Book for the quotation

Within the infant rind of this weak flower
Poison hath residence and medicine power:
For this, being smelt, with that part cheers each part;
Being tasted, slays all senses with the heart.
Two such opposed kings encamp them still
In man as well as herbs, grace and rude will;
And where the worser is predominant,
Full soon the canker death eats up that plant.

Film Family Fun with madness on the blasted heath

Before I press play, mama says be grateful, because look, some families are worse than ours.

(But don't risk it, pushing me on that chemistry assignment date. I'll end up screaming naked in the rain, rolling about the local rec talking to your fluffy camel.)

Anyway. This week's Film Family Fun is the RSC production of King Lear with Ian McKellen. 

You can watch it here, if you have pressing deadlines or are trying to get out of making dinner. Call it an education round at Grit's.

No. And if you come at me with a needle, I want another nurse

We are all debating the niqab.

No, is my short answer to Shark's questions. I don't like to see it because I like friendly smiles and the pleasure of seeing a face in my social dealings. How does putting a screen over a face facilitate the social moment for me?

I want to see your facial lines wrinkle, know what impact I'm having on you, and judge whether I'm pissing you off already. Veiling a face goes against all the cues I have learned in my social world. Incidentally, I do not want to unlearn those cues, nor say to my daughters Shark, Squirrel and Tiger that these social cues do not matter. Culturally, they do. I want them to continue mattering.

While I've got the keyboard under my control, I don't like what the niqab says about men. They can be their own champions and defenders, no doubt, but I do not like the suggestion that men cannot be trusted to walk down the street without wanting to leap upon all unveiled women. Screening a female face from the male, suggesting that a female-male interaction is nothing more than code for sex is, frankly, depressing. When I pick up the car from the annual service and discuss the changing of the brake fluid with Gordon, I do not want to be forced to think we are having a covert game of hide-and-seek little willy.

So, no. The niqab removes nuance; it creates an unfair platform where you can see mine but won't show me yours; it's insulting to the men in my life; assumes my cultural coding is worth less than yours; and rejects a long tradition in England of showing a face alongside the oath you state, the belief you declare, the vow you make, and the promise you give.

Women should not don the niqab to give evidence in court. Faces should not be veiled in the nurse's office, nor when sticking needles in my arse or arm. Girls should not be veiled in schools. Nor when taking exams, having the third attempt at your driving test, nor serving me at the grocer's.

Tell me, sure, that we should remember the woman behind the veil. Fine. Let me see the face and then I'll smile back.

That Chemistry IGCSE?

I'd like to say, at this point, in early days, before the solution blows up in my face and ignites my eyebrows, that Chemistry IGCSE by post? It's all going brilliantly!

Of course it is not.

We have barely started, and you should hear the howling. You probably can, sitting quietly in Ullapool, sipping your Earl Grey, wondering vaguely, Why are the windows rattling? That is Tiger, voicing her consternation that I am now demanding from her the completion of Topic 2, Principles of Chemistry, with a Bit of Diffusion.

With all this hullabaloo, you would be forgiven, truly, for imagining how I had threatened eternal imprisonment unless she (and her sisters) solve all the riddles of the universe with this broken comb and that mouldy plum stone. And I want your assignment in writing; use your own blood.

Now, I am all one for going with the child-led flow, but I ain't going with the flow on this one. Going with the flow would mean lying down on the floor and giving up altogether. Writing three sentences and choosing from a column whether a couple of statements are true or false does not, in my mind, constitute hard work.

Thus, I have become Mean Mummy. I think you home educators should know this is possible; how even the hippy, free-thinking hair, autonomous-leaning Grit has a line at the front door, over which you do not cross en route to your next social engagement (many, this is home ed) unless I receive by next Monday, 4.40pm, Topic 2, Principles of Chemistry, with a Bit of Diffusion.

Writ in your own blood, or mine.

