It's easy to make a puppet

Yet another reason for the great house clearance! Today I put Badman in the bin.

That will make no sense to people who come to gritsday to read about Grit and kids crashing around in fields and ditches on a home educating journey. You probably think Badman is a puppet with a pillow for a head, cushion stuffing for brains, and two wiggly eyes, one of which has dropped off and been crushed by a sofa leg.

You are right.

This despicable little puppet is now all shredded up and heading for the compost and bloody good riddance to the little rag.

And that is a very lovely fresh all over clean feeling. I'm enjoying it for just a few brief hours, or at least before I begin the long trek through General Election Land. And now I start that reading and thinking process with a tidy front room, better vision, and a clearer mind.

On the other hand I am not getting rid of the lion puppet with a sock up its bum.

It's easy to make a puppet. This is what you do. You buy an ordinary stuffed toy for 20p at your local charity shop. You cut a circular hole in its bottom, and you pull out a channel of stuffing right to its head, a little bit like you are making a digestive tract to its mouth. Then you insert a sock up through the bumhole, right up to the mouth, and for security sew the edge of the sock to the opening. See?


Now you should be able to insert your hand up through the toy, like so


... then with your fingers, wiggle the legs, manipulate the mouth, wave the arms and nod the head.



There! A puppet Badman. Sorry, lion.

Don't stop me now

I am gripped by insanity. I know I need to come out of it, but I can't. It's too perfect.

I am clearing up. No. I am clearing out. Objects that have terrorised me for ten years. It's heady stuff, this. Sweeping out the old and dead. I feel like a conqueror in a frock. This power could go to my head. Next I shall be pulling on jackboots.

Now I have power over bits of cut-up paper. Foam shapes. Tangled string. 100 piece jigsaws that no-one ever wanted to do. Especially not jigsaws with three pieces missing. It says so on the Oxfam sticker peeling off the lid.

Someone helpfully put the sticker over the parrot's face. Three pieces missing 59p. Like All aspiration is pointless. Noose enclosed. And I saved that jigsaw for ten years, in hope, even though experience taught me after three years that all hope is destructive. It's the most pointless thing you can do. Hope. I have reconciled myself and accepted it. The three missing jigsaw pieces will not magically appear on the doorstep one morning with the milk, ten years late, with a note of apology from the previous owner Found them down the back of the sofa! Sorry!

Better to be shut of the thing, kick it out. Start afresh. Look for a jigsaw that has 100 pieces, and not 97. I cannot even bear to pass it on to the next hapless home educator.

Into the recycling bin it's gone. And did that feel right. So right, in fact, that when Shark and Squirrel remind me that I promised to take them to the forest play, I almost gasp, I cannot. I have to stay here and throw away all your jigsaws, especially any with missing pieces. But I know they don't yet have my perspective on liberation, my wisdom about throwing off shackles, and my newly acquired carelossity freewheeling whocaresashitanyway attitude.

So I say nothing. And I go to the wood.


I mope. I want to come home and throw away jigsaws, put up shelves, reorder my environment, reclassify my scrapbooking hoard and separate paper by size, colour, quality and variability depending on transparency and satin varnish.

After fifteen minutes propped up against a wooden stick in a wood, fantasising about Ikea shelving, watching the kids muck about in hammocks and rope bridges and tyre swings, I feel if I do not act on this cleaning-up-my-life impulse, I may explode.

I decide in the interests of humanity I should abandon my kids in the wood. They are old enough. So that's what I do. I equip Shark with my phone number, and poo poo her response that my phone number is not much good if she doesn't have a phone. I answer that if there is a medical emergency, like Squirrel gets stuck up the tree again, then simply borrow a phone from the mad axe murderer bound to be walking these forested parts. Better still, ask the play supervisor over there. He's busy stringing up ropes between trees while 36 kids queue to hurl themselves across it, equipped with two sticks and no sense of balance. Anyway, we're only ten minutes away, you can walk home and fetch me.

And then I come home and throw away jigsaws with missing pieces and sweep the floor and clean the window and put up the lovely, lovely, lovely Ikea shelves.

Closed for reorder

Everytime I walk into a room I pick something up from the floor. It is a fantastic strategy. As a result, I am seeing the floor. This is so empowering. I am becoming transfixed by floor.

And it's only encouraged me. In pursuit of control over STUFF I am stashing crap in boxes, on shelves and - wait for it - stuffing STUFF in plastic bags to be taken away.

Sssh!

