is in tears and Shark is shiftily edging her feet about with a guilty expression, caught with her moral righteousness and the quicksand on which she is basing her position.

Cue the moment we have all been waiting for. The Peace Treaty. (Triplet method: sidle up to each other, shove each other about a bit, show no offence is taken.)

Peace Treaty of the Wetlands declared at this site.

Well, for today, I have no conclusion, except maybe to blame this undercurrent of aggression and general atmos of vengeance on the Hong Kong weather. Or the high humidity. Or all the fault of the neighbours for yesterday introducing that theme of conflict into our lives when we were all getting along so happily. Bar the routine insults and daily threats.

Now here are more pictures. Looking at them, I can see I could have told quite a different story.

Happy home educated children looking for birds, mudskippers, fiddler crabs and water snakes.
And of course we had ice cream when we got off the bus at Central. It was an excellent educational day.

The awful preparations begin

Hallowe'en is coming.

Did you know that?

If you live in America, no doubt you do. Admit it, you have been on tenterhooks, waiting to realise this fantastic ceremony for the last 363 days. At this point, you probably need nailing down to the ground and tying up with ropes.

I have satisfactorily avoided the worst of Hallowe'en for years. When I have faced it, I have made it English, of course, so the evening has started with tea and biscuits and there hasn't been much else, apart from a little light whining. When the children have forced my hand, then I have turned it into someone else's problem.

Of course I have dabbled, but only where educationally essential, with Samhain. (Child-friendly version: ceremoniously put two plastic Early Learning Centre cows in a cold oven to mark driving cattle through fire then say that is enough. Colour in a picture of a Celt.)

But all that happy and deliberate ignorance and avoidance has come to a sad end. I have now found that I can escape this junction of time no longer.

The reason is simple. I am surrounded by Americans, and other enthusiasts of the genre. There is no way out. Now even I have horns.

The children of course are beside themselves, annoyingly thrilled at the prospect of extracting candy from the neighbours simply by turning up with a plastic bucket. (I have banned that. I am insisting on coconut shells.)

And the costumes. Godhelpme, the costumes. Today I am pressed into service, thrashing between streets and gutters of Hong Kong grovelling in the ten dollar bins like an old tramp in the park.

The purpose is all miserable, as is the experience. I am scrounging cheap factory reject clothing, so three seamstresses can scurry back to their ateliers and convert discarded nylon into a bat, witch, and some half-baked idea about a demon cat.

But I must salvage something from disaster, and simultaneously claim it is life enriching.

Now I can say with absolute certainty that today has been very good and a brilliant opportunity for our ongoing education.

The children can, for example, practice their sewing, then revisit the following ideas: Customs around the world, Changing seasons, and Why are the Americans so completely crazy for this horrible event?

(Don't ask me, I have no idea.)

The saving moment of a weary day crawling through Sheung Wan's factory rejects.
Being distracted by a stationery store.
Discovering these little gems up the backstreets of old Hong Kong
is like discovering a pot of gold at the foot of a rainbow.

Well, only if you are a stationery enthusiast, and not a Hallowe'en aficionado.

Water cannon? That's nothing.

My advice, not that you've asked for it, is that if you're comfortable, in that place in your head where you live, then don't home educate.

If the world already works in neat, organised, predictable ways, and you have your home and work routines safely sorted and complete, better leave it like that.

Don't poke anything. Not with even the weeniest tiny starting question, like Why are we doing it like that?

Take my word for it. Once you start, you'll never stop, and then it's all a disaster. The whole of life can come undone, sliding down around your ears quicker than you can draw breath. Terra firma slips into a sort of thick oozy mud which slides about leaving you no safe place to stand.

The problem, once you imagine how you might make an environment for a child's learning, and worse, make those ideas a reality, is that now you must question everything.

Then you're really stuffed. All your assumptions, ambitions, plans, thoughts, ways of behaving, seeing, doing. And not just once either. No, after you jumped off planet normal, then desperately scrabbled about to make it stable, you have to keep checking, calibrating, assessing, because the damn world shape is now moving off again, out of your control, some place else.

No wonder people who see us flounder about in alternate education land will sometimes say, You must be mad. There's a grain of truth in that.

And if you follow it with, I couldn't do it, then you probably have your head screwed on, tight.

You are right. It can be a midden of a mess.

But you might not see. It can bring astonishing moments.

