Why you should never allow children to play in quarries

Today is the walk-and-talk with our local geology group. Here they are.


Let me say right now they are fabulous people. I adore them for their kindness and generosity. They allow themselves to be seen near us, even though we are an ignorant sprawling bunch of amateur no hopers who have trouble sorting our basalt from our bison.

Because some of these walk-and-talk people are professional geologists. Really. They actually do this rockwatching for a living. They are exactly the type of knowledgeable people I like to shove Squirrel towards and have them list to her the chemical composition of brecciated Upper Lias clay.

Squirrel is possibly my only scientific hope. She is the one who actually enjoys learning the times table. Tiger, on the other hand, goes berserk and smashes up the house in anguish at the sight of 4x7, so she takes after me. Shark simply shrugs her shoulders in a SeeifIcare? gesture, unless you rephrase it and switch the numbers for conger eels and seabed caverns, in which case she can give you the answer no problem. But Squirrel is interested in numbers and chemicals and planets and rocks, so on those daydream disconnected days, she could be lying on that hammock working out the mathematics of black holes. Who knows?

So today, a lot for Squirrel, but for all of us too, we walk-and-talk round Stowe Gardens with the lovely, wonderful and kind geologists. We do a lot of this.


And a lot of this.


Quite a bit of this.


And plenty of that.


Then we walk further, to the local disused quarry.


Now the moment we arrive here, I realise this is why you should never allow children to play in quarries. Why not? Because you cannot get the beggars out. What is here? Why, just all the very best stuff you can ever imagine! Mud! Sand! Puddles! Fossils! Pits! More sand! Sliding slopes! Danger! More danger! Rocks! More rocks!

At this point I collect some 150 photos of kids fooling around in mud and clay and climbing up and sliding down sand and gravel heaps, because I think this would be a hoot to show the staff at A&E.







But I also know this is how geologists are made, so if my ambitions for Squirrel include her rockwatching in far flung parts of the world, I'd better let her throw herself down a cliff face now, while her body is still bendy. And if I have to carry the wounded Squirrel back to the car then I can always say I was led to it by that weird deity we keep round here: education.

After the exhaustion of the quarry fun, and some slight coercion about going home before the clocks change again, we set off in the direction of the car. But I see that she is limping. I would like to think this is real sustained injury from which she might know her limits. But it is not. It is because she has stuffed 1,290 bits of rock down her knickers, 3,596 pieces in her trouser legs, and a further 2,400 rocks in her socks.



All of them, precious.

This is the best thing I have done all year

Inspired by yesterday, I thrash around in the bathroom-craftroom where I strap torn up strips of the Independent to chickenwire with lashings of glue. That feels better.


I know it looks like a car seat, but it is actually the start point for the sculpture, Seated Woman.

The children are mocking. Yes, I hear their cries of Mummy! What are you doing? She hasn't got a head. It looks like a car seat. I take these observations merely as a sign that yesterday's visit has broken through to their creative imaginations. Now I have done that, I know they will be inspired in similar vein. Squirrel has already created a plaster of paris dinosaur and Tiger has had a big squeal. This is great progress in the borderless lands of creativity, and I'm not stopping now.

The other remarkable event of the day is that Dig is not sitting in an aeroplane en route to Singapore. I'm not making any jokes about the unpronounceable volcano round here, I can tell you.

My heart started singing when I realised he was grounded, and I might have a husband. But then I realised that having a husband actually means we have to live together for two weeks in the same place, when really he would rather be changing planes for Bali.

Well I remain undaunted. In fact my inspired, creative state will see me through. After Car Seat, my next sculpture might be of a weak and blindfolded beggar teetering at a cliff edge holding a particularly heavy and difficult sheep. That sculpture, I would call Marriage.

More than love for Henry Moore

I decided, many years ago, that I did not like the sculptures of Henry Moore. I blamed it on a bronzeblob larded with pigeon shit, lumped between a faceless corporate office block and a fume-filled dual carriageway.

Anyway, I was more interested in shoes. I might have had employment that suited tippytappy shoes. I bet I totteredtippytappy past the bronzeblob and put my nose in the air.

I am not the same person now. Thank God. If I met my former self I might enjoy wrestling that vacant wrongheaded idiot to the ground, smacking her round her ignorant chops and dumping her shoes in the canal.

