It's a time for children, so I'm told

Tigger, the irrepressible bouncing chum of Shark, Squirrel and Tiger, is off her face with joy.

Mostly thanks to having the world's best parents. They know exactly how to set her Christmas Joy Switch to a permanent state, ON. Simple. Turn your entire house into Santa's Grotto.

Result. Tigger is bouncing off the walls because did you KNOW? It is CHRISTMAS! Come and see our LIT UP REINDEER and SANTA and FAIRY LIGHTS and it is all WONDERFUL and mama makes a GROTTO and it is BRILLIANT and there are STARS and that is usually the point where I pass out, and someone has to slap me round to bring me to consciousness.

But Tigger makes me realise how awfully wrong I have got this Christmas lark. Here I am, with my strugglings to regain a patch of front room decorum, I have totally failed to lie about fat men with presents entering your bedroom late at night. Then there is all my Soviet-style military marchings backwards and forwards to the 10p bauble sale at the Community Re-use Shop, where I come over all control-freakery with the front door wreath.

No darling DON'T CHOOSE THAT ONE. It is so vulgar! Choose these discreet silver baubles instead! They are much prettier, ARE THEY NOT. Right, shut up crying. We're having them, because every time I enter the house, I have to look at your choice and quite frankly a dangling thing that looks like a tinselled stool on a stick will make my face melt as well as alert social services to what we get up to behind closed doors.

What I should have done, I now realise, was proudly and defiantly tip the contents of the local skip onto the front door step, chuck six foot of fairy lights over the lot, garnish it with a blow-up Santa, and declare it a grotto. Then I would have raised three children similarly off their heads with joy at the spirit that is Christmas.

But I fear, with my curmudgeonly ways, that I have done the stiff and judging British thing with my offspring. I have introduced them to social anxiety, made them aware that they will inevitably get on the wrong side of the scales of social judgements, and I have brought them to that point where they must apologise it is Christmas and they are not even Christians. That is what I do, and I can say it is not exactly healthy.

Well I am going to change my ways. Tigger, with all her uncomplicated joy and delightful bounce, has taught me wisdoms about the needs of children. It is not enough to shove the plastic Christmas trees at my offspring, then tell them to decorate them up to the eyeballs with crap in their bedrooms where I can't see them, I must proudly declare my altered child-led vision of Christmas in public.

I am going to tell Shark, Squirrel and Tiger to decorate the cherry tree that stands in the front garden and which is visible to the WHOLE WORLD.

This, I feel, will be a sign that I am finally led, totally, generously, and fulsomely, by children at this special time of year.

Thank you, Tigger.

Edited to add: When Dig enters the house from his long, long journey home from Hong Kong for the Christmas holidays, his first words are not Hello my lovely family! But Call the Police. Someone has tipped rubbish all over the front garden. Honestly, the vandalism that goes on in England is one reason why I stay in Hong Kong.

Pineapple and Ginger Jam? Avoid.

I have a to-do list as long as my arm, growing more fingers by the second, but I dump the whole lot this morning.

I have to. If I do not, I must listen to BUT YOU PROOOOMMMIIIISSSEDD howled about my ears from one of the three banshees I keep chained to the radiators.

Pineapple and ginger jam.

I promised it, obviously. I assumed I would be safe, not delivering on this promise for a few years yet, because I refuse to buy full-price pineapples, and everyone knows that pocket meanness always overrides stupid promises made to children.

But then. I walk into the local Tesco and, between dodging the truancy patrol and trying to pretend my emergency shop in the biscuit department is really a fully-scaled up maths/business/marketing lesson, Tiger eye-spies three pineapples, unceremoniously stuffed, bottom up, in the reduced price veg bin. Horror of horrors - three chunks of reduced-price ginger root sit right next to them.

Fate came into my world. I dumped the emails about booking the theatre, planning the chemistry, organising the trip to the British Museum and generally sorting 2013, and I rolled up my sleeves to get stuck in creating the promised land of Pineapple and Ginger Jam.