I can only think of the word revelation - the bewildering joy that I cannot quite explain because it doesn't fit anything I prepared for, fits none of my former ideas, expectations, pathways I thought she took - and I admit it could all be gone tomorrow phfft! - yet I can only guess it sort of fits that point when the shift of the world takes place, and the angels toot toot and the hallelujah chorus crashes, and the extra smug faces of some army or another turn to the non-believers to say, See? We told you so.

Now look at this.

Unremarkable, you say? Tiger working out a bar chart?

After the black middens and molten lands we have crossed, it is more remarkable than anything. It surpasses all.

More remarkable, more worth the telling, than anything. Including how it happened today at the Heritage Museum.

Here we come where I try and make the ground stay firm under my feet, and cause the gritlets to think studiously about Hong Kong for the population bit of my covert IGCSE Geography syllabus.

Where I am sure, the little guard I ignored - the one aged about 14 who told me off for my open sandwich box - in the museum outside seating area! - well, she went right up to the roof and got her own back; showering over us from that vantage point a spraying jet of ice-cold water.

Yes, showing you Tiger with a bar chart is even more remarkable than that.

But I forgive myself. (Frequently.)

After yesterday's pleasurable indulgence I wouldn't want anyone to think that my main motives, driving this home ed life, are to take delight in my capacity for mischief making, and secretly enjoy the expression I can bring about on someone's face.

I deny nearly both of those.

What fundamentally drives me to live life without the institution of school is not petty spite. Of course not! It's that I have to put into practice what I believe in. (Oh holy! Get out the nails!)

But I accept that being able to put something into practice is no measure of how strongly we might believe in it, or even want it to happen.

Which means, I just met someone who looked at the happy-go-lucky grit and the adorable free-range gritlets, then imagined a similar life for their mini-humans, led without school.

They can imagine this life is about perfect. They even imagine it working for themselves. They know how learning outside the walls is no hindrance to a person's happinesses, successes, well-being. Most importantly (because we have not yet come to the promised land) they could ride out the suspicions and negative judgements that can be employed in a trice by neighbours, media, government.

But for a load of reasons, they can't put their belief and strong arm righteousness into practice, and give up school.

So I want to tell them, don't be sad about that. We home educators only look like we're in perfect joy! It's not all roses on this side of the fence.

Because how many of us live a pure ideology? And is that even desirable? Most people make a mish-mashery of compromise. Either that or maybe blow themselves up with the effort of bringing it all together.

So the autonomous-leaning might have to implement a structure and a timetable, because without that, their partner, pursuing them through the courts, will have the kids back in school. Then I've sat next to crumbled pieces of parent who say, We don't want to home educate, but having been through what the school system did, now there's no real choice.

It's probably no help right now, but maybe it's also what I'm motivated by (apart from petty spite), and that's freedom of choice. To have your kid experience and learn the way they want and need; to choose the service or support you want, and freedom not to choose, too; to live it the way you want, as you want it.

I don't have any ideological commitment beyond that. I have not much judgement to make about any school, flexi-school, nor home-school agreement. I have my suspicions about faith schools - I fear organisational control - and I have my suspicions about free schools - I fear organised capitalism - but if they suit, then how can I argue?

So spare my fingers and toes and nail my flag to freedom of choice.

But don't expect me always to stand under it.

Because sometimes I really have to do things in spite of myself. I must deny it all, choose regrettably, make bad judgements.

In this semi-tropical, money-happy paradise, where air con is every breath you take, the trees hang thick with the pollutants from Shenzhen, and the water churns with plastic, I take the kids here.


Yes, I can take the kids to the ice-in-the-tropics skating experience, while hand on heart believing I should be helping create a balanced and harmonious environment, one that's sustainable, both kind to us and to the planet.

We're all driven, somewhere along the line, into the arms of compromise.

Personal celebration day

I celebrate, with a bottle of champagne, and a carry-out curry for the kids.


I have confronted many ideas in our society; not least those that say champagne should be shared, or is a romantic drink, or is better not served with a vegetable balti.


Or, indeed, could be photographed to better effect when there is not a bottle of bleach behind it on the kitchen windowsill.

No matter. Some days, it is just good to celebrate, because I feel like it.

Balancing the successes and the failures

I now have so many preparations to make for our too-soon departure to Hong Kong, that I can afford to waste several hours balancing out success vs failure of our few months in England.

(Let us pray when we have done this futile exercise that we reach equilibrium or, better still, are on the up. Otherwise, I fear the worst. In the woods last week my mind could not help but record how the kiddie rope swing had been most effectively mended.)