With that last one I must conduct myself in the guise of a smuggler with a facemask under cover of darkness, passing contraband to silent callers at the door. They must knock, slow, quiet, twice, cover their faces with bat winged cloaks, take secret parcels, and disappear.

This is the only way to remove some of the items from this house. I package them discreetly and slip them away. If I am discovered, the panic will start, the wail go up, But Mama! We need the foam picture alphabet set! The one that Shark chewed when she was three! The one that misses out the letters D, X and G!

You do not need these things, children. I must clear the way, clear out the toddler toys, prepare our ground, my battle lines, lay out the place for your teenage future.

And what a pleasure it is. I can fondly turn that chewed up letter D which I find wedged between floorboard and wall, like a mummified offering for the security and goodwill of our house. I could leave it there, for the occupants to find in ninety years ahead. I won't. Better to get rid of it. You will need the space to stuff your acid stash when the police come beating down the door.

But this feels good, all this emerging space and floor. This is perfect, this life cleansing, clearing up, sweeping away of STUFF.

Come back later, and look at my shelves.

Damask curtaining

I am spring cleaning. I have hung an 8-metre high DONOTDISTURB sign round the chimney pot of this house. You can probably see it on Streetview. Now we fit in with the sort of people who paint a penis on the roof or sculpt a shark diving head first into the attic. Those sound like reasonable things to do as I start moving the entire house contents from East to West and back again.

Don't ask me why I am doing it. Spring cleaning the entire house. It is not normal. I have never done it before. Yes, before children, but that time was different. That time was pure, total, free, unrestrained house worship.

Each month then was marked by the tender love of authentic house, Late Victorian. I sank pleasurable hours in swooning passion over pot sinks, or indulged days locating the authentic rinse effect wash of eggshell blue, available only in The Heritage 1894 Paint Reproduction Range, manufactured in limited quantities and made by traditional methods of pissing into pots and stamping on beetles. All to the good, for it led to the perfect late Victorian effect. Gas lamps? I cannot confess how close we came.

And these days? With kids in this house? Forget the Victoriana. Paint the walls with what the local council recommends: anti-climb, graffiti-resistant, industrial mould-proof grey. Then have done with it for 20 years. Do not bother screwing the doorknobs back on: the children rip them off. Floor? I saw it once, somewhere over there. Windows? Don't make me laugh. Door frames? Finger marked. Burglars push money through the letterbox with a phone contact for building repairs.

Let this be a word of caution. If you love your house, and do not yet have children, consider the balance carefully. Elegant interior? Or kids? Think about it. You can get a lot of pleasure from a hand-made butlers sink, a crystal chandelier, and a wrought iron wine cage.

So why I feel the need to suddenly awaken to the wreckage that is My House, and lug smashed up old furniture around, vacuum the three foot dust mice away, or sluice down the walls with 110% strength bleach, I have no idea. It's not like I can ever return to that pre-lapsarian state of damask curtaining. It is just another nodule of the late Grit brain that is growing unbidden with my age. The perimenopause? Possibly. Arrangement of the house so that when I soon lie on my death bed I can think At least I vacuumed under the bed and then pass away happy? Probably. Fears that we may yet leave this fresh green and rolling England land where I am rooted in history, to go survive on an island with a view obscured by steam and smog and heat haze? Almost certainly.

Then away I go, round this house, like DemonCleanerGritofSmalltown. Until the remaining children remind me that we must go and see the craft show. They say I promised. And a shelf is only a shelf, whereas the opportunity to create a felt bracelet in a community hall with a bunch of nouveau crafting hippies is the reason for this existence on Planet Earth.

And that's what we do.


And I am glad of it. It knocks sense into me, albeit for a short time. You should all see reason, and go and support the textiles of Jess Sharp, here.

I may not be able to dribble any longer over butler's sinks and eggshell washed Victorian walls, but I can dribble, for a few indulgent moments, on life's smaller pleasures. Candyfloss buttons, stitched paper, pink hearts, and Victorian nostalgia.

Quick! While she's on a horse...

Let's move house!

Shark, that is a step too far.

Instead, let's buy lots and lots of new shelves...


move everything around in the entire house...


including all her favourite cuddly toys and books...


then we pick her up next week...


look at the expression on her face while her mind is in the process of e x p l o d i n g...


and then take cover.

Sounds like a great idea. Let's do it!

Wanted: Daughter thief

Here it is, this thieving creature, creeping to us in the night and stealing away my daughter child.


