Alert the authorities! Control of Grit risk!

Grit has been CCTV'd today, in Bedford, being irresponsible. She has been doing something I am sure she is not allowed to do, given her role as parent-teacher-adult-in-charge to vulnerable gritlets.

She has been caught loafing off, all on her own. Yes! Can you believe it? On her own! Without any children and totally alone!

So where are they? you ask. Where is the defenceless Dig and the vulnerable and needy nine-year olds, Shark, Squirrel and Tiger? Are you having a new patio laid, Grit?

Well, the children are indisposed, elsewhere. And you can bet that shiftless fat arsed grit has been enjoying her unregulated adult activity, and you sure can assume that this activity was of a non-supervised nature and totally not endorsed by all the parental-teacher licensing agencies Delyth Morgan could muster.

Because, get this, today I send Squirrel, Tiger and Dig off to Wales in a hire car to attend a funeral of someone they've never met, and I send Shark, upwards, strapped to a harness, along with a dozen other home ed kids, all atop a wobbly tower made of milk crates, under the pathetic excuse that this is an educational team-building activity day down the local outdoor centre.

Here she goes!


Hurry up Shark! Once you're up the top, I can abandon you to scoot off down Bedford town and into that Sally Army charity shop and blow your £1 dinner money in the cast offs department.

Really, I should be imprisoned for my own good and the safety of children.

Because most of the time we fall flat on our faces

The other day Tiger accompanied me to Scrapstore. She was terrified. Children are not allowed in Scrapstore.

To get inside, you must first pass through locked doors. Here are pinned large notices about what they will do to children who are NOT ALLOWED in Scrapstore. If you dare defy them and bring that child inside, then you will be DISEMBOWELED and hung lifeless over the wiggly eyes and that will serve as a lesson to all humanity what will happen if you bring children into Scrapstore.

And I agree. Really. Children should not be allowed in Scrapstore. There is nothing more irritating than a soft and gentle fantasy involving 2,600 plastic offcuts being broken apart by a child screaming MUMMMEEEEE at the tops of their voices. No. No children. I want that place all to myself.

But. Tiger has a specific project in mind. It requires foam. This type of foam? I plead for the hundredth time, gesticulating with my hands in the air, like a desperate woman clawing at straws. No! That type of foam? No!

Then Tiger suffers me like the idiotmama I am and with a tut and eyeroll tries to explain in excruciating detail what type of foam is exactlythattypeoffoam.

Until I throw up my hands in despair and say we will risk all, it is worth it, come and look at the foam yourself. In Scrapstore.

And together we make our way to Scrapstore. Once we have passed the locked doors and fearsome notices, Tiger catches a glimpse of this Aladdin's cave of plastic offcuts, bits of wool, cut out squares of paper, and it is like looking at a cave sparkling with diamonds and emeralds and rubies.

But to reach those treasures in the inner sanctum, you must first pass the six headed keeper at the paydesk and his name is Norman and he is The Guard. Tiger peeps out from behind me, and sees Norman. Norman catches Tiger in his sights and emits the sort of growl you could expect from a ferocious panther ready to leap upon you and rip you limb from limb.

Tiger shrinks in horror and Grit becomes a backsliding slime laden weed who is grovelling apologies on the floor for ignoring those signs of death and bringing a child right into the cave of delight that is Scrapstore.

After some negotiation, Tiger is allowed to pass. On the understanding that I will be disemboweled before dawn if she breathes out of line. Tiger, meanwhile, has seen the plastic offcuts and now has eyes as big as saucers at this warehouse filled with junk. Delirious, she starts to babble about all the exciting things she can make with wool and paper and foam and 2,600 plastic offcuts. And those things are all elephants! dinosaurs! fairies! horses! castles!

Norman, who has been unable to stop his ears from wigging all this chatter, must have a heart that melted. Because when all the choices are made - bits of string, clumps of wool, fabric scraps, 2,600 plastic offcuts - Norman gruffly passes over a little package to me, containing four blocks of Sculpey. As he does so, he says in his grim and surly voice that the baking clay is a present because Tiger is using Scrapstore properly and what's more, that is how it is meant to be used. And that comes out sounding like the greatest threat and the most wonderful praise all at the same time.

And I don't know what to say, apart from a mumbled thank you. Because it may sound stupid but that is one of the kindest things to have happened to us in a long time.

In simple truth, I walk about this world with headlines like this hanging over me, and 'common sense' from Delyth Morgan shaping my world, and all the while waiting to be dragged off to the local police station with a truancy officer gleefully filling in forms right behind us.

All because we have made this non-mainstream choice and chosen to home educate.

For that choice, we must face the one old lady who loathes the sight of kids gadding about on a Wednesday morning in full view and lets us know it in no uncertain terms. Or we must be flicked into the gutter by the young professional striding down the high street and who, this morning at 8.23 precisely, deposited her child in the local state school and knows for sure it's people like me that are failing to support our schools and bringing this country down.