Success!
(Most in worship of a god called Education; obeisance performed while feeling smug and self-satisfied about the raising of outdoorsy children, who neither see broccoli as the devil's nose pickings nor imagine the most fun thing they can do on a Friday night is to smash up the city centre.)

1. Five outdoor adventure holidays taken by three children in lakes, woods, fields. Not a bad rate. My advice is: hold your nerve till the final hour. Some desperate adventure holiday company always does a half-price or kid bogof offer. (But not so useful if the holiday is located in Ullapool while you live in Eastbourne.)

2. St George's Day. And the Festival of History. And lots of castle. I love English Heritage, I do.

3. The Globe. Passion, satisfaction, delight, surprise, perfection.

4. Seeing Richard III at the Old Vic. I must pause to sigh.



5. Making jam, like good mother.

6. Local museums, all over the place. Hmm. Not as many as I would have liked. Saxmundham was my favourite, thanks to Peter with the keys.

7. Happy hour cantering for Tiger.


8. Spending time in Suffolk. Should I count as a success the fact that Big Bro's partner left the house before our arrival so she does not have to clap eyes on me or my foul brood ever again? I have put it in the Success list, anyhow.

9. Illyria Theatre. I include here all workshops, parks events, home ed activities, RSPB kiddie group etc. I could not possibly list them all as individual successes.

10. Northumberland. (And this time, avoiding being stabbed by Arctic Terns.)

11. Staying married.

12. Buying a small piece of vinyl. (I know it does not seem much, and it was the wrong size, but it was a big thing to me.)

13. Halting the ferocious advance of The Ivy. (The plant, not the restaurant.)

14. Visiting the tip with the contents of the house bundled into anonymous plastic bags. Strangely satisfying.

15. Organising and executing a week's tour of the Jurassic coast. With hamster. Without injury, loss, disfigurement, imprisonment, hospitalisation. (Very great success.)

16. Killing 235 moths.


Fail.

1. Losing the shifty nightingale for which no vengeance is enough. I will trap the little bastard next time, if I have to sit up all night in Bradfield woods to do it.

2. Missing the British Library Science Fiction Exhibition. Don't show me your Martian badge and say in a funny voice while you are pretending to be a Martian, that it was very, very good.

3. Christmas pudding (make it and eat it). Truly, I am sad about this. I really wanted Sarah's Vegan Christmas Pud. And so what if we celebrate Christmas in August?

4. Visiting Dover castle. Big FAIL. Warning: I will make Dover Castle to see the Great Tower by this same time next year, or explode. Fact.

5. Staying over in Nottingham. (Always on the list.) Yes, I know that Nott'm is one of the premier gun cities of England. But we can all laugh together while we watch our innards splattered over the stone lions in the Market Square in a drugs turf war.

You are probably right. A visit here is a misconceived idea. The kids do not want to loll around The Trip before heading off to an evening's mindless criminal damage with a Robin Hood statue, but it was called fun when I grew up.

6. Other sites of visit FAILURE. Cornwall (Squirrel). North Wales (Tiger). Whale-spotting on the west coast (Shark). Salmon watching in Scotland (Shark). Hull, for The Deep (Shark). I harbour a desire for Scilly Isles burial chambers. So basically, everywhere.

7. All school-type work as recognised by most of the population. Handwriting. Spelling. Maths. Etc. Etc. Big Deep Fail with High Probability of Sudden Anxiety Attack at 2am Type of Fail.

8. Admitting to friends, flung about several counties, that we are now in England. Um.

9. Lace making. Long story, slightly embarrassing.

10. Allowing 756 moths to live because they have gone into hiding.

Now, those are the lists that spring to mind, and I have to say, the comparison of success and fail is NOT BAD.

Indeed, I can now say with some confidence that the children may enjoy the rope swing in the woods without first having to cut down mother.

Playdate

From which I draw yet another astonishing, earth shattering deduction.


When I talk I don't need to write.

Next I shall clean out Tiger's room!

So, in the last 24 hours, I have achieved more than Hercules.

I know, when I list my labours (oh reading joy!), these triumphs will seem not quite so dramatic as they would from a Roman half-god. But take my word for it, they are quite dramatic for a Buckinghamshire resident who is sometimes half-dead.

They include:

Acquiring pink recycling sacks. (Ha! They are available only from the central library, so imagine that gruelling journey! Then facing down the Nemean lion who guards the box where they're kept!)