See! Another! Be vigilant, for they are everywhere.

Do not let those big, soulful, eyelashed eyes seduce you. It is all calculated horse intelligence to lull you and make you sigh aaahhh ahhhh aahhh like a twerp and yearn to stroke fetlocks and put glitter in manes. No! Desist! You should know that they are foulsmelling gutterliving sugarlump addicts. And they will steal your daughter if you allow her near them. Keep the daughter child away! Away!

Look! Now we see the evil appear! Look at those crazed staring eyes! That truly awful nose violating my phone camera, seeking out sugarlumps and daughters! Revealing themselves as the cruel and calculating child snatchers they really are, plotting and scheming for access to more daughters! More sugarlumps!


Do not be taken in! Pay attention to your daughters! Learn from my sad and bitter experience. Equine worship is begun in so many innocent ways, and soon it becomes all enveloping and all pervasive. It requires mama to dig her hands deep into her shrivelled bank account and pull out the last dredges of last month's pay to stump up for yet another residential week down the stables.

Poor, broken hearted mother! It is a bewilderment to see the Tiger daughter seduced by these great snorty hairy stamping creatures.

Yet they laugh at me to know that another year has passed and the Tiger daughter's equine love is still strong!

I know the time has gone, and with it, her heart from me to them. Tiger stares from her window and sighs, tenderly, knowing that in only a few hours she gets hold of horse. She stares at me, with urgent eyes, and I know that I must provide her with bigger leggings and longer jodhpurs. She cries that the others cannot fit. Her feet are poking out the bottom, dangling there, and reminding me that I may have put this moment off, but I can put it off no longer. The feet must fit into the jodhpurs and the jodhpurs must have the horse. And then these shameless animals lead my daughter away, causing her to pack her new jodhpurs and leave us for a whole week!

When will it ever end? This is the second year of two long years that Tiger daughter has taken herself off to the stables. For this Easter week, they provide a bed, dinner, and other horse-crazed daughters. And horses! Ever so many! All at once! And worse, POTS OF GLITTER.

Yet I can do no other, but drive her down there, and wave goodbye. She loves them. I do not know why. I wipe a tear from my eye. The daughter thieves scare me half to death with their big teeth and rolling eyes. To me, they are the stuff of nightmares. In my unconscious, they trample over me, and squash me face down to the mud. And yet now I hand her over to their care.

They gallop through her dreams. Under her guiding hand, only hers, she jumps and leaps and runs with them.

Daughter thieves, every one.

It mocks me! See how it mocks me!
The devil horse whinnies Ha Ha! You lose, Mama Grit! You are not as lovely as a horse!

Seven days with food (Or, make it last all month)

Fantastic! Next up in the Grit series, Living with elephants!

Now, assuming your four-year old does not stagger home from playgroup clutching a stomach injury due to the 15p the nursery spends on the nutritious midday offering, or does not need A&E treatment after the black eyes and plastic hammer dents around the head from the energetic playtime - and is still not effing and blinding so liberally about your late pick-up that you may have to put them on the naughty step for the next three years - your little kidlet might be in the right Spring holiday mood to enjoy a festschrift to food.

I recommend it. Lay aside all motherly pain-in-the-arse worries about 5-a-day, your guilt nutrition, and any fears about the food police inspecting Tinkertop's lunch box as an excuse to haul you off to parenting classes. With Grit's fantastic guide, kick your heels, ditch the diet, eat crap, and be free. All in the name of real life learning.

Word of caution: some things I take for granted, and it is only when people say Erm... that's not normal, Grit, that I wonder. Like, Shark, Squirrel and Tiger always serve themselves with food. I never serve them. If I do, it is a punishment for serious violation of rule, like RULE 1: Food is sharing and social. END of RULES.

So the time one of the little animals spat at the table? Quick and instant dismissal to another room with a plate of spaghetti. Judgement is swift and YOU DO NOT SPIT AT MY TABLE.

That said, the instances of rule violation are rare, and I have three fantastic, beautiful creatures who serve themselves sensibly, enjoy food, sit and talk over lunch, laugh, have a go at green, say thank you, and leave an empty plate. (I have failed in that they are not dragging themselves to shop at midnight, then next day preparing, cooking, waiting, clearing up, and serving me with chilled Pinot Noir, but I'm working on it.)

Now, take the benefit of Grit's experience. These are my guiding kid/food principles, and if they give you ideas, then I am happy.