Now I am older, wiser. I have had Alien life forces ripped from my innards. I have learned in ways other than shoes. It feels right then, that I can say, I know what it is to grow knuckle and bone. Now, I want to shug into those giant sculptures. I want to wear them, like skeletons on the outside. Those sculptures are all vertebra, tough gristle, hard sinew, stretched elastic cartilage. They turn my insides to outside, pare them, bleach them, stand them to the wind and rain. They stay there, facing out the world.

So that is how today I see those sculptures by Henry Moore. And I want the children to know them. I want them to see, and feel, their design and elemental expression. Shark, Tiger and Squirrel, I want you to know that it is possible to envisage on a grand scale, to dream, imagine big, and create. Something other than wearing tippytappy shoes.

But something gets in the way, just a little, on our group trip today to experience the Moore sculptures. Yet this, of all places, is the place to come. Not a cold museum, or a corporate face, but an earth place with grass, sky, and birdsong.

Despite this, our guide tells us that the children will not understand, cannot understand, cannot understand do not touch FOLLOW ME.

And while that guide was helpful, and concerned, and worried, and fretful that we might overstay, touch wrong, not look, not be over here, be over there, not come this way, go the wrong way, I think too that my children need to know those sculptures in their own way; as children do. By running around those forms, by feeling their spaces, pressing their hands and bodies and faces to hollows and curves; by being there, close up. Thankfully, we take that time in the afternoon, and do just that.














Girls, do not be like me. I wasted my opportunities. And now all I can do is join the elderly tribes, where I am forced to merely walk slowly around those sculptures.

I have to act like an over sober adult, nod quietly in reverence, be hesitant, respectful. When really, all I would like to do, is run at them, then squish my body up close, inside, under, between.

Not a lot makes sense here. Unless you like sheep.

Today we went to College Lake to celebrate sheep. I think this reveals something about my character. It shows you that I am soft and gentle and fluffy and have a warm endearing side. No! Really! Stay with that thought!

Because it may be the moment to confess a small vulnerability. I have a weakness for sheep. OK, make that a big-hearted tenderness. In fact, I like sheep so much I might have lived as a sheep in a former life. That could explain why I am very cautious near wolves. Or how I like to aimlessly wander over rolling English fields and all the way back again. Yes, and the fact that I am a vegetarian. Because I cannot eat a piece of my own soul. Of course it might also explain my hair, which is left over sheep hair.

But it gives me a problem. I cannot use the word sheeple, as I am supposed to. I know the word sheeple is used to suggest people who allow their attitudes to be shaped by everyone else, and who simply do not mind being told what to do, think, and say - uhoh, I just listed a few more reasons why I'm not voting Labour - but each time I see that word, sheeple, I shiver. It is just too insulting to sheep.

I mean, have you ever watched sheep? Really stood around on the perimeter of a cold field with the rain-laden wind sweeping across the grass, smacking you in the face to remind you of your own stupidity for standing there watching sheep?

I can tell you that sheep are quite independent. Oh yes they are. I admit they can be rounded up and shot, but I can tell you that in their life journey they have arguments. They really do. And in those arguments, they stand their ground.

I have noticed that if you get one sheep crossing the field in one direction, and it meets a sheep crossing in the other direction, then they will both stand and look at each other for some considerable length of time. Quietly.

I take this to mean they are silently communicating. Perhaps negotiating field-passing rights if they are cousins or otherwise well disposed. If this has happened before and it is a grudge match, they may be plotting some revenge involving poo, or planning to stand near ditches, where they lure their enemy before bumping into them backwards byaccidentonpurpose, sending them tumbling into the ditch and to certain humiliation. Then the whole crowd may watch the indignity of the conquered singledout sheep rolling around on their backsides with their legs in the air. Of course I have empathy.

As you can see, I have put some thought into all this. And I hope it explains a few things. How I really do have a sensitive side; how I lurk around very independent-minded blogs where everyone communicates using the word sheeple; shall not be voting labour; really do look like a sheep; and am mug enough to be easily scammed out of twenty quid by the Wool Marketing Board for pornyvideos about fleece.

Now here are some pictures of sheep-related craft. Enjoy.

Upsetting everyone in North America. And the world.

OK, I knew grits was some sort of corn gruel. Like porridge.

But I did not know that people in North America actually love this stuff. So much so, that once a year on April 14 they throw away all their inhibitions and get down and dirty in a frenzied celebration of corn gruel. Maybe when they've smeared it all over their bodies they chuck it at each other like La Tomatina.

You can tell I am jealous. I want the English to do this. Can't we have Scone Day? When all the English bake scones then hurl them at their neighbours?