In hindsight, I should have looked at them in the reduced price bins and left them there. I could have bluffed my way out with Forty pence for a pineapple? You must be joking. Come back when they're a penny, then I might consider it.

The problem is, with Pineapple and Ginger jam, after two teaspoons you're gagging for a shot of emergency insulin. It is so sweet it peels your throat off. And it never set properly like jam should. It stayed as a liquid, running out the pan as a gloop of disgusting yellow gunk, packed with great wodges of pineapple and ginger knobs as thick as your thumb-end.They fell all over the working surface while I was trying to coerce them into the Kilner jar. I shouldn't have bothered with that, either. The escaped banshees were licking up the semi-hewn pineapple wheels faster than I could find the camera to photograph the end result.

So now I have a sugar bath all over the kitchen and another addition on my to-do list: Make an appointment with the dentist to have new false teeth fitted, because for certain those old ones were just digested by a sea swell of syrup with sugared pineapple wheel.

Stranger, don't 'ee come into town on thissum night

The Smalltown procession.

Shark, Squirrel and Tiger have made lanterns to walk the walk. I paid for them to attend the workshop this year, so off-loading me from the actual lantern-making job. It's better for everyone concerned. With me they get last-minute frenzied shouting and some thrashing about with a hair dryer and Copydex while sprawled over the kitchen table and positioned under a gigantic fish. By the time the procession starts, someone's usually in tears. I didn't think I could withstand the dramatic tension of it all this year, so it was worth the fiver for the workshop fee.

Anyway, here are the photos of the actual event. It all looks normal to me, processing round the streets following a giant cat in a top hat and a robot with a slightly disconcerting grin. The town's inhabitants take to this ritual wicker-and-tissue-paper-fest with great enthusiasm, making double decker buses, space rockets, wolves, something that looks like a medical experiment and, from the House of Grit, a type of shark or whale or whatever. I forget. Not having to care about the precision placement of willow on a dorsel fin was just another reason why the preparation was totally worth a fiver.

There are limits, apparently

Inevitably, to the new stables. Recommended to us by a fellow home educator; one who owns a similar horse-stolen daughter to Tiger.

Get them together, and this pair of horse-turned juveniles are obviously demented. Within seconds they are hopelessly absorbed in conspiratorial whisperings of polo mints and hoof picks.

The young woman/horse slave standing at the wooden board in the cold shed who ticks Tiger's name delightedly and withdraws money from my purse for more horse nuts promises they can meet Tiger's wishes for hacking and horsing; they'd be perfect, no problem! Just ask, whatever it is!

Okay then, I want you to air-lift a horse outside of Tiger's bedroom window, stick jingle bells on it, and wave it about come Christmas Morning. Then give her the horse to cuddle, ride, stroke, nuzzle its mane and plait its tail. By the way, you pay all fees, bills, invoices and expenditures for vets, shoes (day wear and evening), little rooms with straw, big rooms with carpets, glitter for arses, then add saddles, reins, hats, wings and ballroom gowns. Forever. And ever.

See? I doubted you would make that particular Tiger wish come true.

Won over once again

Ipswich! You have won me over! Your winsome market day, your lovely fruit & veg stalls, your v. trad. horse chestnut seller and your delightful pizza woman!

And Ipswich Museum! Not on Museum Street! Isn't it fantastic? Okay, don't go by the local council's website. They obviously don't do it justice. But I can say, Go along! It is superb.

Their moth-eaten stoat, Great Auk egg, and fake woolly mammoth, renowned all over East Anglia (well, across Ipswich town centre) are, since 1881, housed together in one of these beautiful old Victorian constructions, made to patterns across this land, and designed as public service buildings, exhibition spaces, lit & phils, museum houses, lecture halls, and a place where you can properly hang flags of the Empire. 

Here in Ipswich Museum you can experience it all, including a walk-round upper gallery with metal railings to stop you falling over onto the mammoth, plus lines of glass and wood exhibition cases, old fireplaces, domed ceilings, real doors and skirting boards, a big central hall, an indifferent attendant shuffling towards us, having been disturbed on his pursuit of spinning a pencil end round his finger, it has everything.