1. Anything goes. We are vegetarian/wannabe vegan; those boundaries means pig's eyeballs and goat arse, out. Apart from dead animal and parts thereof, we try anything. Once. Really. Pineapple, peanut butter and mashed potato with accidental glitter? OK, sounds like lunch. Blame Heston Blumenthal.

2. Eat round the world. A favourite home educating project. For which read, find out about China, the beautiful countryside, the elegant writing, the poetic language, the sprightly fish, the dancing pandas ... do all that in a half-hearted manner so you can feel smug that evening when you send out for a takeaway.

They get leopards in China, don't they?

3. Make food shapes. Take every opportunity to make ships from pasta, trains from cabbage rolls stuffed with rice, clockfaces with vegetables, horses powered by sausages for legs. Once you start, you can't stop. Flowers, butterflies, trucks, space rockets... your toddler will join in! Elbow them out the way. Now it's serious, and you're competitive. I can rearrange your entire pantry to look like a map of Mexico City. Indeed, fruit and vegetable modelling is an art.

So crap it has to be labelled.

4. Model with mash. The alien offspring will soon know what it's eating and will scream after clapping eyes on the colour green. Or it will brain explode because it is all too horrible! LOOK! The tomato is TOUCHING the potato! So get this one in early and blind kids with colour. Mash up half a dozen piles of potato with the following: broccoli, red kidney bean, cheese, blueberries, beetroot, turmeric. Dollop it down in tempting mushy colour mouthfuls on the table to be scooped up and patted and belly stuffed. Truly disgusting and horribly pleasurable all at once. Make sure, while your kid is spreading goo all over their face, that you have a nice little salad and a half-bot of red from Waitrose.

5. How many colours? A favourite supper game. Pile white rice in mountainshape in middle of table. Put any colour food all around. Instructions are to paint a colour wheel. Does it matter if it comes from a tin? No. It won't kill them to eat tinned peaches (orange) red berries (red) blueberries (not blue) and green cabbage (yellow). You don't have to eat it. Put something of what you fancy round your whitericemountain. Black eyed beans with garlic dressing, roasted green peppers, baby tomatoes, rocket. That's more my taste.

6. Lie. I tell the children that the green bits in the stew are chopped herbs and they are delicious. When Squirrel gets suspicious, I throw in some real chopped herbs and lie some more. I am going to have some pissed off children when they read this. Really, I use chopped spinach in cubes from the freezer. But HA! I GOT AWAY WITH SPINACH FOR EIGHT YEARS, LADIES!

7. Serve it funny. Plates (paint them with tomato puree on the edges) napkins (fold them, add wiggly eyes and string, call them cats), napkin rings (curtain rings), home-made place settings (large cork tiles from the DIY shop and the kids paint them up), plus a home-made tablecloth (take an old one and get the kids to draw all over it with fabric pens). It all makes dinnertime a day long event. Round here, we call that fun. (Shut up and suffer it. These days pass too soon.)

8. Make shopping list books. Cut, fold and staple little notebooks to take to the shops. The kids can write shopping lists inside, or simply scribble all over them. Then you can interpret the scribble as onions or carrots or jam tarts. Whatever you want.

9. Make a food book. Add food words and pictures, let your offspring write in it alongside you, then take it shopping. To be honest, this is no help for your child but after two hours sleep I've found the food book quite a useful aide memoire. It stops me coming home from the weekly shop with three bottles of scotch and a bar of chocolate.

See? Handy, when you cannot remember why you are in Tesco in the first place

10. It's your turn. Let the kids take over the cooking, no matter what the age. Yes, I am still recovering from the fruit soup. Yet I still defend it! That's how far gone we are.

11. Let food be a celebration. I don't care whose celebration it is. Persian New Year? Let's celebrate that and lay the stuff on a tray. Next week? I'm sure there's a Hindi celebration. Yup. We could order a take away.

Suffering an education at Persian New Year

12. Go mad on what you fancy. Fruit salad. The gritlets consume vats of the stuff. They make their own. At age three, they went to the shops and I said Take whatever fruit you want! They did. I bit my knuckles and paid the £245 bill. The kids weighed it, butchered it, composed their own bowls of fruit salad, and scoffed it. We did that every week. After a few weeks of an overdraft, I suggested options to bring down the cost to £50. Now they are more responsive to seasons, airmiles, quality, selection. And still demand blueberries so let's burn up the atmosphere.