But it would all go horribly wrong here, wouldn't it? Working class scones would be made with water, and upper class scones with egg, which would mean the appointment of a Scone Committee to ensure rules of fair play. They would declare only upper plays against upper because upper scones are crumbly and do not dent on impact, whereas the oinks would cheat by concealing half an engineering brick in their dough to bring on the revolution.

Then of course the Ministry of Centralised Scone Throwing would get in on the act with all the healthandsafetygonemad, and you wouldn't be able to pick up a scone without having filled out in triplicate the Scone Risk Assessment Form, taken out special Scone Insurance, paid a £150 entrance fee, and entered all your details on a database run by Capita.

On the actual celebratory day we'd have cones and National Trust rope and the Scone Police on duty supervising everything, issuing on the spot fines for inappropriate throwing and loitering with uncooked dough.

It would be a total nightmare and all the fun would be taken out of it and that is just another straightforward and simple reason why I won't be voting Labour in the general election.

Anyway, I did a photo homage to Grits Day, the North American variety. Here is Squirrel, being told that Grits Day is not mama's blog, but a celebration of a delicious Southern foodstuff.

I hope they are happy with my loving gift to their nation.


Probably not. But in my experience, Grit's Day does not usually aim to please.

A very English afternoon

This is the sort of thing the English do when the sun shines and the children need amusing. Find a Grade II listed house with a marquee in the garden and take ourselves off there for tea and biscuits on the lawn.

OK there aren't any biscuits but there is popcorn. Shut up about it being American. The English don't mention things like that. Don't comment on the milk bottle either. Shouting about the bleeding obvious is not polite. (I include that social tip for the benefit of the American reader.) I'm grateful they put out a milk bottle and not the finest Georgian crystal. Can you imagine the social hazards Gutter Grit would face when interacting with fine tableware!

And, for once, that hand reaching to grab a shovelful of popcorn isn't mine.

Anyway, look, there might be theatre!

And indeed there is. Here is a tin tray moving along a cloth. Call that a time machine.

And there is lots of drama.


I know it doesn't look like it, but there is. Don't say anything about that either. Just be grateful. Because it got rid of the kids for a couple of days on the excuse of socialisation and drama education and it's a very peaceful way to pass a late Tuesday afternoon, isn't it? Especially next to a posh house on a lawn. With a marquee. And tea.

Now thanks to Interaction for the fun we have. To them, Applause!

But look on the bright side

There are moments I despair of our home education journey.

Take the heart-stopped minutes, locked in the mausoleum halls of the Natural History Museum. Where Tiger suddenly rips up her papers and shrieks at me through tears of frustrated rage that she cannot draw an accurate picture of a stuffed woodpecker. She hurls her crumpled woodpecker at my feet and squeals that now she would be better off not existing. Top that with the howl that her mother would be better off not existing either, then a flood of tears enough to drown the vaults.

In that moment, I might have felt able to pick up her scribbledout woodpecker and, with balanced breath, compose myself, had we not been surrounded by a school group of perfectly behaved microdots. Each barely out of toddler stage, uniformed in grey and white, sat neatly in horseshoe arrangement, dutifully completing their National Curriculum Attainment Science Worksheets (Target 3.4). With their perfect synchronised arm movements it wouldn't surprise me if they were composing superior calligraphed joineduphandwriting (Target 2.2) with 100% spelling (Target 5.1).

They, and their staff, turned like one body with sixty eyes to gaze at my feral child. All with the same curiosity and vague alarm that you might feel when you stare at a feral baboon going ballistic in a zoo. Here is the audience to my banshee. She, completely unaware, is howling, clinging to a decorative pillar. I fight the competing urges to smack her round the face, hug her, and use my feeble body as a shield to protect her loss of dignity from the rocks that pack animals might throw at the strange and unacceptable.

That moment happened maybe four years ago. It's just one of the many moments which has burned a hole in my brain. It marks misery and failure. But from it I learn. I learn that we hurt people we love. I learn that Tiger needs me to help her, and she resents that need. I learn that my daughter, the sensitive one, the one who hid in the nursery toilets, needs more tender dealing than I knew before. She is the one who deeply, keenly, knows that wound, even by the flimsy passing thought of it.

I know now from experience she needs a place to go; a place of safety where she can be wonderfully, completely, madly berserk. Then she can sit upright, her anguished face raw and blurred with tears, and nod. From my stand nearby, because I have stayed the course, I gently say for the thousandth time, Do you want a cuddle?