Making an appointment with the dentist. (The shameful moment I put off last year, then went to Hong Kong to avoid. Being poked in the face by a surgical instrument is far worse than being stabbed by beaks of Stymphalian birds.)

Visiting the bank to withdraw enough cash to pay the stables for Squirrel's adventure week. The stables do not take cards, only cheques, but I cannot find the cheque book although I have looked for it. (I think taking the bull by the horns is appropriate, no? Now is the point to be agog at my determination in the face of adversity.)

Leaving a message for the gardener. The one who is not really a gardener but a man with a chainsaw. (I am not sure which labour this is, but he cannot come round because I have not yet dismantled the piano we keep in the back yard. Maybe I will keep this as a labour for later.)

Locating the new National Trust tickets and putting them in my purse! Yes! This is just like Hippolyte's girdle! (I can now look forward to only a small amount of trouble in trying to gain entry to National Trust properties, as opposed to a large amount of trouble and 25 minutes arguing with the membership desk while secretly wishing to go berserk in the tea shop with a garden fork.)

I think you may conclude these are no small achievements for one day, excepting the piano, which is work in progress, and Hercules may feel a tiny bit outshone.

Looking forward

'Where is daddy?' At Squirrel's question, Tiger stops chewing, her mouth half-filled with pasty. Her gaze slides uneasily to the empty seat at the kitchen table. Shark swings back on her chair, rolls her eyes and tuts.

Squirrel asks again, 'Is he in London?'

I sigh. I think I do. Maybe it is breathing. I need to tell the difference. I live on this borderline between laughter and tears and how I breathe might unbalance me, and push me over, falling on one side or the other.

'Daddy is in Hong Kong' I say. I try and make that sound out like it's of no consequence; maybe he just popped to retrieve paperwork at the office and will come back in a moment. Two months of a moment before we fly out and join him. I dread the date for what Tiger might put me through again; I dread it for losing England, for the uncertainties of how we live without futures.

'Didn't you know he was in Hong Kong?' Shark drawls out her vowels, treading her fine line between deep sarcasm and her exaggerated demonstration of how patient and kind she can be to her confused sister. The date of return to the island can't come soon enough for her; she will possess beach and rockpool once again.

Squirrel is momentarily lost. She could have been anywhere. She's sitting in the chair she fought for, at the position round the table she made her own and, until her sudden realisation, she could have been flying over Namibia, swimming in Quebec, or digging up the veg patch at the bottom of the garden. She looks like she doesn't know which way to go.

'Can daddy make a horse in Hong Kong?'

She has harboured the idea that daddy might like to power up the magical jigsaw tool that curves and shapes wood. She had grand designs on a horse. With her wide eyes registering her dismay, she knows it's too late. She faces the loss of the only parent who can be manoeuvred into a woodworking session. She's left with the other parent, the one who complains about things that don't matter, like spilled beads on bedroom floors and soil in shirt pockets.

I give Shark a push to ground her four chair legs on the floor and I answer Squirrel with a firm 'No'. Then I ask Tiger, What would you like to do in England? It's already too late. Tiger is plunged deep in dark frowning scowl, and silently takes up her chewing with vengeance on the pasty.

We need to swell out the few weeks with purposes and activities, as many as time can hold. That way, maybe, we can all chart a course until the time is up, and we can all tread firmly on the side of laughter.

To The Tip

After yesterday, when time stopped still and I got no further than 5.15, I decided that overthinking a cloud costume until it reaches nihilism is a pointless waste of time.

So this morning I exchange Squirrel's ballet froth for a bottle of beer; I throw in a witch outfit, Snow White, sundry Cinderellas, and a plastic ironing board.

Then I get serious with the chucking out, and begin a marathon 8-hour relay, steadily driving the contents of the garage to the tip.

The first time I get there, I start to feel nostalgic for the days when I could drive up, drop the car's contents onto a stinking heap of landfill, then quickly scarper, burying my conscience along with the refuse. Not now, not any more. In these eco-friendly days, everything must be recycled, which means dividing and sub-dividing the universe into metal/electrical, chipboard/wood, fabric clean/dirty and so on.

Each journey, thanks to this divisionary labour, thus takes no small amount of time. It involves me in a lot of matching my garage junk with their correct container, then staggering left-right, round the corner and back again, bent-backed and filthy, under the burden of wet chipboard, old duvets, and the metal legs of a broken bed.

The first time I do this, it is under the watchful and slightly menacing stare of the staff, employed, it seems to me, to lean on railings. I am sure watching me takes quite a bit of effort. I can only assume they are there to make sure I don't try and evade my ethical duty and dump the lot in garden waste.