Cute, huh? Fruit salad at 35 quid a throw, what with the fresh raspberries and all

13. Fry it. Boil it. Bake it. Mash it. If you usually do something with your food, do the opposite. We fry fruit. Quite a lot. Fried bananas, fried pears, fried apples. Mandarin segments fresh from a tin. In butter with a little Satan's sugar, squeezed direct from his behind. Delicious.

14. Go childlike in John Lewis kitchen department. I discovered how the kitchen should look if you are aged four. That means wipe away the tears because I never had this stuff before, and now I own 150 food cutters, ring moulds, lolly sticks, ice cream maker, toasty machine, popcorn maker, jelly moulds, cake tins, heart-shaped muffin trays, sundae dishes and sixteen fruit salad bowls...

15. Don't stop until it crawls away. I am too mean to throw out food. Boiled potatoes are roast potatoes the next day. Lentil bake becomes sandwich spread. Stale bread is cut into cubes, sloshed over with olive oil, subjected to a twist of dried herbs, pepper and the salt of death, and shoved in the oven on high for 10 minutes. They are Tiger's crunchy favourite. Perhaps they remind her of the bones of small furry animals.

16. Make food a joint decision. Set the kids up browsing through a cook's blog and pick something. That way you can blog at the same time and pretend not to.

17. Be old fashioned. Leaf through cookbooks. We all have favourites? Mine are Mark Hix, Miriam Stoppard, (no, really!) the Australian Women's Weekly cookbooks and the old old cookbook we dragged from Northumberland.

18. Get the right Dahl. Shove off with the saucer eyes, Sophie. We want to eat the wallpaper.

19. Do all the rest. Visit a farm, grow your own, cook outside, eat at a restaurant. Do what you like, but don't make it guilty. Look, I can get to 20.

20. Craft it. Make food seasonal. Blow and decorate eggs. Stain them with tea, paint them, wrap them in string, how many ways with spring eggs are there? Unless you are vegan, obviously, and then you can look at pictures of battery hens and cry. If you are not vegan, not allergic to eggs, do not worship them, and cannot beat them, then you could join them and throw eggs at your four year old in a game of Catch! and see who cracks first: you or the egg.

Don't do it my way

Dear Tiger. Someone suggested I use this blog to tell people stuff about myself.

That's a difficult challenge. Mostly because there is stuff about me you don't know. Hey, I am yet working out how to explain that stuff to you without making you want to run for the hills.

Rest assured. I am unlikely to drag out the decapitated skeletons from the family closet. Not yet.

I promise. I will not scatter those bleached bones before the entire world. No. I will humiliate you privately first, and afterwards I will blab.

My other problem with this challenge is that my own life now is without sparkle, consisting of laundry, cooking, dead work. On that, I better not think too hard. And it's not like I have two heads or five hands or anything else interesting to report.

So I thought I would tell people something I notice about you. Because things I know about myself, the person I am now, and the mother I have become, I learned from you.

Tiger, I recognise you. You shock me. Your spirit knows what it wants to do. But it is at conflict with your head. Your spirit is creative, free, and is filled with feeling, and it wants to break out and express itself. But your mind is made of barriers and boundaries and off-limits. It tells your spirit to damn well shut up and sit down. Then I watch you wrangling with yourself, beating yourself up, and generally torturing yourself in frenzied angst. And we haven't even hit the teenage years yet! Wow, am I looking forward to those.

Girl, let your spirit lead. Let it lead, even to pathways that scare the shit out of your head.

How can I know that your spirit should be in charge?

I see the things that you do. The things your spirit loves. Put a pencil in your hand, and in quick and simple strokes that you never feel the need to correct, you bring that page to life, and I stand amazed.

That drawing your head hated, of a penguin. I snatched it from you and sealed it in my heart. I swear that penguin has a soul. And with that facial expression, it is a pissed off soul. It should get up off that page, balancing one flipper on its hip, curling a sneer at its beak, and make a smart arse comment about fish.

Little Tiger, you will answer me with a head-thrown frown and a loud, dismissive tut. Then you snort that of course I see talent, because I am your mother. Therefore you can discount me. Oh roll on, my thirteen-year old wise one!

But do you remember the architect who looked over your shoulder to see you sketch? He'd never met you before. His eyebrows went up, his mouth dropped open, and he pointed to your page and cried 'She's got it! She's got it!'

You see? Not just me. Your talent is there, and your spirit knows it, even though your head makes you look at your work, and your mouth opens in a cry and frustrated tears come and you screw up that page and weep it's nothing but rubbish rubbish rubbish.