And so often I am put in a position where I am made defensive, explaining things, justifying ourselves, even when I don't want to be that defensive person, and there is no need to feel these things, but I feel them all.

And sometimes moments like this happen, and gruff old Norman passes that baking clay in reward to us, to Tiger, and it feels like someone opened a window and a million and one diamonds and emeralds and rubies just shone out.

Fun at the RSPB day

Not fun. Not for mama. I am in a sulk, and not talking to anyone.

Why not talking, I cannot quite recall, but you can bet it was an important cause - no, more than important; the most vital earth quaking cause that has ever happened in my life - like, like, the newspaper delivery was late. Or Dig, chirruping, I'm off to India. Laters! Enough to send me into a grumpy not talking pit.

Which place I should send myself to more often because Shark, Tiger and Squirrel totally ignore me and amuse themselves all day long without any irritating adult interference. Indeed without any vocal intervention from mama, they have a whale of a time and probably think this day is the funnest most fantastic day they ever spent on this planet.

The RSPB fun day basically consists of two dozen exhibits and stalls laid out like a village fete. Mummy Grit silently provides each of her sparkle-eyed children with a shiny £2 coin each. For £2 at the RSPB fun day you can enter nirvana. If you are aged under 12.

For 10p you can play tombola and win a green pottery money box painted with yellow faced teddy bears. You delight in that win and hand that beautiful object to mama before scampering off. Behind your back and without a word mama hands it straight back to the tombola lady.

After the tombola you can hook a shiny sequined fish for 20p. Given that the hook on the fish is the size of your head and the hook on the fishing line is similar, this feat takes less than one second. It is rewarded with a booklet about poisoning red kites. You can stuff this in mama's handbag before running off to the next kiddie delight, whereupon mama will dolefully lift it out and return it to the hook-a-fish stall woman because we have eight of the bloody booklets at home already.

Oblivious, you can run off to enter the food chain competition which is FREE! So you can hear the happy jingle of £1.70 in your hand while you sort owls and mice. Thank goodness there is no reward. But the owner of the stall prises 80p from you for a flat plastic owl you can paste on the window.

The same one mama will silently peel off 24 hours later.

With all that shiny change glittering in your hands you can run off to the Can you spot the badger? stall, where for 30p you can fill in a quiz sheet with stick-on badgers, then select a miniature fluffy fox. This item you will throw at mama as you hurtle towards the bat stall where for 20p you can identify bats and be rewarded by a sticker. It will drop off the fluffy jumper you are wearing and fall lost into the long grass, thus relieving mama of the duty to silently dispose of it later.

And so the day continues. The gritlets run about in complete joy, totally unconscious of the pain and suffering of the normal world of Grit, who simply trails along behind, silently collecting treasures which are forgotten about in seconds, or quietly handing them back to the stall holders to sell again to the second gritlet who will be along in five minutes time.

The delight for the gritlets is all in the playing, and the paying.

And I realise the sum total of a mother is not in words of wisdom, or any words at all. It is simply to provide the money, up front, and then shut up.

Lots of things not to do

Shark, Tiger and Squirrel say they have had enough of being frog marched around from activity to activity and are pleading to have a day off. Even though I think they have not yet had a day on, given the nature of their holiday lifestyle.

I tell them that is a pity, because today I have in my diary that we can be in Cambridge shoving lavender stems up our noses. Or in London at the Royal Institution hobnobbing with the next generation of mini scientists. While in both those places we can be at a local park walk-and-talk with specialists who know about soil. And I am pretty sure I can find a village green just outside Dunstable reenacting a fourteenth century medieval battle.

They win.

Shark, Tiger and Squirrel serve me with notice to cease and desist for the day, and at ten this morning they scamper off into the garden to play.

And that's the last I see of them, till tea time.

Ordinary goings on down village hall

Grit is revealing her strange and creepy nerdy streak with this photograph. She will quietly dribble and drool over it when you are all safely in bed.


Can you see what I see? Can you? Any plastic junk? Laundry? Dead mice? Creatures from the black lagoon? Nope. Nothing. Just pure floor.

Floor. That is the solution to all our problems. In this house of home education horrors, one day into a new-type-term, we are already wading knee-deep through discarded science experiments, a selection of home-made medieval lances, and an inexplicable Mount Everest of polystyrene. Soon I expect to lose my path from front room to kitchen altogether and require emergency cutting services and oxygen supplies.

At this moment, if you send your kids to school, you can plump up your cushions and feel good. That is OK with me. Living in a skip is a punishment I bring daily on myself for home educating. I accept it. That and my total inability to clear up chaos, thanks to being totally outnumbered by expert chaos-knitters.

But do not imagine Grit is sunk under a swamp of despair. Not likely. I have a get out of jail free card. My house may be an embarrassing tip, no-one is wearing clean knickers, and you can open the fridge door and discover a saucepan of mould, but there is yet a place I can go to find sanctuary, refuge, and swept floors. We can go trash that.

It is this. The Village Hall of England.