I didn't get any help to carry the bed lengths around. None at all. I did note however that the young, lithe, blond twenty-something female wearing a low-cut sleeveless top with wobbly bosoms - the one who, as if she needed to, waved her arms feebly about - well, she received quite a bit of assistance in lifting a puny few bits of timber. Just saying.

I thought I might try her technique, but that idea was never going to get anywhere. I turned up each time in a more dramatic fashion than the last. By the second trip I managed a pair of savagely torn jeans and soot over my nose, and by the third I sported a green and purple bruise over one entire upper arm thanks to a collision with a piano. I thought I couldn't top that, but by trip four I wore a finger bandage made of a cut-up sanitary towel and some duct tape, thanks to nothing of any use whatsoever in the first-aid box except for a plastic ear thermometer. By trip five I carried several spiders in my hair, plus their entire housing estate, and by trip six I had lost the lower left leg of my jeans completely.

At the end of the day's tip experience I looked a little like some monobrowed cave dweller jettisoned through time to the medieval age: hunchbacked and broken, staggering haphazardly about under a layer of grimy robes, garage dust and century-old cobwebs.

But I was high on a combination of the cleaning experience and the excitement of seeing my remodelled garage/craftroom appear under my very nose. Taken to the edge of nervous exhaustion with the physical labouring of the day, I also began speaking in a strange, high-pitched squeak. I think it was then, at the final visit to the tip, that I started leaning on the rails alongside the tip staff, cracking jokes about bottoms and dart boards, the like of which might be suitable for an 8-year old. Gratifyingly, they laughed. I have found my level, and possibly my new vocation.

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.

Papers

Here is the despair and joy that is home ed.


This is the creativity of children, and it is scattered over most of the floor in this house.


It's not mess, although to unimaginative adult eyes, it might look like mess.

Actually, it looks a lot like mess. Especially when I see it in the cold, early morning light, or when I'm tired, facing doubts and troubles. Knowing that only last week, I encouraged this state of affairs.


But I know it is not mess.

It's the reason why I started with home education in the first place. The creativity of children astonished me. They felt and knew everything in the world from love and rage to anguish and patience. Their experiences and understandings poured out in everything they did. It felt like I would commit a crime to shut them away in a crowded room, to take their creativity from them, order and arrange it, compose it in a worksheet, tell them what to do, how to answer, then give it back to them, timed to end in fifteen minutes.


These papers aren't mess. They're the visible parts of a story my children have been telling. It's an old story, and it stretches back a long time. I've asked the children, how long have you been telling this story? 'Years', says Squirrel, definitively. She says it, matter of fact, like this is part of who they are, as if I had asked her name, or her age.

Each time they tell the story, they add more nuance and subtlety and danger and delight. It is indeed, growing older with them.

Sometimes, I see that even at age 10, my children enter so deeply into this story they have trouble translating between fact and fiction or between reality and imagination. They are moved, made angry, given to laughter and delight, at events that emerge from their telling. Each time it's told again, I don't know how it will end. The story might end in tears. It might end in a flash of anger, sharp words, and slammed doors. Or it might be simply paused, everyone agreeing to suspend their part in the story until after tea.

I cannot tell you what the story is. It would be a betrayal. It's not my story to tell. I think I can say that it comes from places where there are unicorns who have rages and loves of their own, and who protect each other and break their word, for which there are consequences and new events to tell.

One day, I hope Shark, Tiger and Squirrel will find a way to tell this story they've made. It won't matter to me whether they do that through art, dance, writing, or simply by being themselves, by expressing their ideas and imaginations.

So it's not mess. Definitely not mess. Even though, some days, it is all so much mess, and so disruptive, and the sight of it causes my heart to sink, because I know I've taken a part in bringing it about. But I know their creativity is still a source of my joy.

I can't help but feel, this is like falling in love with someone who you know won't do your life any good at all. But you still can't help it, and fall in love with them anyway.

Photoblog Hong Kong: Cheung Chau

Another happy family adventure! Coming by ferry into Cheung Chau.


I think it is the cutest looking island in Hong Kong. It has a waist so small, you can stride from one side to the other in five minutes. We do that, obviously. Even if one family member is a bit sulky. Not telling you which one. She is the grumpity mockersbong who points out all the miserable bits of your delightful stroll on the lovely island.


Like Lamma Island, Cheung Chau has no roads, but paths which are filled with bikes, people, and the odd emergency village vehicle. It's very holiday feel and the little streets are very endearing.