Yes, daughter, I know you do, because we are both from the same mould. You do not take after your father here: have you ever seen him make such an idiotic spectacle of himself as we are both capable of doing? After the humiliation we have both subjected him to, it is a miracle he still loves us.

Yet I think moments like this tell me what home education is about. It is not only the discussion about how society worked in Ancient Greece, and not simply arguing over whether the answer to 7x6 should be Is it time for lunch?

It is about learning through all our experiences; it is about experiencing many things, better to learn.

Such learning and living comes unpredictably in all dimensions, all circumstances, all moments, all places, all feelings. We can learn, even from moments that first seem humiliating, shaming, weird, or downright bizarre. And more. Choosing home education is to explore parenting and childhood. It is to wonder what makes us strange, messy, dangerous, human. It is liberating. It is 100% snot, sweat, tears.

Yes, in this filled-up life I would say this entire home educating family needs the patience of saints. And the compassion of angels; the awareness of therapists; nerves of steel; knuckles we can chew to the bone and - personally speaking - a kitchen bin I can kick the shit out of.

Then there are the other days. I am safe. I know we've chosen the right way, the best way, the most happiest, wonderfully filled, satisfying way. On these days I see my children exploring in freedom, with friends, at ease, feeling happy. They are wise, sharp, outpouring with observation and creation.

It can be a day as simple as a walk over stony fields, by the balancing pond, past the sluice gate, through the woods, over the stones, along the towpath, and under the bright blue sky.

And I want an 80s alternative rock themed party

Today I wake to discover my face, eyes and forehead have been stabbed in the night by the knife-wielding headache of death.

I lift my head from the pillow with a pain so severe that within ten seconds I am contemplating my mortality. Perhaps now is the right time to compile the list of songs I want played down the pub after Dig sets me on fire at the crem.

And if only, after the first two aspirins and vat of coffee, that thought had gone away like normal. No. This headpain hasn't softened one micron as the day has wore on. In fact the pain has grown to booming and resonating at such an enormous amplitude in my forehead, that I may be affecting radio waves in your locality.

To get rid of the thing and return you safely to Radio 4 I have now swallowed six aspirin, injected neat caffeine, blindfolded myself and shoved my head in the fast freezer. This has all been to the delight of the children who think that emerging with a bag of Tesco peas wrapped round my face is the best thing they have seen me do since that time I fell down the quarry. I'm telling them that if they do not shut up with the hilarity noise, their next stop may be Patio Junction.

This is all I can do, and think about. The headache. One in a series of many mutant brainthumps over the last ten years, and they don't get any less frequent. Be warned, you bright young childwithouters: headaches become progressively worse after children. I am absolutely sure of that. If you are like me, they may be so horrible that DIY trepanning with a hand drill seems like a reasonable thing to do. (That is on the headache, not the child.)

I could go on, and think about everything that's broken down with this soontodeathbed body since kids were untimely ripped out of it. Maybe the fact that I can still stand upright is a marvel. I could reflect on the stomach wound, the kidney and liver malfunction, the wobbly knee, creaking joints, cricked neck and the pain in the arse thanks to a passion for Thomas the Tank and all his little chums with their pointy steam nozzles congregating round the sofa.

Come to think of it, I may as well use this blog to upload a list of medical ailments and broadcast them to the entire world. It will save time later when my NHS records are left on the 18.45 out of Watford.

In which consideration, I may as well add that the results from the scanner up the doodah have still not come back despite being told it only takes ten days to know whether I have hours to live.

But for the moment I need to lie down and calmly contemplate the medical options.

Maybe the headache is caused by kids screaming eee-eeee-eee, or the stress of not moving anywhere despite clearing out the front room, or the delightful bulldozing hormones that routinely knock down and crush fragrant and delicate ladies like myself, or the fact that I got less than six hours sleep last night thanks to worrying about everything, or the consumption of a tincture involving red and white wine, or the most obvious and rational answer: the incurable brain tumour and the flesh eating bacteria combined. I am sure Dr Internet will support me on that one.

So play the La's. I definitely want those. And Talking Heads, the Stranglers and, go on then, you twisted my arm. Dress me in the coffin in black eyeliner and goth boots and play a bit of the Cure.

With nothing to lose, here are my thighs

The left thigh I can hear sloshing about, filled as it is with bitter tears and a sluice of self-pitying misery. The right thigh is a concrete lump I may have levered off the side of the A14 heading to Ipswich.