Don't take these buildings for granted. Look after them. That is one of my dying wishes - along with please can my children not hate each other, and please sort out public transport - as I'd like to die imagining these stuffed Auk mausoleums will be used in this same archaic way for a thousand years or more. These exhibition palaces are their own living reenactments of dusty history, created by the concerned professional classes for the moral improvement and scholarly instruction of the working ignorants. Well, that's us today. Changed, from knuckle-dragging boneheads to improved citizens! Thank you Ipswich!

 Ipswich? Can't find anything wrong with it. I even fell in love with the dummy. 

(Maybe something is wrong with my hormones.)

Not a lot of options

Travel to the wondrous Suffolk, where the wide fields washed in white may seduce me, but the prompt cold note securely pinned to the chest of drawers certainly doesn't.

Like the tolling of the heavy bell the thickly penned letters set out my clearing duties and remind me why venturing to this part of the country now brings its own set of hazards, disturbances, and miseries.

Put simply, the knot in the Suffolk family dislikes me, my home educating choice, my uncivilised children, my forthright being and my odd way of living. There is nothing I can do to redeem the relationship. My uncontrolled hair, my inappropriate choice of everything, and the way I wear that bling belt suitable for a 14-year old, these all disturb more than can be said. Essentially, I am not in order, full stop. I should behave better.

Strangely, I completely agree with all her observations about the messy hair, messy life, and foolish bling. After then, we part. These half-complete frayed bits of me, these spontaneous wanderings and my noisy announcements might upset her, but I have to make them delight me. I must enjoy my uncontrollable hair! Fuck it, I like my dramatic reenactments! Yes, I thrill to my bling! In truth, I would like nothing better than to find the opportunities for dressing and behaving inappropriately in my way more often. Joy in life would come from these wayward motes.

We will never see eye-to-eye. She has already departed the house ahead of my arrival, ensuring she never has to clap eyes on me nor see my foul brood ever again. On the kitchen calender, a black border confirms the dates of my arrival and departure, like a heavy box over the days I am here.

Maybe I should admire the way she puts her principles into action. By packing her bag in preparation at our visit, she's not putting up and shutting up, like I thought we all had to do from time to time with extended family members. 

But the chill of it means she turns my family visit into a problem and makes me feel awkward in knowing what household disruption I prompt; the circumstance she creates works against me seeing people I love, prevents me staying over more than a night, stops me enjoying my fields, and puts a halt on me gratifying my flung-off desires to trek about a wintered Anglia. All of it makes me feel the full frontal gloom of not being liked. What she doesn't get, not at all, is that my inappropriate life and non-normal choice doesn't necessarily result in a foolhardy irresponsibility.

What do you other home-educating rejected types do, when you are faced with such undisguised  disapproval of your choices and your lives? Can you ever reach their heads or hearts?

I don't know. I can't make it any better.

Hmph. May as well make it worse.

Here's her stuffed pussy, Grimalkin. Its fur is peeling off, I'm sure from over-stroking.

All our dreams come true

Looks like school, not like school

I agree! A magic momentum gathers when you group a load of kids in a room and say Hey, let's draw maps of Indonesia!

Of course it works: disparate kids learning together can have a positive impact on each other. When the session ends, we parents proudly clutch to our tear-stained bosoms a wad of maps of Indonesia. Now we can truly boast our home ed kids can find Sumatra on a globe!

Without that enthusiastic crowd, faced only with whipping my own kids into cartographic-related frenzy, I would fail in my Indonesian goal. I suspect many of the other mamas would, too. Without their essential kid peer group, Shark, Tiger and Squirrel would each find something more urgent to do, like another three hours clicking away on the all-consuming Animal Jam.

But the evident success we can have with a group of kids in a mapping workshop still, to my mind, doesn't form an argument for pursuing an education through a conventional classroom.