With Kitchen.


Isn't this fantastic? Here everything is orderly and clean and crap free. You even get an old lady thrown in to potter around after you and tidy up everything and make the saucepans nice and shiny. They put polite signs on the taps reminding you to turn them off, because last week Doris had to clear up the Biblical flood and she requests not to do it again if you wouldn't mind. It is like having your mum back again.

Glorying in all this clean-floor ecstasy, we then do what any sane British person would do in a village hall.

Start up with the didgeridoo band.

Did someone mention Britain's anti-child attitude?

Shark, Squirrel and Tiger studied Henry VIII in the British Library yesterday.

You are right.

I am aiming to breed a bunch of girly swots who dress in black wool and stride about in eager haste to return home for a night's entertainment of recataloguing their nineteenth-century book collections.

I am succeeding in all things literary and fatter-than-500 pages with Shark and, in part, with Tiger.

But rest assured. I am failing with Squirrel, because the British Library, seat of all knowledge and fount of all learning, is still not painted pink and covered with sparkles.

Never mind. She puts up a jolly good show at smiling gamely and pleasing mama by coming along to the David Starkey curated exhibition on Henry VIII. She clamps herself to my side and listens dutifully and attentively while I drone on and on in teacherly style about the reformation and whether the Church of England is all down to Anne Boleyn's bosoms.

At some point, possibly as she fears death, Squirrel eye-spies salvation in the form of a try-it-yourself lance.

Thinking this would be better than a further enthusiastic biography of Cranmer, Squirrel leaps off to reach the try-it-yourself lance before anyone else lays their hands on it. In doing so, she squeezes past an old lady peering at a document possibly requesting someone's death by axe or sword.

The old lady - who an innocent bystander might assume was simply a dusty historian absorbed in the calligraphic development of the letter S - suddenly whips round to Squirrel, stabs her with a full on laser beam stare, and sucks in her mouth to the size of a cat's arse. Squirrel is pinned to the floor in the laser eyeballs of deliverance and oldladyhag spits out a canon-ball sized TUT and follows it with a skewer of WELLINEVER! Squirrel, charcoaled, mortified, humiliated, dashes back to me, buries her red face in my bosom and sobs.

Lady, if you think a little girl clipping you with a pink sparkle handbag is the worst, most grossest and most scandalizing affront you have ever received in your life, you have just been lucky. By rights, it should have been followed with a full kicking by Grit.

Home education? Why and How

I could submit 50,000 words for the round-up over here.

Or two photographs.

These people are my why.


And how?


With joy. Struggle. And determination.

This is Grit's twisted family

Today, we are in Suffolk, with Big Bro, partner Val, and partner Val's treasured cat.


I don't talk too much about Val. Possibly for two reasons. One, she may read this blog while she strokes that cat, and two, she does not agree to our home educating ways.

I can tell. I can pick up the meaning of those eyebrow laden glances. And that laugh falls short of joyful agreement. But because we are British, or wanting to live in the same house for more than five hours without resorting to hammers, we neither of us talk too much about how well or badly home education is equipping my kids for their independent lives.

But those reasons aside, I have some loyalty to Val, because she gives Big Bro a pretty harsh time, and that is good. Without her, he probably would sink back into that blasted place some people call clinical depression and which Big Bro describes is like waking up, not knowing where you are, where you are going, but all you feel is alone in a cut away vastness where no-one can reach you. Val probably helps keep him chained up to some type of reality.

For a start - and this should tell you something about her personality and our relationship - she keeps a very orderly house. She does not like mess. No crumbs on the carpet. They may be your death warrant. And there are routines to go alongside those rules. If you don't eat that spaghetti for supper, you might see it again at breakfast.

Well, because Val is extended family, in respect I will not rip her opinions apart here. Even though I feel that today the air is bristling with an invisible comment that Shark, Tiger and Squirrel should be making their way back to school this week at 8.15am sharp. And that should include appropriate luncheon not exceeding 9gms per 100gms sugar content, which may be subject to an inspection and supervision order.

So I will merely show you what she keeps under the cat.


You see? My brother's girlfriend keeps company with a cat that is dead, flat, and labelled. And she thinks I am odd.

Home ed history

This is our primary age history lesson. Because the history of this land is resounding under our feet, rubbed between our thumbs and forefingers, and caught in the rhythm of a voice.

We gain all that, and more today, at West Stow Anglo Saxon Village.


Our history isn't given to us from the black and white pages of a worn through text book. We feel it, do it, live it, and are spellbound by its story.


For me, there can simply be no better history lesson than one that takes place in the richness of the world. I hope to pass that on to Shark, Squirrel and Tiger.


Thank you, West Stow, for supporting our history lesson today.

Come with the gritlets on a photoblog walk

We'll start off in a field. Not any old field. England's fields are dug deep in history, and this one is no exception. This field offers you a windmill, built 1627, cut wheat, and tumbling greywhite clouds.