Clearly, the only thing to be done beneath both is to entomb the flaccid dangling bits up to knee-height in cheap plastic boots the colour of a table leg (as you can see, table legs are considerably more shapely). Whatever their condition - OK then, pallid winter white, knobbly bits and cellulite - you might also see that I still keep my knees gripped together like a good grammar school girl.

Yes, all is hopeless, as usual. But it is Spring. The blackbird says so, turned mad by unfamiliar warm wind and weak English sunshine, banging its face against my window. Of course I'm taking some of the credit for that because the blackbird's not getting all the glory. The loss of birdbrain directional control was probably helped by Grit thrashing about up a ladder with the Windolene because, as I said, it is Spring. And I have been cleaning up house.

Which brings me back to the thighs. Because it is Spring I must robe the revolting puffy things that stick out of my torso - but which I admit are incredibly useful for locomotion - in something other than those once-black-now-grey jeans which you can also see in this very fine photograph.

I have thrown those black jeans out twice, putting them into the bin both times. And then I have gone and got them out again. Both times.

Once, in a Sydney apartment, last year. The same apartment where I set the fire alarm going and peeled off my face. Just as we were leaving - and a good five hours after I rolled up the black jeans and stuck them in the bin - I fled back inside again in a panic attack, wrenched the jeans out from under the coffee grinds, and stuffed them in Tiger's luggage.

Of course she screamed about that particular shocking violation, but tough. I couldn't fit them in my trolley because I was carrying 15 books and 10 CDs on the history of the British empire that I'd picked up cheap in Port Stephens. Which was why I was throwing out the jeans in the first place. And because they are ragged, pitted with holes, thin, and worn out.

I wondered whether that moment had revealed a fear of abandonment and need for security. I think it might. Or maybe it says I am just very tightfistedly mean. I should put my hand in my bank account, go to the shops, and buy a replacement pair.

I like to think neither are true, and that somewhere along the line I actually once liked wearing these jeans. I can go one better, and wonder if I even thought I looked quite good in them, in the right level of daylight dimness, peered at through squinty eyes.

I know that looking good is no longer true, mostly thanks to the elastic going and that time I suffered the temporary bowel control issue. But simply considering that one afternoon, probably several years ago, I may have thought to myself, They look nice! has made me never want to part from them, ever. These moments are rare. So rare, that it may explain a wardrobe filled with clothes that no longer fit, are 20 years out of fashion, or are held together with sticky tape. Because once, I liked them.

Perhaps I can hope that they will die on me while I am wearing them. That might be a suitable way for us both to go. But maybe I need to be brave. I will try and pluck up enough courage this time to part with them for good. To spring clean my thighs, and go to M&S to buy another pair of Per Una jeans.

Hmm. I really don't suppose, M&S, that you would care to donate a similar pair free to robe the plump and blotchy Gritty thighs? Then just for you, I may label that photograph Thighs by M&S.

And I don't look like her on the right. But you can bet I wish I did.
JGXDW62J7ZN9

Pathetic

My darling Tiger. Today we collect you from your stay at the stables, to bring you home.

I don't think you want to come home with us. What tells me? Maybe it's the look of shock mixed with misery that crosses your face when you see my ancient mother carcass slowly dragging itself across the field.

My advance towards you comes as the steady beat of the tolling hour. Your shoulders sag and your heart heaves. Your time here, at the stables, has ended.

Here it is heaven. Here you are surrounded by keen, sharp-eyed girls who leap on horses. Spontaneous with life-spark, they up and bounce and stride and play as if this stable yard were a mere continent: a small skip away to the wide grass waves of galloping fields, where you can all frolic wild with horses.

For this week, you have joined these joyous people and their bright horse ways, and I know from that look of bewilderment that you forgot about us; enough not to send us a postcard from heaven.



Later, you will sit sullen in the car, or at home, misty-eyed and far away. I will jolly you along with prospects of return. And of your lesson - two weeks is nothing! - but you already miss the smell of Dust and Star and Mars, and yearn to be back here again.

If I could, I would use that. I would look at you, all fixed eyes and steely resolve. I would say Hey Tiger! Let's talk business! You want horse. I want maths worksheet. Let's cut a deal!

Of course I won't, because I am in thrall to your mournful eyes and shiny bottom lip. I know, compared to horse, that for you I am inadequate. Mother love now is nothing. Without silky mane and prancing hooves, I cannot measure up.

Weakened at heart, I search for the single glimmer of advantage, to plead, Tiger! Come back to me! Sure, horse can take you to the stars, but look! Horse cannot cook pasta.

Do not let this daughter thief near a saucepan.
If you do, I am done for.

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!