The kids at Grit Towers meet because they want to; the session - lasting two hours and nowhere near thirty to a class - comes with laughter, jokes, and biscuits; there's no hidden agendas of test percentages; everyone knows the afternoon will come with outside play; and no-one has to put up a hand to speak, pee, use crayons, or have permission to talk.

See, Mrs Gradgrind? Have another example of how education can be gained through everyday ordinary interaction with adults and peers. It comes in endlessly possible combinations, groups and approaches. And as today is a resounding tick, and I hug my tear-stained map of Indonesia with all the big islands drawn in, I can thoroughly understand why you just love to hate us, smug bastard that I am.

The little things of life

It's been a busy old few days.

I have barely had time to thrash the little grits onwards towards their autonomously-inspired educational achievements, let alone shackle them to the radiators.

But I had better note here the minor happenings which have passed while I have been a-busy, creating my delicious lovely things to catch your unguarded soul.

After all, you never know how things turn out. Any of the following minor events may be significant for the future.

1. Fish death.
It was sad. There was mourning. With a coffin.

The gas meter man arrived during the grieving process. The wailing had just reached a new height of emotion. I had to explain it, obviously, in case he thought I was up to something with child and manacle. I said there had been a pet death. He looked awfully sad and consoling, then I said it was a fish, not a cocker spaniel. He burst out laughing. Me, I would not dare do that. Thankfully, I shared a conspiratorial snigger with him by the gas meter.

2. Ceiling collapse.
Dig's office. An issue of not if, but when.

For many gloomy rainy seasons I have shuffled the buckets around the kitchen floor. Do not ask why a hole in the office roof has not been mended. Life is complicated. Anyway, the ceiling finally caved in, brought down, presumably, with August's rain, which we have stored there in the plaster and insulation. Well, I have abandoned the ceiling on the kitchen floor as a punishment. I will now source a new bucket, in extra-large.

3. Car crumpling.
I emerge at 9am one morning to drive the car dangerously round corners as normal, and I see someone has beaten me to the crumple point. One side of the car is totally bashed in. I suspect this is a result of the hard economic times we live in; more particularly, the man who runs the car shop down the road, trying to bring about my state of mind when I think it is worth trading in our old beat-up van for a nice new shiny van.

I can tell him now, it isn't going to work, driving your white van at speed towards my sides and rear at 2am. I am on my uppers thanks to filling the van up with fuel the other day.

4. The back door lock.
It keeps dropping off. The wilful disobedience of the thing is driving me insane. I hate the lock. It is telling me the awful truth that I need someone about the house who can do stuff. This is a profound confession, and I give it in a moment of weakness, the lock just having dropped off again, even though I have shouted, several times over, DO NOT DROP OFF.

Yes, I bought the book 100 Things You Don't Need a Man For, which hand-holds me from dripping-tap-mending to wobbly-door-hanging. No matter how helpful the text, I know it is all doomed. The state of my DIY skills are about as useful as a crippled poodle. I can just about wield a hammer, regardless of the task, but in all truth I am weary of taps and doors and locks dropping off. I want someone to sort it all.

On the bright side! I have half-mended the kitchen scales!

But I now look back and see that so many events have occurred! Any could, in the future, be significant. How is one to know? How can you pluck from a million events the single moment which will form more weightily in a life than all the rest? 

Now I have come over all Proust, with echoes of crunch, memory of buttered toast, and wonder at significant insignificance. Soon I will be rearranging Squirrel's gravel collection, and marvelling at it all.

Knicker Drawer Notebooks does alright

Take a stall at a local Christmas Craft Fair.

It is a total success.

I conclude this, even before 8am when I stagger towards the car carrying 25 hand-made notebooks, all bagged, tagged, and touchy-feely delicious, precariously held in a cranky wicker basket which also doubles as my stall's shonky visual aid.

But I tell the children this day is one of triumph, yes it is, of epic proportions.

For the first time since completing a design qualification in the fourteenth century and acquiring a speeding ticket on the way to display my end-of-course work, I have managed to create something other than a mess.