The hill behind is chalk, once a warm and calm sea, floating somewhere south. Chalk comes in layers, Upper, Middle and Lower. And we're told about this today, at Ivinghoe, thanks to the Bucks Earth Heritage Group. I have to pause a while here to be astonished that the group leader on this walk so easily welcomes my little rockwatchers Shark, Squirrel and Tiger.

Having said that, the party seem to have legged it. Quick! Catch them up, before they start running.


At the end of the field, we turn, pause, and look at this.


Don't laugh. It's the remnant of a quarry. Grass covered, it's a chalk habitat, and if I were to get down on my hands and knees, I'd find glory; a land festooned with tiny creatures, wild flowers, fragile plants and a micro society of mini beasts. We would sort and size them all if we had time. But look. The party's gone again, heading down the road, round the corner and arriving here, once a wide chalk quarry, now College Lake Nature Reserve.



These wood huts are very British, don't you think? Here are our national treasures, all shovelled in a garden shed. We'd padlock them probably, if only we could find the key. I shall be quite disappointed when they finally build the twenty-first century vision of the Visitor Experience. I quite like the ramshackle twentieth. And the views are superb.


We must come back for the fourteen bird hides, and the squirrel assault course.


And here! Here is a world famous SSSI site.


Can you see the sign that says No Entry? That's how we do things in this country. We don't make a song and dance about our ancient lands, you know. You'd drive past them with the car windows firmly snapped shut and you wouldn't know, unless you stop that hurtle-by life, pull on those wellies, cross those fields, and start looking.

Yes, it looks like grizzled ground to me too, but our expert guide tells us it shows an interglacial period when the waters rose, surrounded the animals and this land became an island. I imagine woolly mammoths and lions dancing together about this country. She tells us they were probably cut off, and scrabbling to get out. And here's the evidence of that prehistoric despair, back in the shed.


A tusk of a woolly mammoth. Seriously. Did you expect to find that here? Neither did I. What adventures are in Britain, right under our feet!

But more than that, College Lake has a wooden built cafe, serving steaming mugs of tea, thick slabs of cake, and a real old lady with shuffling papery hands counting out coins behind a desk.


I don't think it could be any better unless there was a second hand honesty bookshop attached to the cafe.


At which discovery Grit is almost kissing this ground and declaring it holy. Can any part of England be more satisfying? We'll be on a hunt to find it soon. But for today our walk is done. We have to cross back across that field.

Thanks to the seventeen books I'm carrying, we'll fall a little way behind.


But let's wait for Shark. Here she is, photographed in Lawrence of Arabia or pilgrim mode, take your pick, clutching her treasure find at the bookshop. The Oxford Dictionary for Schools.





A glorious walk, with the wind pulling the clouds about and pinching our cheeks pink, my legs aching from crossing that hummocked ground, Shark's scribbled hair, woundabout and windswept, Squirrel's pockets stuffed with sharp pebbles from ice age dump, and Tiger's fingers chafed with picking grains from wheatfields. We go home happy. What could be a better way to spend a day?

Synchronicity

The end hour of another month hurtles towards us.

Time to sweep up the days past, hold the children's notes and jottings, the hastily drawn pictures of unicorns, and pause; a moment to wonder about the years, before carefully tucking those child-drawn treasures away to books and cupboards.

The paper secrets I'll file in the day book for August, which will, as the days tick by, become another memory book for another month. I know that in just hours ahead, I'll heave a big sigh, create the empty pages for the day book of September, and look forward once more to plans and big ideas.

Then, as I search and sift through all the badly printed photos, the ephemera, torn theatre tickets, notes from workshops, flyers picked up in holidays and travel across the counties, looking for the last items to save before I throw all to the recycling bag, a photo that Dig has taken crosses my paper pile.


I stop there and would laugh about our departing bouncing bottoms, me and Squirrel, or flatter myself that of all the skirts I have, this careful cut cotton wraps my shape better than any other.

Yet it's not these observations that cause me to tuck this photo especially safe, bound in the cover of my August diary. It's the way we are, mother and daughter, both gently strolling towards a town, any town, one person larger, one smaller, but so easily, made of the same, simply separated by years.

Is this normal? Not for us.

'A lot of mum action happens at tea-time (after nursery or school) and cake is often present to liven up proceedings... And, by the way, there is a lot of social pressure around this issue. You can be ostracised if you don't eat cake. I'm serious. No one likes a mum who doesn't join in. No one likes a mum who fusses about what her child eats.' (Opinion piece, Amy Jenkins, The Independent 27.8.09)

If this is mainstream, then this is a world I don't want to join. It sounds like a world of judgement, social exclusion, and bullying.

I have only ever encountered the judgmental cakes-and-mums situation once. That, by the way, was at an after-school club that Squirrel joined for a term. It is true I was definitely a strange item there, to be commented upon if I didn't eat The Cake.