Hands-on copy editing

Looking around the web for insurance. Just in case someone trips up! A horror I will certainly bring about by one of my frilly Knicker Drawer Note Books.

The unfortunate, innocent, injured party is never able to work again.

Then know the horrors and disasters I can bring on!

Maybe someone cooks with my cook's notebook. Or attempts actual time travel, using my notebook with the dismembered clock bits sewn on the cover. Maybe someone very reasonably eats one of my notebooks. Or uses the one with the aeroplane charm for flight, launching themselves out the bedroom window.

Hundreds of people could take me to court! Thousands!

But I find I can be insured against claims involving hospitalisation, harm, and distress. Not, however, psychological scars caused by any words used in my books.

Words? I cannot be insured against them in my crafty business.

I consider the harm I can do with words - to the word themselves, and to other people using my bad, evil, crafty, emotional game-playing words, or my slap-in-the-face blasphemies. Then I am comforted with this.

Copy-editing or proofreading. A hands-on therapy where the therapist will be touching the patient.

I suddenly recall my time spent copy-editing and proofreading; I regretfully realise that I could have defined my job as word therapy and, thus being insured, might have been able to strangle the author and get away with it.

Steampunk Asylum, Lincoln

Join Steampunk fun in Lincoln.

Honestly, I may not be attired in full goggles and corset, but the Grit spirit fits snug in with this delightfully bizarre pottage of English eccentrics. 

Who could not fall in love with Tea Duelling? Biscuit dunking sublimated from warfare. It should be adopted by the UN.

Or howabout the races, where lead boots are an obvious advantage?

Or a costume line up? (The restrained and modest attires.)

But of course I couldn't photograph Steampunks all day long; I had business to research. I am plotting those Time Travelling Knicker Drawer Note Books right now. And whether I should make my own corset.

I can see only one problem about my intentions here. The day with the wonderful Steampunks flipped out Tiger's mind mechanism. She was truly destabilised; we almost had a major freak-out by ye olde tea shoppe.

Grown men and women simply must not dress weird and behave in this silly manner!

I tell her, But you have been living with your mother all this time. Did you notice nothing about her?

We had to take her into Lincoln Cathedral* for a calm down.

We reversed roles then, because while Lincoln Cathedral calmed down Tiger, it almost certainly blew my mind. It is one of the most amazing, eye-punching buildings I have walked in, and I have been in a few, from the opera house up the Amazon to the great hall of the people in China. It was all anyone could do to stop me running about naked laughing in hysteria.

Lincoln Cathedral, you are beautiful, and a testament to the wonderful skills of humankind. If I could afford to pay for all the repairs to your lovely flying buttresses, I would do so in an instant.

*Go and visit, I insist. Wear your corset.

On film, doing better than alright

I might be crap with maths but I am okay handling film (let's kindly call that Media Studies).

This week's Film Family Fun Night chez Grit is Laurence Olivier in Hamlet (1948).

Maybe that would do, but lo and behold, here's comes an unmissable upstage from the Independent Cinema outfit in the form of Aelita, Queen of Mars. This Russian sci-fi film (1924) is where Metropolis nods a thank you.

Obviously, there's a three-line whip to march the gritlings to Milton Keynes Gallery where, thanks to funding from MK Council and Arts and Heritage Alliance, Aelita is screened with live piano accompaniment.

I wasn't expecting to be so entertained (and educated) about Russian society in the early twentieth century. The narrative is fluent, the characters rounded and interesting, and there are jokes! From post revolutionary Russia! Better still, it set me off with discussions on Constructivism and Can you trust a Tsar? I'm counting that as an education even if I can't multiply 23 by 56 in my head.

Now if you are interested in film history/ twentieth century politics/ the Russian revolution, then turn down the lights, and enjoy a home screening.

British Awards for Storytelling Excellence

Attend the preview night of BASE with a pile of books specially stitched for storytellers.

What do you mean, you have never heard of BASE?