I bring together zillions of small parts, an old curtain, plus a great deal of willpower, to amalgamate into one glorious burst of design, all prettily located in a cold barn at the back of a destroyed abbey next to the London-Birmingham railway line in the drizzle. This is triumph indeed.

If I sell not one book, the day is not lost. I prove to myself that I can bring events together in a co-ordinated fashion even though everything else about me is dropping to bits.

It is an interesting experience, sitting behind a wobbly table in the middle of nowhere while the Christmas shoppers file by.

I quickly realise I need do absolutely nothing, apart from slump behind it with the ipad. I do not need to perform come hithering if I am to sell you a notebook. I can see whether or not you'll buy one. First, as you clap eyes on the exquisite sueded and leathered offerings, an expression like recognition passes over your eyeballs. It is with urgency that you then head straight over to them, lift one up, feel the weights and textures, then put it down quickly as if there is a bodily necessity you must attend to. That is my sale. Making the book which matches your desires, weaknesses and proclivities. Stitching into it a fragment of your soul, for want of a better word, then you only have to find it to be reunited with it, and for hard cash, it's yours.

 

I can even try and fatally undermine my stall by perching behind it the formidable Tiger, who can rip your face off 

if she takes a dislike to you. It makes not a jot of difference to the final results.

Mind you, the competition's not up to much. 

This is Squirrel, bored out her skull, propped behind a table displaying only the number 7.

She didn't sell it. (Neither did I, but I had a go.)

How can you teach everything?

I had this again. Hmm. Christmas might be an example.

It is one reason why I was driven to home educate, frankly. I want to be in control of Christmas.

Nursery - the experiment we foolishly tried when Shark, Tiger and Squirrel were aged four - gave us a size 24 classroom assistant wearing tinsel elf ears, eagerly anticipating Christmas starting in October when Santa falls down the chimney.

I'm sorry? Isn't it a bit more complex than that? I want the mini grits to grow up with a much wider awareness than offered by a pair of tinsel elf ears. I want my little grits to be aware of how many stories and how many voices compete for our attention and time in our Northern hemisphere's mid-winter.

Relying on Coca-Cola's Santa with his red-nosed reindeer, 200cwt of school glitter, and a school assembly for Christian Teaching Resources delivered by BoxTick.Gov.UK merely glosses over the issues raised by organised religion, commercial power, and social expectations.

Sure, we'll track Santa with Norad, watch Miracle on 34th Street, and read A Christmas Carol (again), and yes, I may even wear tinsel elf ears myself, but I want to take time to position all this in some intelligent and interesting debate.

It comes down to who's in charge of this culture? Whose message do I support? I could not imagine for one minute being able to shut up for long enough to suffer the quickly-delivered school line on Christmas without wanting to punch the classroom assistant and start a fight. Ultimately I'd want to make the event all more complicated than they'd want (a donation to the Christmas Fair organised by the PTA).

So yes, I do think I can teach my kids about Christmas better than any school. I want to convey rounded awareness rather than blinkered ignorance.

Now, December 1st. We are not Christian. I can't pray to anyone how I never want any of my little grits to burst home, declaring their born again evangelical status. I can only hope the family gene for that isn't dominant.

Even so, we're up for the carol service at St Giles in the Fields, the Poets' Church. Listening to Tallis' Videte miraculum, sung by Pegasus.

Christmas discussion starts here.

 

Learning how to turn up at a Church not looking like a scruff-ball;

learning how to shut up, sit down, listen to someone else;

and learning how to take part in a wider cultural event 

alongside an audience mostly composed of those aged over-50. 

(And when the kids have learned all this, they can teach me.)

Childhood

Spent the morning filling the diary for January 2013.

Then February and March.

I claim we don't have a timetable. Obviously we do. The events I just pencilled in - workshops, tours, theatres and social meets - must fit around the fixtures of sub-aqua club, mapping workshops, Latin lessons, art lessons, Woodcraft Folk, astronomy club, wildlife watch, 10-13 youth group, the new bodger group, the monthly coppicing club, our reading group, the seasonal science lectures, and my once-a-week film studies night.