I don't want that voice in your head to win. I don't want it to control you, and stop you. I want you to feel your talents, follow your spirit, and free yourself up, because I think if you do, you will find your way in life. I want you to have the openness and confidence, and wilful bloody-mindedness, to take those routes before you. And where those opportunities don't exist, I want you to make them.

I did not. I never fought for those paths that I felt I should follow. I didn't do things I instinctively wanted to do, because I was too scared. I let my head stop me. I am too weedy and too easily made fearful.

Maybe now, because of you, I am making up for that. Now I determine that we will live this life in a way which protects you, and your sisters, and gives you the space and the freedom to find your own way, on your own terms.

Tiger, this is my advice. Follow those paths of yours that you think will lead you to fulfilment and satisfaction. And if I grow fearful, and try and pull you off into another direction, one that's more sensible, more contained, filled with controls and boundaries and off-limits, I want you to fight me, every bit of the way.

But stop short of a busted nose, OK?

Dear author, who should remain nameless

If you are writing a book for publication...

1. Can you please find out what happens when your wrods leave your tender care?

Your book is not set by tiny fairies waving wands. Not laid upon the page by naked elves yearning to exchange their midnight labour for cute green hats. Neither are your wrods magically hoof-printed by silver unicorns toiling by the glimmering light of a half-shadowed moon.

Your wrods pass through a setting and printing process which is scheduled. Those processes include drafts for you to check and correct, sometimes final proofs for you to make minor amendments, then a timetabled stage for sign off, and print.

When you are given final proofs of your book, do not say things like, I don't like Chapter 3. I'm rewriting this chapter now. I'll pass it to you next Wednesday. If you try that, I reserve the right to violate your copy. I may secretly and silently type eatshit in the second paragraph on Chapter 13.

Let's face it, for some of you, if I sneak that in, no-one would notice. Not even your mother. Even though she is getting a good discount rate on the 435 copies you are selling her direct for her knitting circle.

2. Be nice to your publisher, the printers, the proofreaders, the typesetters.

Do not think we have been sitting here with nothing to do until your book came along. You may like to imagine the day your wrods came to us was the day we knew our salvation. It wasn't. We can just make it look like that to flatter you. By this means we hope to be paid on time.

3. Please write well. We working ants, low down in the food chain, must read your wrods. Sometimes more than once.

Remember, we all like reading interesting wrods. So please do not write tedious sentences of 200 wrods without a comma. Do not use impenetrable language to show off to your mother. Try to write elegantly. Remember to close your (brackets, include full stops and generally finish your sentences in a timely manner. You wouldn't believe how many authors

Yours wearily,
A typesetter.

PS. Yes, typesetters still exist, spreading our skills across copy editing, book layout, print processes, graphic design, pre-print services. And type. We like to see nice type.

The slow road to consciousness

I have to work. Yes, I do a job still in existence, and someone has to do it. It could be counting numberplates of vehicles passing junction 23 on the M25 after 7pm. It could be wrapping myself in tinfoil and moving very slowly down a high street near you, and calling this Installation Art With Slow Moving Body. It could be stapling snails to walls. It could be academic typesetting.

About 3pm, I become aware of the fragile line between survival and death. Sat at the computer for over six hours straight, staring at commas, my mind is in stupor. I am overcome with a sensation that my face is rigid and my body hollow. I may be entering a catatonic state. I have forgotten why I breathe.

I must find displacement activity or die. The least traumatic method to bring myself back to life is visit Ikea. That is a slow nudge from the states of torpor to the place of barely conscious. Here, in a slow and painful journey, I drag my typesetter's carcass from the halls of the undead to the land of the nearly living. On the way, to mark my existence, I photograph bookshelves.



It helps. By 5pm, after a small struggle, I can photograph a tree.


By 6pm I can breathe unaided and photograph this scrap of felt. I find it on the landing, like the droppings from a crafter.


At last, I am almost fully alive! Finally, I am able to conduct a photographic session in homage to Harry Worth circa 1962.


Yes, I am recovered, but for what purpose? Tomorrow I must face the abyss of pointlessness once more, and typeset 50,000 words on validation instrument testing of instructional materials for chemists.

Day out with the rozzers, fuzz, blue meanies

Gawdhelpus here we are dahn the copshop with the ole ducks and geese farkinghell.


Can you believe that? Here I am at the Police Station in Milton Keynes! I'm not even frogmarched down there with my arm twisted round my back!