It is the British Awards for Storytelling Excellence.

Go on, click around the nominations; amuse yourself with a story or two.

Free at random in the British Museum

I used to dislike the British Museum. Too big, overwhelming, and obscure; a pile of too many confusing and inexplicable objects, propped up in glass cases. 

To make it all worse, those scuttling keepers stole my ordinary letters, numbers, and punctuation, and turned them into indecipherable Curator Code IBP 6757-2/1 db. 

I can be kind to myself and say that museums have come a long way in making their stock accessible. But I suspect I was just young. I liked a simple narrative and a solvable problem. It made moving on that much quicker.

But now, now, when I am older, I want to fill my time with unfinished business. I hanker after unknowables, un-thought-about problems, and puzzles I have not met before. I want no prospect of completion, no story with conclusion.

Have three of my finds today.

Practical learning of river words

Living with chronic urticaria

This is not a good time to be in the Gritty household, as those members of the family who live with me will testify.

Like today. I am struggling, it is true. Not with providing things for children to do - today they can take all the hours they want, then footle about the house and garden, sewing sticks and painting horses. It is health that constrains and absorbs me today, too much, too unreasonably much.

Some months ago, chronic urticaria came to live with me. I blame that. It wrapped its fingers of stinging nettle around my cheeks, stroked my eyelids with hot spears, and then dug claws into my neck with its acid burn. Helpfully, it wakes me in early morning with skin swollen, stung, itching and scaling. I gulp down fat pink pills and avoid looking in the mirror until midday. The face that I knew has changed; it has become inflamed, scarred, and a constant source of pain.

In the best of days, I cannot wear clothes about my throat; my own hair hurts me. I do not wear any necklace, nor brush blusher into my cheeks, nor use soaps, nor fragrant potions poured from dainty glass bottles, nor thick creams with their promises of youth and plumped-up firmness. None of it. Vinegar I have tried, and the most palatable of cures, honey.

Nothing vanishes the tight pain. To search for that peace, I am winding my way round cures normal, natural, bizarre, ridiculous, repulsive. Maybe, I have come to think, this time, this remedy, forget how unlikely, will work. If that would happen! Then I wake tomorrow, my normal skin, normal feeling, back again! I can take it all for granted, say I have taken it in my stride, it never beat me down, now let's pour an evening glass of wine in the day's celebration.

I know what happens. I wake up knowing hope is another version of despair. I have travelled on this road before. Nothing will send this visitor away, nothing, maybe only time. I hope then, for only two years; but I have read a sentence of ten, twenty, life. Maybe one day, it will surprise me and I can be released. Then I can say no-one could track the cause, knew the reason why it came or went, nor why it stayed the time it did.

But, meanwhile, I still have a face, and my new challenge is, to make it mine. On good days, you probably would not tell much, although I feel. On bad days, I am the strange cabbage patch eyes and lumpy swollen cheeks, the red wounds and thickened skin around the jaw which cannot move without a line of dry pain as if from the wringing of rope.

Over it all, I have to think, feel, be my way; I have to bring onto my new resident the old wrinkles of knowledge that I recognise are my experience; the turns and folds and lines that give me, to you, my who-I-am.

While I do that - reform this face and make it mine, I have no particular desire to show the world what it looks like. But I do. I have to, pragmatic, plain and simple, because I have business to do; vege sausages to buy; kids to educate about the world. And show them how the world looks back at us.

It is kind, for the most part. On a bad day, the worst of days, days like today, while I am out and about, I catch the scrutiny of strangers, or have that moment when there is someone I must speak to, who glances and then cannot look back at me in my face. They do not want to know themselves as the type of people who stare; and maybe they want to spare my blushes. As if I could have them. Unknowing, confirming me as someone who simply cannot be seen, they send me off to cry silently in the relative privacy of the car. Isn't it ridiculous? I find myself hoping, stupidly, that maybe this time, this remedy, my own tears, this briny salt solution - who would have thought it - will somehow magically prove the cure, to wash it all away.