I proudly display my efforts to Tiger and say how brilliant it will be to see Twelfth Night with Propeller, visit the Royal Academy, and see Ice Age art.

Interrupted from her computer screen where she is shooting an armadillo out of a cannon to hit a banana tree, Tiger looks at me with her indifferent, unfocused gaze. Then she curls one lip, shrugs her shoulders and turns back to do what's important for the moment: increase her score from 1,300 to 1,500 by knocking out the toucan.

They take it all for granted, kids. Unaware of how others move the world to help them out, make their path easier, support them through life. While it all happens for them by magic, they can be totally unaware, uncaring and ungrateful.

Man, I wish I were aged 12 again.

Joining the hunt

Not the horse-back way of enjoying the countryside. Not that type of hunt.

This type of hunt. 

Where we meet in a field to huddle round website print-outs and scrutinise copies of an old OS map to realise we don't know what to do.

Ten minutes in, and I am learning that I cannot read a map to within eight co-ordinates and don't know where I am.

By the measure of things, I am not alone.

Never mind, we have a leader!

Leadership is of vital importance. Otherwise, within the hour, our happy band will be roaming wildly all over your weathered land; trespassing, getting lost, calling the emergency services, considering who is the fattest and can be eaten first, and generally blaming each other for starting this misadventure.

But our leader is very good, so all dangers can be avoided. Looking a bit like a Ranulph Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes type, he strides manfully about with the bearing of one who could wrestle a few sheep if the need arose.

Here we are, he has led us to stare into this hedge. I very much approve of this sport.

And we discover so many interesting places on our countryside trek! Would I have dared the old canal route under the bridge where someone has scrawled DIE DIE DIE. I don't think so.

This is what our leader suggests we must do as well. Crawl under footpaths into drainage channels.We do that, readily.

To you muggles, I accept this might look like we are searching for the drugs stash left last night by Skull Crusher.

Did ya get that clue, right there?

Yes, this is the most brilliant afternoon Grit has spent in a long time, and she has had a few in this home educating lark.

Thank goodness we had a leader, and I need to brush up on my shonky map skills, but I now count myself as a totally blissed out geocacher.

 

All there is left to do is persuade you, too. Go and treasure hunt your locality.

Legally, this does it for Wednesday

 

Section 7 of the 1996 Education Act states your parental duty is to equip Tinkertop with an efficient and suitable education. 

How would you define efficient or suitable? 

Round here today, I'm defining efficient as taking the quickest, most expedient, and cheapest route to an end. Which means I take Shark, Squirrel and Tiger along to a community hall to thrash about in a Willow Withie Workshop with tissue paper, masking tape, and glue. I'm given a discount on the basis that triplets share. See? Quick, simple, and a bargain.

And suitable? I'm defining this to mean Shark, Squirrel and Tiger must have the cultural understanding to fit into, take part in, and help grow the life of a community in which they are a part. 

Then we can give a big happy legal tick here with the Willow Withie Workshop. Because this is in preparation for the event, taking place in a short time, when our local community comes together, out and about on the streets, in a night-time outdoor ceremony involving candles and twisted wicker. 

(I merely recommend strangers don't come into town on that day.)

I am absolutely not paranoid delusional

The Highways Agency is gaslighting me.

Tonight they closed the A5, then denied it.

But I have them sussed. They are messing with my mind, trying to drive me to madness by preventing me from driving myself home.

More precisely, at 8.30pm from the Woodcraft Folk, not driving myself home, nor Shark, nor Shark's chum Tigger, sat behind me in the car innocently blathering away about throbbing glow-in-the-dark Santa hats. Well, she was doing that, until I had a minor temper thanks to closure of the A5.