And why? It's not the day that Grit has to turn up shifty-looking and shamefaced to show her driving licence. Nor collect her Notice of Intended Prosecution. Nor deal with any summons of any kind, give a statement, or receive a ticking off. None of those. Keep guessing.

You give in, don't you? We went entirely voluntarily. And it's called educational visit.

Howabout that! Here's one in the eye for all the arsefaces that claim home educators live on the fringes of society. How many times have they visited the cop shop on an educational outing then eh? How many? Na-na-na-na-nana!

Ha! Well, now she has done a spot of righteous gloating, delighted to prove home education is nothing about being excluded from society, but all about being smackbangrightinthemiddleofit, here's a photograph of a police horse.


And after the talk down the stables about horses being police officers we were shown the riot van.

Don't look shifty, Tiger. Last time it was different. In you go.


Do you recognise it Tiger? This is probably the same one we sat in while mama was having to fess up all her criminal ways that day we'd just visited the psychologist and had the car smash. Ah! Those were the days!


Then we toured the identification suites, but I'm not allowed to photograph those, obviously. There might be crims alooking at my blog and I cannot blow the gaff on the sneaky ways the coppers have of nabbing the miscreants.

All doing, the little grits declare the visit first class, and mama says the PR was excellent. So very good in fact that it has turned me away from a life of crime guvnor that's for sure. Now we recommend you all take your kids down the cop shop as soon as you get your educational group together and have those essential life discussions about the role of the police in British society. *

It was so exciting indeed, that Grit ran red lights all the way home.

* And if you home ed, we're following last year's Mad Science workshop on forensic analysis, last month's vidi on the history of the British Police Force, and now Grit is all set to dip into a spot of Sherlock Holmes and Wilkie Collins The Moonstone.

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.

In which I mostly say, AMAZING

OK, this is AMAZING.

It's like there is a giant eyeball and projections of snails in all these kaleidoscope patterns and colours swirling all the time to music over the eyeball and the gardens, and the bricks are lit up in rotating flower patterns, and there are streams of white wind flowing through the trees, and enormous faces hanging in the branches with flames and flares and beautiful colours, and it is so AMAZING I wander round saying AMAZING AMAZING AMAZING until two hours later I am forcibly wrestled into the car and slapped a bit to shut me up from saying AMAZING.

But it is true. It is AMAZING. And pleasepleaseplease we need to see this again because I am so pleased and happy that I can tell the gritlets now for sure that to achieve this impact in their brains they must simply use the light of this world with their own imagination, and never need resort to acid.

Now I'm in my nineties

A gentle day, in which I age fifty years.

I have visions of myself moulded to the shape of a rocking chair, twitching a knitted rug over my knees, and complaining in the midst of my dementia about all the young men called Norman who are on the lookout to steal my oven gloves. I shall put drawing pins inside those gloves. All the Normans won't try twice.

Since I often equate growing older with misery, incontinence and a face that looks like it's been scoured by glaciation, the thought of going slowly and benignly mad in a rocking chair is quite comforting. I'm almost looking forward to it.

You will never guess the reason why I was sent into the future so kindly, so I shall tell you. It was the day I installed myself in a corner of the local toy library and sat there sewing up playbags. I can't explain those anymore. If you need to know about the playbags, go over here.

Tiger helped.

Together we sat there, stitch, stitch, stitch, aging by decades, withered and worn, quiet and gentle, talking to anyone who stopped by to listen.

I could imagine Tiger aged sixty, sitting next to me, complaining that I never stitch the handles on right and Norman's not going to come and steal the oven gloves. 'No, he's not mother', she'll say. Then she'll add, 'because we sold your house ten years ago and you haven't even got an oven, never mind about the oven gloves'.

Then I shan't do any more cooking, I'll say. Not ever, not ever.

Most people stay indoors

Readers of gritsday know that we have built an outdoor out-of-school education for our primary age children.

Most days we are out in those fields and open spaces on some flimsy pretext. Perhaps to meet with a home ed group, perhaps to explore an ancient site or battlefield, maybe have maths or geography as the excuse, or just because my head explodes if I stay inside for more than four hours, conscious. But the last place you will find this home educating family is at home round the kitchen table.*

Anyway, our education is to be out, somewhere, everyday.

So this is what we did today, this normal Thursday, when any sane and rational person would not leave the house at all.