Unlike Lamma, the main town is big, with more than one street to wander. On Lamma, you get the shopping path stretching from the Public Toilet to the woman who sells the inflatable shark and that's your lot. Round here there is an overwhelming amount of shopping to be done. There's even a Wellcome, Park n Shop, Circle K and McDonald's! Get that!


Happily, and now I'm ignoring the offyput scowlerflosh, the town feels quite traditional, fishy, and local labour. In fact, there are so many images that divert and delight me, I become quite transfixed with snapping away and looking in every direction except the one my feet travel. Even after the head collision with the sign post I found myself still wishing I had a decent camera instead of a beat up old phone camera with a dodgy battery. It was all that good, whatever the glumble lippypout mumbles.





When the old ladies start staring at me, ganging up on me, and trying to sell me dead fish, I am not one bit deterred. I merely photograph the hat and rice shops, one of the many local shrines, and an interesting door.





But of course I have an educational mission here. It's not all photography fun and games. I'm after the Watersports Centre, in the hope that I can land my sulky globsnotter on a flat chunk of plastic and maybe push her off into the South China Sea with a map of the Philippines. (Only joking, Ofsted! You can call this parental-end-of-tether moment, PE.)


It's all usefully signposted. And I approve of the 3,500 year old rock carving getting a sign post like that. Remember ladies, the seven hours I dragged you round Northumberland? Five minutes in Cheung Chau and we see a sign.

By the bye, here it is.


But I am distracted. Rock art is not the focus for today. There's a lovely walk by the beach. Except that the beach is very Chinese. Municipal, functional, filled with reprimands and prohibitions, No Gaiety Permitted, that sort of thing. I swear they have miserable bastards come round to slop grey paint over any colour like bright orange or primrose yellow. Then I remember all over again why we need social classes. I like a faded pile of ancient upper mixed with an uninhibited heap of shocking pink. I want that. Especially at sea sides.


Anyway, we follow the family trail over the hillside. The crumply grumply doesn't want to go. I ignore her, and say the walk is called something like the mini great wall.


Don't ask me why. Your guess is as good as mine if you use the information boards.

Nice views of cute Cheung Chau, though.


Even here there are distractions. Like a big board the family can hide behind, waiting for the huffly snobblegrog to come grumbling and complaining up the hill. Now her lovely family can cheer her up by jumping out at her and going BOO!


Well that didn't work, obviously. Never mind. To amuse us instead, the Chinese have placed granite rocks in interesting formations along the shoreline...

... and built a pavilion where the workmen can wash their trousers.


When that fun runs out, and the groffleweed starts broaking and froaking and drumbling again, we can always amuse ourselves with the public signage.


I liked this one. Fire beating is such an ordinary event on Cheung Chau. See a fire, beat it out with a wooden stick and some strips of what look like rubber at the end, then remember to return your beater. Note those instructions. Do not, if you see a fire, Clutch your head. Scream. Run about shouting Fire! That is not very community minded. It is certainly not correct Chinese behaviour.

Now, once we're back to the beach, mustn't forget the Watersports Centre.


I am told this is not for people who die on the one day crash course. Although Wikipedia says the idea for a Suicide Theme Park didn't get anywhere.


Why anyone would want to end their life here on Cheung Chau, I don't know. I mean, it has long sandy beaches and is a pretty town with proper elderly folk in hats.

If I were pushed to the edge of despair and contemplating suicide, which I deny completely by the time the mishery soddle has gnawed and grumbled in my consciousness for five unrelenting hours, I would choose a purple velvet ballgown, an assortment of head lifting medications and a bottle of whiskey. Then I'd alert the neighbours so they could come round and have a laugh while I was lowered out the attic window from the third floor.

No, I wouldn't choose cute little Cheung Chau at all. Highly recommended for photography.


We'll probably let you know about the crash course on watersports.

Look on the bright side

One of the best things about coming a little close to death - no, don't worry, I may have only a minor nasal outbreak of death-chicken swine-virus - is not lying flat on my bed at 6pm waiting for the reaper to knock on the door, but the heart stirring joy I can surely get from knowing that my living corpse is providing yet another fun educational opportunity for my adoring children.

For a start, from the vantage point of a death bed, I can overhear everyone competing about who should accompany me on the emergency helicopter ride off the island, should things take a turn for the worse at 3am.