Did I pass any warning Road Ahead Closed sign? Pah. It was more fun to let me waste yet more fuel and another 15 minutes before leading me to the shut-off Flying Fox roundabout. At which point, I could see no way out of this predicament without a U-turn, an extended tour of Leighton Buzzard, two more road diversions, the closure of the A146 and another hour and a half until I could be spat from the back-end of Bletchley in a fuming boil because the chippy shuts at 9pm.

Stupidly, I tried to make light of how another tenner in fuel costs and another two hours was added to my evening drive time, plus we were all going to bed starving. Ahem. I humorously suggested to my young passengers that the entirety of Milton Keynes was now sealed off in emergency lock-down due to a poison gas cloud, escaped mutant virus, rampaging pyschotic lunatic, or maybe flood, so now all the citizens were evacuated to Aylesbury. Let's go and spend the night there! It's easier to get into.

My attempt at humour didn't go down well. Like a lead balloon, in fact. Thus I faced the prospect of having to explain to Tigger's mama how I had not only hurtled her daughter about the Bucks countryside for two hours late into the night, starved her half to death without any supper, I also now had to explain why the next 15 years will be spent in trauma counselling.

It's only a bit of water

Well, plague might stop the home ed meet.

But only if it's really bad.

Rock watching

To a village hall, somewhere off the M40. For an all-day workshop in geology. Led by a geologist. With lots of rocky geology samples. Worksheets and maps. Geological maps. 

Yup, that pretty much defines the day. I finish with only mica, schist and slate in my eyeballs.

There are many of us out here

Another day, another sleepover.

I woke this morning and wondered, Whose child have I got? I couldn't recall. We have people in and out on a rota.

Is it the graceful, stick-thin horse girl with the delicate, fragile features? Get on the wrong side of her and, like a sword-fighter, she'll chop up your mind and expose the dismembered bits to her forensic gaze until you're blubbing for mercy and miserably agreeing that you demonstrated a complete ignorance and a total lack of rigour in your off-the-cuff remark about wombats.

Or is it Tigger, the force of nature who bursts into this house, bouncing off the walls, ceiling and floor because it's all! so! exciting! and DID YOU KNOW?! Soon it's CHRISTMAS! and there are REINDEERS! and there will be a tree! and lights! FLASHING! and it is all so TASTEFUL!

Then I remembered. It is Fizzy.

Planet Earth, know this. You are visited by a unique energy in Fizzy. Fizzy understands you, Planet Earth. She listens. Or she would, if your rocks could stop chirruping for a few moments and talk to her in a sensible manner. Fizzy is intuitively in touch with rocks. And earth, water, trees, sky, plus all animals. She listens to the complaints, knowledges, and endeavours of them all, engaging in discussion equally on the creaky knee joints of elders, and the wisdoms of deer.

After five minutes with Fizzy, she blurs into one great surge in my head. Sparrows are energising, as are force-fields. Sky can pulsate but that is okay because badgers send you messages by snorting.

She may actually be from Planet B897-Minor, put here on earth to confuse your expectations of normal.

But no. By afternoon, I know she is normal, because together with my own adorable offspring she can still trash a bedroom in the time-honoured sleepover manner.

I know it's not rational

Men, I suggest you do not read this post. Achieve a goal more useful, like make a cup of tea, and cherish your beloved.

Today I had the routine once-every-five years smear for cervical cancer. The second smear this year, note, because the earlier attempt two months ago produced no cells for examination.

Really? Well, I can tell you why it didn't. The same reason I expect this attempt with the dreaded speculum also to fail.

Because, strangely, when I am flat on my back on a medical couch vulnerably exposing my doodah to a Chinese woman with a focused stare, watching in growing horror and fear as she draws back her arm to skewer me with something that resembles a bicycle pump, terror kicks in. My body reacts in a completely involuntary, uncontrollable manner. This always takes both of us by surprise.

Personally, I think my body has examined the options. As far as it can see, they are:

a) suffer being stabbed up the doodah with a bicycle pump
b) punch Chinese Lil in the face and record-break the three-minute mile
c) confuse the enemy, by levitating.