So what happens to you? Do you approach that cake like it was a fearful initiation ritual into the one-of-us mum gang? Do you eat it willingly? Is it a mark of social acceptance? Are you airkissed afterwards, hoping you don't chuck up the blue flavoured sugared up E-number icing over the new moc-croc handbag? And when it's done, do you sigh and settle back down, and wait for the next new mum to turn up innocently, so she too can be shown the cake slab?

I declined cake. But to these tea-time mothers I could shed no light on their world. So there was no way I was invited to the post-cake chit-chat. I could not discuss the latest heel styles (is three inches too high?); I could not talk about how difficult it is to shop when you have a three year old who, infuriating, won't go to nursery (really? want to try three three-year olds who we choose not to send to nursery?); of course I couldn't say anything about Tinkertop's school (school? should we say child care?), and then there was the burning question of what to put in lunchboxes (how many hours can we really talk about that?).

Grit, who wouldn't have minded talking about what good books folks might recommend for children and how to encourage non-readers, was distinctly a fish out of water, a non-cake eating variety, for the entire 6-week run of the thing. And mostly ignored.

Not surprisingly, it is true that I now feel much more comfortable in the home ed meetings. There is cake there too. Actually, there may be several types of cake. Make one vegan, make one non-gluten, make one by Ellie, aged 12, with added jam and home made rosewater icing. There will also be fruit for those who don't eat cake. Someone's brought popcorn, because this morning they used it to model the Big Bang. And parents in my world care aplenty over what their children eat, and no-one thinks them strange, or odd, or fussy. Just normal.

The home ed community - and not just mums, I'd better say, but mothers and fathers and grandparents and siblings all turn up - is remarkably non judgmental about these things. Sometimes strange, no doubt, when you meet the roadkill enthusiast, but still, just let us all get on with it. Cake is not a social hurdle. It's just cake.

Some moments, I have no doubt

The camping trip is over, and I watch the laundry in the machine, churning.

It's been a heart warming experience, these last few days.

Not for the camping, which was, quite frankly, horrible. But for the children I have met on the home ed drama camp. Each child, in their own way, shone in brilliance. Many have told us their stories, and they are ringing in my head. Children who were battered by the school system, who didn't fit, who couldn't understand the rules, who felt not part of a mass, but unique and different, an individual not catered for.

I might have once asked, How could that have happened? Here are amazing people, gentle, thoughtful, warm. But what system have we built that could not handle that? I have seen a system that could not handle that. It makes me sad, not angry. School is there for mass production. It is a factory flow. Individuality, uniqueness, these are difficult for mass production to handle. School requires fitting in the allotted slot, making the given sounds at the given time, living someone else's time.

But here are these children, many strangers to each other before last week, yet within hours working together shoulder to shoulder, creating a magical theatre in the woods, and their talents are on display. These children are sensitive, wise, happy, unique. They mix easily with children older and younger than themselves. They express themselves clearly. They feel safe. And this experience tells me, home education best fits us; it equips my children for a future that is theirs. It is the right thing for us to do.

The only reason for the past few days

My centre stage. Peaseblossom Tiger and Woodland fairy Shark. Attendants to Queen Titania. Sworn enemies to Puck, mischievous sprite. A wonderful performance in the woods (and the rain).

Take a bow, children. I would travel all this road, and more.

This could be the start of a whole new adventure

I think the novelty of camping has worn off Squirrel's diamante sparkles. In fact, she has chickened out. She has slipped off to Am and Jol's to spend the night there, in something called A BED.

You should have seen the look on Squirrel's face when I suggested that escape route. You may have caught the warm glows of relief glittering like brilliant sunshine through your windows this afternoon.

All the better joy for Squirrel, because the idea popped from the blue, like a summerday gift from an aunty you didn't know you had, and she's loaded.

Until this moment, Squirrel had resigned herself, like a true gritlet, to suffering for the art of others, and resolved to extract her revenge later, when their guards are down. And here we are, suddenly turning up at Jol's without so much as a toothbrush and a change of knickers and anticipating a whole night away from a dark dark tent in a dark dark wood.

On the phone earlier, I must have sounded desperate. I pulled the car over, as far as you can get on a single track road, and shouted to Jol through a coming-going signal, We are close by! Let's come and see you!

We are not close by at all. From the campsite to Jol's it is a forty minute rocket down a dual carriageway at 70 mph. We made it in half an hour. Crawling over the threshold to Jol's house probably made her pity me all the more. That's a HOUSE, by the way, WITH BRICKS. Walls. Doors. Cushions. Carpets. Tables. Sofa. And Jol, making lovely hot real coffee. At the sight of the toilet, I almost wept.

Then, just as it is time to return to the field, I had the idea of leaving Squirrel. Can I leave Squirrel here? I blurted to Jol. She, gracious and unfazed and wondrously stable, said Of course! Am will be delighted! And that was done.

I very much wanted to stay myself. But Tiger and Shark finish their forest rehearsals at six each evening and, if I am not there, Tiger will burst into tears, thinking I have abandoned her. I will not abandon you to camp alone in the woods, I say. I don't even add my usual line, not without frisking you for breadcrumbs first. Somehow, after three nights in a tent with the disastrous mother Grit, I don't think Tiger will laugh.