I won't be making a career out of stand up

Took my Knicker Drawers to the flea, craft and vintage fair held monthly in our local arts and community centre.

This time the organisers gave me prime place, up on the piano podium. I like to think it was a reward, not a punishment.

But I turned the elevation into a bit of a disaster. Given the rise of a couple of inches on the nearest thing the room has to a stage, I kept tirelessly yelling to all comers that I've gone up in the world! Then I set about haranguing passers by.

I don't know what it was, but the psychological impact of a podium - perhaps making me think I was duty-bound to deliver something verbal - set my mouth off running in places it should know better than to babble.

People did not deserve being upbraided for their free use of Twitter, really, and maybe that approach didn't do me any favours. But it did, at times, feel good. And allowed me to finger point dramatically while trying to sell a witch's notebook to the young man who came round trying to persuade me to love baby Jesus.

It was only a matter of time

Okay, I had to wade in. But credit me; I bit my tongue already.

August school exam results bin and gone, as the whole world knows.

To say other than Congratulations for the terrific achievement and hard work etc etc etc is treachery. I Must Not Say (repeat 100 times) that school children are made copying parrots and some have done very well at it. If I say this treason out loud, people would cross the road to avoid me, make throat-slitting gestures and snake eyes in my direction, and I must slink home in shame. So, Congratulations for the terrific achievement, etc etc etc.

The reality is, grade boundaries have cak all to do with a person's intelligence; A* to C do not reflect whether Tinkertop is bright or dull. Worse, Tinkertop, if she has a great memory, but fuck all interest in a subject, can breeze away with an A*, whereas poor old Florabunda, who may be passionate about the very same subject, is kicked onto the failure heap of life if she drags out a measly D. What then is an exam grade measuring?

In truth, grade boundaries - regardless of whether they are made by the exam boards or by the minister leaning in a particular direction - are in themselves political decisions, and they become a means to justify decisions in all policy areas, whether management, staff recruitment, or restructuring the state schooling system.

Now I've started, may as well get it done. Gove is whittling away at state education not because he cares whether Tinkertop 'reaches her full potential' or whether she dosses about in the back row. He messes about with state education because it is bloomin' expensive and, given his ideology, he needs to reduce the financial cost of it to the state while forcing it to become profitable in its own right. I think we can expect, down at your local Bessie Street comp, more selling, more venture capital, more consumers, more language of goods, outcome and product, and more adaptation from the models of education services already sold in a global market.

For all this to happen, Tinkertop must be turned into a consumer - and you thought she was enough of one already - but my feeling is, we haven't seen anything yet. Wait till her mama and papa properly become a buyer of her educational goods and services as the state norm. Then we'll see the day when Tinkertop takes her teacher to court for failing to deliver her with the A grade she paid for.

And, just as an addendum, I distinctly recall telling my HoD in 1989 that the bastard Tories were after performance related pay, to which they answered, That'll never happen.

They should never have removed my soap box from the Post Office queue, I'm telling ya.

Not entirely a home ed-free post. Home educated children take exams too. Perhaps with a more cynical eye, and less willing to lap up the nonsense of Gove. I did a quick count of 20 exam results posted up from home educators which resulted in the following grades across a range of subjects: 15 kids got A*; 19 got grade A; 9 grade B; 5 grade C; 7 grade D; 1 grade E, and 1 grade F, which I wondered whether to count because the kid taking it was aged 11 and took it when his brother was doing it and he wanted to know what an exam was like. I guess he walked in with almost zero preparation.

Time for free food

There remain two problems in the damson jam session.

One is that we start the procedure at 9.30pm.

Don't ask why. That's life in home ed land. Where impulses and urges must be followed. Tinkertop learns to read at 11pm? No problem. Let's get out more books. At least no-one round here has to get up for school in the morning.