Obviously, it is option (c). My body has worked out that by jumping to a height one metre above the couch with the speed of a cricket, this unexpected manoeuvre will confound the enemy, secure its safety and thwart the evil attempt to stab it in the doodah with a bicycle pump.

Unfortunately for my body, the limbs and torso have not yet learned how to jump like a cricket. This is where it cunningly employs the hands. The left hand attempts to scale the wall while the right hand grabs at the modesty curtain to lever the whole being up and off the couch.

I think my hands do very well, considering the people who make walls forgot to put in handles. My left hand, for example, does a sort of flat-palming technique half a metre up, which works fine and is a good start for elevation purposes. The right hand does not fare as well, sadly, because a thin modesty fabric curtain is obviously not as rigid or secure as a wall. The scrabbling right hand can therefore have the entire screen tipped over on the floor in seconds; curtain, hooks, metal rods, the lot, crashing about the feet of the confused Chinese Lil.

The worst isn't over, because once the body attempts the levitation, I have started screaming. I have tried to stop this panic reaction, and simply can't, unless it is to suppress this sound into a sort of gulping sobbing noise punctuated by shouting GET AWAY FROM ME I MAY PUNCH YOU. It is not very dignified, it is true, but at least I can be relieved that there is only the final act to go before the horrible scene is complete and I can crawl home in ignominy.

The combined forces of the failed levitation attempt, the falling modesty screen, and the fight-or-flight reaction invariably tips me over, unbalanced, off the couch, sending me lurching towards the floor. Given that my legs are at ninety degrees to the rest of me, it is understandable that I have zero stability and no point of balance to help right me in the fall. I am not a cat, after all! Thus one leg swings wildly round to locate a floor while Chinese Lil steps back to avoid my foot in her ear, simultaneously tripping backwards over the fallen screen. Give it one misplaced footstep now and we will both be sprawled on the floor in the wreckage, wishing I had cancelled like last time.

I can find nothing, absolutely nothing, to say about the whole experience which suggests it is a good one. In previous years the only way I have found to control the involuntary terror is by drinking a triple whiskey beforehand. I do not emerge well, and Chinese Lil is now completely terrified of me.

To her credit, in the hour-long appointment I take for this two-minute procedure, she attempts to calm me by reason (fail), with humour (fail), by showing me the speculum which she confusingly labels 'virgin size' (fail), telling me the techniques of others (fail, you are insane), suggesting a variety of pain-lessening positions to do with buttocks and hands (fail), asking me to use deep-breathing exercises (fail), giving me a badge which reads I have been brave at the doctor's today (fail), and suggesting, as a last resort, that in five years from now I don't take up the offer of the smear on the basis that I am probably low risk for cervical cancer and frankly it is doing more damage to her nerves than the good it is doing for my medical reassurance.

There's a challenge

Yes, there is a little bit of me (maybe the left upper arm) that once a month is driven to do an 'I'm in charge' teachery thing.

Normally I don't like to admit to it.

But there it is. Once a month I run an English group, where my little band of willing pre-GCSE victims are kind enough to let me witter on about readers, writers, expectations and delights, then read out a short story before setting them a writing task.

I am all in the manner of an English teacher who is probably elderly and confused but you tolerate them nonetheless because they seem fairly harmless.

Today's writing task was to bring together two sentences. The first must describe or introduce an event that is routine, predictable, normal or comforting. And the second is to pounce on the reader with an idea that is so strange, extraordinary, or unusual, that you draw up in your seat to wonder how the world can be so composed.

I gave a couple of examples.

The alarm clock sounded as usual, at 7am. The death sentence would be carried out that afternoon. 

The house looked as it had always done. Except for the gigantic elephant, balanced delicately on the roof, its trunk stuck down the chimney.

I suggested ten minutes would be sufficient to come up with two or three sentences like that. Enough to get us wondering about expectations.

After fifteen minutes, Tiger was still stuck.

She had plenty of second sentences. She just couldn't think of anything that was normal.