That fear of solitary camping is down to Shark, by the way. Without any regard for the impact she has upon the tender hearted, Shark has bounced about for days, being delighted by the whole camping experience, and suggesting she'll be adventuring into the unknown outdoors at the first opportunity, perferably with a sea lapping close by and without any tedious parents holding her back by saying they have forgotten to pack 1001 Interesting Facts about Fish. Now I think reading Robinson Crusoe was probably a bad idea.

Tiger has enjoyed the theatre, loved the theatre really, but she has had enough of the camping experience. Mostly on account of last night's industrious midge, who has had the temerity to puncture my delicate Peaseblossom daughter in thirty or forty places.

Dig - you may be wondering about him - has spent one night with us, and hightailed it back to the office home to work. On the bright side, literally, he has left us another torch.

But we are nearly done. We see the performance tomorrow; the end result of all this labour and sacrifice.

And for me? Not for the first time, I can feel myself shifting my ground. After I have put this bravestupid foot forward, I am not giving in and going back. I can already hear my voice saying to Squirrel, If we find the right campsite, yes, one with toilets, and we find the right location, yes, by the beach, and we find all the equipment we need, yes, for hot chocolate milk every morning, then yes, don't you think, Squirrel, you can go camping again? I think you will find the answer to that question, Squirrel, will be yes.

Two trips to the camping shops later...

...and I am equipped to fight another ten hours.

I have three mattresses, two duvets, four torches, two wind up lanterns, four bottles of beer and an empty bladder, having squeezed out every last drop of pee in a toilet that doesn't scare me witless.

I should make it through the night. Don't correlate the beer and the bladder. I will deal with that problem when I get to it.

You may be wondering about food on this camping experience. The food is excellent. I have no complaints. Other people are doing it. I have no hand in it whatsoever, beyond throwing daily bread and fruit supplies to the little grits. Each evening, other home educating parents are taking turns to deliver top quality hot nosh to us all.

And if you are wondering what we are doing camping in a field at all, then yes, I have taken leave of my senses. Apart from the normal insanities that come from home education, Shark and Tiger are taking part in a theatre summer school with Heaven and Earth theatre company, leading to performance on Wednesday.

And while they are gone throughout the day to various parts of the Hertfordshire woods for workshops and rehearsals, Squirrel is groaning and moaning that life is boring without sisters. That statement I am preserving so I can haunt her with it later.

Do you love us mummy?

A huge amount, I blithely say. More than all the tea in China.

But perhaps not quite enough to repeat those last ten hours in my life, ok?

I know that you Shark, now say you love camping. And you Tiger, say tents are fun for a first night. Even you Squirrel, my diamante daughter, add that you enjoyed the idea and now are we going home?

But let's not mince words. Let's say that for mama the first night in a tent was A LIVING HELL.

How do I count the problems? Let me do it in order, procedurally. In that way, it will be like basketry, and I shall weave out my peace and calm.

My first problem is the countryside sinks into darkness and there is no electricity.

I admit. I did not actually think ahead when I said Fantastic! Let's go live in a tent! I will blame the kids and say my total lack of speculation was guided by my children. And they never think more than ten seconds ahead. Which at the time of agreeing to camp in a field, seemed a better guide than planning. And my outlook is, your attitude to a new situation predicts how much you're going to enjoy it. So of course that all fits. I wanted the children to enjoy living under nylon. Say nothing about dangers, horrors, spiders, creepy crawlies in my socks. I did not think of these. I did not want to think of much at all.

In my defence, that lack of planning was also a protection. Because I might betray to myself how much of a town girl I really am. While I love striding across those fields feeling the wind on my face by day, I also like, by night, brick walls, electric light sockets and warm beds.

But look! In the countryside it falls dark! How beautiful is the grey cloak of dusk settling upon us in the wooded glade.

Where are the torches mama?

What torches?

What do we have apart from NO TORCHES? Well, we have NO TORCHES. Aha! We have one wind up lantern! Where is that? Oh yes, where is that.

Remind me now, where is Shark? Shark has declared she is not staying with us thank you very much. We are undignified and our tent is embarrassing. Shark has found herself somewhere else to stay. A nice cosy spot in the organiser's tent down the other end of the field. And she'll have that wind up lantern, thanks.

So with a falling down tent and one child disappeared to someone else's tent in the dark dark woods carrying the only light we have, there is only one thing to do. GO TO BED.

Oh dear. Let me pause to weave another therapeutic basket.

My second problem becomes apparent twenty minutes after climbing in a cold sleeping bag. I am lying on the world's quickest deflating airbed. Once Grit's fat arse climbs aboard it sinks quicker than the Titanic. Thanks mainly to the FIVE HOLES. How many holes I do not discover until daylight, when I drench every inch of that airbed in cold tea and bitter tears to discover at which point the little air bubbles ooze up and prompt me to slap on another rubber patch from the bicycle wheel puncture repair kit.