I merely raise my withered finger and croak that the pilot will not 'offer you a go'. Neither will he be impressed that you once visited the helicopter museum outside Weston-super-Mare. He will not take it as evidence that you know what you are doing because you once sat in a helicopter cockpit, nor will he give in when he learns you have played the computer game where you fly a bird over Hong Kong and bring it down in a wood.

Also, Squirrel, remember that the helicopter does not land you at the ice cream parlour in the IFC mall as your reward for participating in the air lift quiz. I can croak it again that the emergency helicopter is there for people like me who are profoundly ill and need immediate travel to the crypt or the local hospital, whichever comes sooner, so before you run a show about 'who can dance the best gets the helicopter ride', think on the actual rewards.

Apart from the slight inconvenience of a near death experience, everything is fine, thank you very much, and Shark has cracked long multiplication, at last. Thank goodness for that. If the viral disease doesn't finish me off, the prospect of yet another hour talking through 375 x 17 surely will.

No day can be pointless, can it?

One of those days you get to the end of, and you think, 'I made it'.

It's not Tiger. She's calming down. That seems to be the opportunity for Squirrel to be flexing her pre-teen muscle by rolling her eyes, crossing her arms and saying 'whatever' before exiting the house with a few dozen door slams.

I do not know where she gets this from. We do not own a TV. We watch DVDs on the computer and that's it. They don't say 'whatever' in Ice Age, do they? If they do, I may have to write letters.

I could say she gets it from the kids she mixes with. Only we haven't mixed with that many in the past month, and the ones we have met are lovely, well balanced funny kids whose parents home ed because they care deeply about stuff like rolling eyeballs and whatevers. So it's not that.

I blame Disney. Yeah, I blame Disney. It cannot be me. I am sure I have never said 'whatever'. Well, not with the arms and eyeball combination, anyhow.

Of course I tried to address the situation by buying a ball set. That seemed like the sort of thing to do. Badminton, tennis, sticky ball things. All in a pack with balls down at the second hand shop. I thought, Co-operative sport. Team games. That should fix it.

Only within fifteen minutes there's an almighty fight over the sticky balls, enough screams to be heard in Beijing and arms going like windmills with Dig forcibly separating the co-operative team players.

It doesn't get any better. For the rest of the day Dig mopes about with his face in his hands telling everyone how he once heard a father of twins say that you can tell one twin off for doing something, she stops and the other one starts doing the same thing. So you never get a break. We all looked at Shark.

But no day can be wasted, right? So I'll say that the outcome of the day is a reminder of the 3R rule - Responsibility, Resourcefulness and some sodding Respect - and, as Squirrel was heading for a grounding to the year 2030, we now have a reward sheet in the house. We tick it to reward responsible decision making. For which read, when your sister offers a provocation, put your arms down, close your mouth, decide not to take her up on it. Get a tick. Get 10 ticks, get a visit to Ice Scream in the IFC mall for the lotus paste delight.

The other outcome of the day was as Dig opened the fridge door with the dodgy shelf, his bottle of white wine sprang out and threw itself at the tiled kitchen floor. As that delicious fragrant grape seeped into his socks, he muttered 'I can't take any more'. That's my line. I think we must have bonded.

One down, two to go

I gave my daughter away. I gave her away to a young man with a fake silver earring and a squeaky voice.

I hope I've done the right thing. There was a moment when she didn't look too sure. Then I wasn't sure either. Let's just say, if she comes home with tales of sorrow and misadventure, I'll hunt that smooth talking earringed fellow down. Then his voice will have true reason to squeak.

But that is Squirrel. Gone. Adventuring for the whole week.


Quad biking, tramping around fields blindfold, swinging from ropes and cliffs, raft building. She'll probably be OK, and forget about us within twenty minutes. She did last time. Then she'll come back home muddy and miserable: there is no zip wire in our garden. How boring can we be?

It's all thanks to the school holidays. And I'm taking my own advice. Useful. (Except for the fact that this is a no-sex zone, stairs or no stairs.) Anyway, this is my expertise. Getting rid of kids. It's a number one priority when you don't use the free childcare system at the end of the road.

Truly, it would be handy if there were no kids around right now. Then I can concentrate on being Gritus Domesticus. I can clean up the house, throw out rubbish, sweep floors, and make pipes accessible for plumbers.

But this week I have two kids instead of three. Shark will be out most days, having watery fun on a local lake. Which leaves one. Tiger. PGL did have a bogof offer going. That would've worked, but she wouldn't go. I tried. I couldn't kick her out on that mountainside. If she had agreed to my cunning plan, could've been zero. But Tiger wants her familiar garden run and home cooked pasta suppers.