The second problem is the same as last year. How do you get the blasted stones out? I want them to float gracefully to the surface to be strained out while keeping the skin and pulp in the pan. Tell me it's possible otherwise I may have to have a temper tantrum with a pan of boiling sugar.

Planning ahead

Sat down with Shark and worked through a timetable to complete her IGCSE Physics.

I told her that most home ed kids take the exam after one year, so why does she need two? She said 2036 was her preferred exam year, so I was doing well if she sat it in 2015.

I probably agree. It is a subject that I am staring at in incomprehension, while simultaneously claiming cheerfully how you can effortlessly relate E=mc2 to one marble and an elastic band.

Well, I warned her. I am not letting her off the hook for 2015. I laid out my serious calendar and came over all pointy-finger and scowly frowny. Then I wrote down her assignment posting dates on it, in very black pen. By the time I had finished with my 2014-2015 at-a-glance it looked like Johannes Gutenberg had had a fit in a vat of printer's ink.

I know it is the opposite of what a good 'let-the-children-lead' type of home educating mama should do, but I have three kids of the same ages, and the last thing I want is for all of them to try sitting half a dozen different subjects at exactly the same time. Imagine the mess I'll make of those codes! It will all go hopelessly wrong. I will have Shark taking Squirrel's course on Fairy Puddings and Tiger traumatised by a Fish Exam.

I think Shark saw the wisdom in my organisational approach, even though she didn't look very happy. More, like the enterprise was already hopelessly doomed. In respect of that, I left our planning meeting as gently and as kindly as I could. I simply said that if she does not get Section 1 Topic 2 written up in best handwriting and sent off as per My Schedule, I would post off a sheet of blank paper with her name printed at the bottom in the blood I have extracted from her forearm.

But it is a tightrope walk, is it not, this passage betwixt what the home educated child wants to do (play pointless computer games all day long involving three talking horses and a wizard), and what the studious home educating mama thinks the children should do (take a measly clutch of ruddy exam courses to give them a bit of elbow room when they come to a college interview).

Term start

See? Even I talk about terms, and I barely grasp what day it is. 

Our terms are mostly imposed by the Latin teacher who comes round once a fortnight to scare me witless with Cambridge Latin.

It's our first lesson post-holiday, and I was up until 11pm last night, revising.

I thought, if she suspects that I haven't maintained our declensions and conjugations, she will breathe in that terrifyingly withering way. It is a special technique all elderly Latin teachers have.

In other news, Squirrel attempts to teach two children aged under five how to play croquet.

For the very first time, I receive a bit of sympathy for 'what it must have been like', coaxing triplets round a National Trust property without being hung, drawn, and quartered by the custodians (who probably teach Latin in their spare time).

 

Geography field trip; river study

We travel miles for this

We pilgrim to Apsley, land of Dickinson stationery*, to say Happy Birthday to Denis, the company's very own Fire Engine, 75 years old this year. 

He now has his own Fire Fighting Museum at Frogmore Paper Mill. Let's all celebrate, English-style, with a cup of tea and a fine collection of hoses, masks, and nozzles. 

I know some of you celebrate big time with hoses, masks, and nozzles. I sometimes click through the keyword search. I need only scatter a few punctuation marks about, break the lines for an elegiac pause, and I am rewarded with a bewildering, awkward, but strangely touching poetry, like this morning's early gathering:

Passive aggressive sex
with my vacuum cleaner.
Thank you for the invitation
but, unfortunate.

And then we journey on to Dickinson's triumph, Frogmore Paper Mill! (Same building.) Here they make lovely recycled paper on an old machine.

(Not so very different from yourself, hungry searcher, I also have ulterior motives**.)

* I didn't know Dickinson pioneered the window envelope in 1929, did you?
** Not sex with machines/paper/window envelopes, but inclusion of recycled paper made on historic machinery into lovely, lovely, notebooks.