But it is daylight.

And the next problem is the composting toilet.

Now I'm sure there are many models and makes of composting toilet. You can tell me they are very worthy and good. Then you can slap me round the face for pining after a draining system that will destroy the earth.

Because this particular model of composting toilet has a sort of partition inside the bowl, where you aim the pee in one area and the poopy in the other. I know really it is straightforward, because unless there is something tragically wrong with your body, then pee comes out the front and poo comes out the back.

But you try getting those in the right order after four hours of broken sleep on a hard cold forest floor, a torture interrupted only by the dream of pain that you are being eaten alive by badgers who are mocking you because they have torches and you do not.

Now, my darling Shark, Tiger, and Squirrel. I love you more than all the tea in China. But after the first night of living hell I am ready to up sticks and leg it out of that tent quicker than a rat up a drainpipe propelled by rocket fuel. I know now it will take more than LOVE to make me stay one more night in this tent, even if it means you get to flit about in Shakespearean mode coached by Danny Nussbaum.

To stay here, I can no longer force my brain to shut off and shrivel to the size of a pea. Let's face it, I did that already. And it did not work. No. I now come with a LIST OF DEMANDS.

1. I want a self-inflating mattress like Michelle's otherwise the deal is off.
2. I want a proper set of wind up torches otherwise the deal is off.
3. I want a proper sleeping bag, and extra duvet, otherwise the deal is off.
4. I want to go home today, use the toilet and the shower, otherwise the deal is off.
5. I want to stock the car with beer, red wine, bars of chocolate and those delicious breadsticks from Waitrose, otherwise the deal is off.

And on those terms, and only those terms, I might stay just ONE more night.

And love, ladies, has nothing to do with it.

There is a path that leads the other way

One pro school argument I've heard is that school offers such fantastic educational opportunities, that you simply cannot match what they do.

Do I believe that? Like in an average school exam mill little Moonbeam has the opportunity to be beaten up in the playground for wearing the wrong socks, or the opportunity to be taught indifferently by a maths teacher coasting to retirement, or perhaps the opportunity for the French lesson to be taken by the maths teacher again because Miss is having a breakdown apres le hammer incident.

If the look on my face says to that pro schooler not convinced about those fantastic opportunities, I may hear about how the Year 9 group got to work with a real! live! artist!

And if I question that claim closely I find that last year in a desperate bid to crawl out of special measures the school sent in the community artists, and 5 out of 150 kids were given special permission to attend a workshop for an afternoon. Today the school still crow about it like they'd dug up Picasso and found he was alive and well and buried by accident.

Or then there's the fantastic school trip to London. Whoopee. The type of school trip where two hours in the Science museum is all you get and you spend one hour queuing. Or try me on the fantastic trip to Switzerland. The one of astronomical cost, where Bazza, Gazza and Wazzer were airlifted to a hospital for alcohol poisoning and Tinkertop came home pregnant.

Honestly, I have not yet found any activity in school that home educators cannot do better out of school.

Likewise, there are a ton of activities home educators can do that schools can't do or won't do.

In the worst case, what schools won't do includes science lessons. And don't tell me that's not true, because I've covered classes for the science teacher on sick leave after the gas taps incident. I've been told by year 10 kids that a cover teacher makes no difference, since they don't do the experiments anyway thanks to Mad Pete who cannot be allowed near rubber tubes. Either that or the four day risk assessment that must be carried out because Tinkertop might come near wood, or water, or whatever is this month's killer. So the science class watches the experiment on video and kids write up the procedure at home. Or at least the A-C candidates do.

Then again, home educators are saved from plenty of activities in school that would boggle your mind, if only you knew, and you would not want them replicated anywhere near your darling Tinkertop Moonbeam.

Seriously, there is such a range of activities home educators can choose or create for their kids outside school - and I would stick out my neck and say there is nothing we home educators cannot find - that far from me being overawed by schools as fantastic places of educational opportunity, I have to question why they exist at all. Unless it is to provide child care while parents go to work.

The only problem is, of course, is that to drag Tinkertop out of school, take on those educational responsibilities and support her while she teaches herself - to actually do this home education thing - you must effect a lifestyle change; you must compromise your cash, time and home. You must be a parent of bloody minded determination, thick skin, and fistfulls of knuckles made of steel that won't snap when you chew them down. And your place in the neighbourhood? Social status? Out the window, along with free time, a disposable income, posh friends who invite you to lunch, and all fantasies involving clickclacking about shopping centres footswathed in Jimmy Choos.

Which brings me to the nitty gritty of our home ed life - which is what this blog is about - and what the home educated Tiger and Shark have opted to do for the next few days. They will be working with an all-age group of kids and a team of actors and artists to recreate Midsummer Night's Dream on a five-day outdoor summer school. And it's only for home educated children, so the pro schoolies can go queue at the Science Museum. We'll wait until school starts again and the place falls quiet before we go to see Wallace and Gromit.