I console myself. One child by day, twins in the evening. Twins are more stable than triplets. Except when they hate each other and sharpen the spears. Hey, maybe I could run my own Enemy Adventure in the garden. We could call it Camp Battle, then draw enemy lines, dig trenches, lob mortars made of mud and weed. Hmm. I bet you see that added to the list of summer camps soon.

Two ways of looking

If you are closely involved in the daily life of your own children, at some point you may feel like you are trapped in a long, dark brick tunnel with no light at the end.

In the tunnel with you is an alien bat monster. You never see the full size of the alien bat monster, but it has the measure of you.

The alien bat monster watches you, while you wade on hands and knees along the sludge-filled tunnel floor, groping your way in hopeless search to a quick exit. It decides this is a good moment to do stuff with you that it calls playing.

Soon you are face down in tunnelsludgemanure. Then the alien bat monster might stop the fun game with the trip wires, spears and house bricks. It scrabbles onto the walls instead, screaming a piercing eeeeeewwaaaagghhh sound that slices your brains like a hot knife through butter.

You might wish for it all to end. But the alien bat monster wants you to love it. It shows its devotion to you as it crashes about your head, smacks you in the face, rips up your clothing, gnaws your ankles, and vomits on you.

You want now to be the time you are justified in catching it, and pulling off its wings.

Instinctively, the alien bat monster detects it has almost broken your spirit. It knows the end may be nigh.

Time for a different approach. It will pathetically cling onto your clothing, emit piteously soft kitten mewing, and snuffle at you with little gulping weeping sounds.

You are softened, and heart-touched, and moved to try and find its tiny head to tenderly stroke, and you will forgive it everything. Just before it sinks its teeth in your fingers.

This is the point I notice something. That this moment is managed differently between the normal parent and the normal home educating parent.

I see that the normal parent thinks now is time to blast through the brick tunnel and dump their alien bat monster somewhere else. This is called 'time out' 'having a break' 'restoring my work-family balance' and 'reestablishing my adult identity by going shopping for shoes'.

I see the normal home educating parent conversely thinks it is time to spend more time together: they grab hold the little claws of their squealing alien bat monster, refuse to let go, and say Righty-o-matey, since we have to get through this tunnel together to the bitter end, is it time now to consensually discuss issues of non-coercive cooperative family relationships in a postmodern eco-sensitive context?

I do not know if this preamble helps you understand, dear reader, why today you can find the normal home educating parent Grit and the three alien bat monsters lifted temporarily out of the tunnel and determinedly sat together under a shaded canopy to pummel the shit out of clay.

Dig calls this time, family therapy. I call it family art. The organiser says the work we produce adds to a project based here.

Anyway, it gives the alien bat monsters, and the alien bat monster home educating parent, a moment to sit, round the same table, being reasonably pleasant to each other, in a shared artistic endeavour to create something beautiful and enduring for display in the community in which this family lives. Endeavouring to be non-coercive, cooperative, and postmodernly eco-sensitive, in fact.

OK, it is also very calming, so may be therapy disguised as art, but is better than basket weaving.

And the day really goes very well indeed. So very well, that it is quite peaceful and brilliant and healing and gentle and loving and the alien bat monsters don't seem quite so fierce after all.

Tiger creates a horse:


You know her well enough by now to know that whatever the question is, the answer is a horse. Apart from when the answer is to smash up the house and lock herself in a bedroom.

Squirrel creates this:


Everyone looks at this and expresses their complete overwhelming admiration and devotion before gently inquiring, What is it? For the answer, you will have to wait until opening day like everyone else.

Shark creates this:


Wind woman, grown from early memories of sitting in this garden, threading wind chimes to hang in the trees.

Grit, because she is headstuffed with edubabblecrap in a patheticweedycommunityhippy sort of way, blubs a little with the happy, simple sanctuary of the together experience, and creates this:


These interlocking hands represent how we stay together: our interdependence, the development of non-coercive solutions to problems, the support we can give each other for personal growth, our delicate balances, mutual trust, and ways in which we can help lead each other out of deep dark tunnels.

It is entirely accidental that they also resemble a pair of scrabbling grasping zombie hands, skin-bound in death and living hell, trapped and doomed on a journey which ends in a melted corpse, and something I may have removed from the freezer only a short time earlier.

But, like I say. Better than basket weaving. Now, back to the tunnel, refreshed.