Because I can tell you that it rained. Do not imagine pitterpattertinkly rain. Not grey British soaking mist-drizzle either. No. Chucking it down. Serious rain. Business rain. Wearing bullet proof armour and lead tipped rain drops. It penetrated the top of my head for the two hours it took to walk the Art Walk, and diluted my brain. Dissolved, it is now dribbling through my nose.

I would just like to give no plug at all for Daisy's discount store down the road where nothing is over a fiver. Including their Luxury Cagoule (£2). (Don't say, You get what you pay for.)

Anyway, here is the result of the lovely Art Walk, with the obligatory Andy Goldsworthy pieces, all run for we weather-hardened home educating families by the fantastic Parks Trust of Milton Keynes.








I think I just need to say this is the life we chose, kids, come rain or shine, wet or cold, wind or fine. Admittedly we chose this way partly because of my psychosis; that I cannot function normally unless I can see beyond the walls of the house each and every day.

Maybe it's one psychosis I am quite happy to pass onto Shark, Squirrel and Tiger. Although that might make it inconvenient if anyone ever wanted them to work behind a desk from 9am to 6pm Monday to Friday with half an hour for lunch.

But we're not exactly growing children who have that employment in mind, right?

* Except at meal times, obviously, because we are smug bastards who eat together as a family, which in these days makes us more or less perfect. Except for the non-school thing, for which read, we eat babies.

Inspired by War Horse

The only satisfaction I can have after sobbing my way through the book, is to take the kids to see War Horse at the New London Theatre.


Truly, I want them to be bowled over by this experience and have it become their meaning of life. I want that not because I want to fry kid brains with bloodgutshorror, barbedwire, deadbodies and war.

No. There is plenty of time for me to do that to you, little grits. When you are older, come with me to make the pilgrimage to Mauthausen. Like me, you probably won't speak much about it afterwards, but to look at that place will make your soul armour deeper and stronger. Being there, walking there, you'll know, if mama ever allowed you to forget, that in your adult lives you will be as responsible for peace making as for warmongering - and you will be offered both opportunities. I want you to know where those paths lead. Choose wisely.

But like I say, it is not world war which drives me here today. I want Shark, Squirrel and Tiger to know how it is possible to make words live from a page in many rich expressions. I want them to see it here, because London Theatre is one of the most wonderful, ambitious, and inspiring human creations. I tell them it was even better before Andrew Lloyd Webber came along and made us all singalong to the French Revolution while waving flags and wearing baseball caps.

And War Horse, with the giant puppetry of Handspring and the sparse acting - showing to us types of people caught up in events greater than themselves - all puts us back where we should be, in those pre-singalong days, with drama and passion and humanity played out in front of us. And Grit kicking herself on the way out of a theatre again because she put on the mascara, so will exit looking like a panda.

The stage is minimal: black with a white gash, like a part page, ripped from a notebook, tearing across the backcloth. Onto this rough-edged gash throughout the play is projected hand drawn animations of key events. It becomes an important, immediate means by which we move location from Devon to France and then back and forth over No Man's Land.

Sitting there, with perfect seats, I can take some time to talk to Squirrel, Tiger and Shark, about how the stage looks. How nothing is a mistake: the designers, craftspeople and artists made it right. Although there is little visually, it is rich: every idea we bounce into it works. Here is a world raw, bleak, bare, stripped down, fearful, and yet we have that white tear across the back. Tiger says she thinks we're deep in a cave, but we can see light, so there's hope we get out alive.

And then it starts, and the horses appear. Against this stage, they fit perfectly. Strong, skeletal, tender, filled with life. The puppet horses - ohmygod does that word demean these engineered creations - are fantastic. I swear the bamboo breathes. These horses start and twitch; their muscles jump and their ears flicker. Their tails switch, they take perfect steps back and forth, beautifully in time. They rear, they gallop, they kick, and the puppeteers, visible all the while, must really be some strange inhabitants of horse - all horses have them, but before this, I never noticed.

There are times I glance over to Tiger and her eyes are wide; wider and she can consume the picture whole. I know when her breath stops, her brain's ticking away. She's looking at the construction of those legs, the turn of that belly, the mechanics of the ears, and I know exactly what she's thinking.

When it's over, and the horse and boy reunited, the war ended, the souls departed, and the woman next to me smothered in tissues, Tiger says that was the best play she has ever seen. And I say No. Absolutely not. We cannot make a giant horse. Not in the bathroom. Think about it. You would never get it out. Let's try making one in the yard instead.