But here's the rub. Having Tiger and Shark running about in a field for five days dressed as fairies requires one big lifestyle commitment. From mamma.

And that one big commitment - not the food supply or a continuous smile of support no matter how crap everyone is - is to break her rule forever and sleep, for four nights, in a wet field in Hertfordshire without phone contact, computer, sense, or sanity, and worse, with a composting toilet, in a construction which looks shockingly like this:


Now those parents who next time try and tell me what fantastic opportunities are available to Tinkertop, while scuttling back to work and contemplating the purchase of kitten heels over lunchtime, I can see where you are really coming from, and what you are really saying. You are saying Lifestyle change? Not bloody likely.

And Grit doesn't even pray, so get this!

Because guess what? Four good things happen in one day!

1) Tiger's bike, the one stolen Monday night, is returned.

A call from the lady at the local police station tells me they have a girl's bike, so come and look at it. She adds her life would be very easy if we said this bike was actually the one stolen because it is a revolting heap of a thing and she has nowhere to keep it.

Fortunately, Tiger says the bike is hers, so that's settled.

Apparently a bloke with a limp and a twitch walked with it into the local library. Perhaps my entreaties worked. I'd splattered the back gate with posters, inviting all comers to take a heavy guilt trip on account of the weeping nine-year old with a stolen bike. Suggesting a life filled with psychiatric treatment for the nine-year old and a hell up Satan's bottom for the damned may have helped.

2) We sit in Northampton Fishmarket and hear about the history of the trumpet.

Yes, this is Good News. This music session is totally fascinating, lively and fun, and we hear a live trumpet performance which sounds not at all bad.

I am so transported I whimsy that now is the time to encourage one of the little grits to learn the trumpet. That is, until I slap myself to remember that a trumpet played by a professional musician who practices five hours a day is a damn big difference to a trumpet attacked by Shark at 7am in the morning after one enthusiastic half-hour lesson with Grit who doesn't play the trumpet but who, in a blind and deaf fit, has bought a trumpet for £500 and taken a teach yourself book out the library.

3) Wandering back through Northampton to the car park we tour the charity shops and discover not one, not two, but three blue cotton dresses that fit Shark, and which she says she will wear.

Given that these three dresses are identical and cost £1 each only adds to the pleasure of this find. Shark is a lady who cannot be bothered to waste more than five seconds thinking about what she will wear. You could use those five seconds wondering about killer whales, or Tintin on the moon, or Harry Potter, or any infinite subject. Everything except what you might wear, because that is totally pointless.

4) There is still time after arriving home to declare today is Tiger's naming day, make a chocolate cake that Tiger proudly asserts is a clock when everyone else says it is a stegosaurus, and then welcome Holly to tea.

Holly is a beautiful retired lady with perfect manners who does not put her elbows on the table or slouch. She is a constant improving presence for Shark, Squirrel and Tiger and I am pleased to report that in all her time with us over tea, the little grits never once shouted ohmygodbloodyhelldamnpissoff, picked their noses, or farted.

About the most satisfying day we can have. And probably a calm before another storm.

There's always a feeling of satisfaction knowing something is complete

We put aside our weeping and wailing for one day to visit the Northampton Fishmarket for a one-man performance of Robinson Crusoe.

I need to write that here because this blog is very useful for recording these educational projects in the life of Shark, Tiger and Squirrel.

And this performance marks a sort of a closure to our several-month project on Robinson Crusoe.

For several weeks this year I forced everyone to listen to mama reading the Puffin Classics edited version of this Defoe story, starting from the basis that it is a flippin good read for children and they should know about it, because I say so.

Foolishly I never got around to reading this work myself in childhood. I had to wait until I hit an undergraduate course at York when it wasn't fun at all. There, the last thing on Grit's Must Do list was hide in a hole and start working out how to carry blackberries home to a shelter made of twigs and mud. But aged 9, this book would've been a perfect source.

The little Grits have truly enjoyed listening to Robinson Crusoe, although we'll leave the grown up version including all the moral wrangling until later. It has been a perfect back story for all the den building activity and has greatly assisted in Grit's master plan: that cunning weeze where all the gritlets flee to separate parts of the garden and set about creating primitive societies using planks of wood and grass clippings.

But now the day is duly recorded. We have read Robinson Crusoe, talked about themes, characters, plots, narratives, what makes up a novel, found out about trade routes, old ship sailing, Alexander Selkirk, drawn pictures of goats and listed their uses, invented a map, found a variety of islands on the light-up globe, built some dens, waved to passing ships from a perch in a tree, and today finally sat in a fishmarket and watched an actor talk to a teddy bear called Friday on the basis that teddy bears lack colour, religion, dietary requirements and anything else which makes them controversial.

Really, we have enjoyed ourselves, but I do not know whether all this Crusoe inspired study counts as educational in the eyes of the local authority. Anyone there could of course say we have failed. If Badman has his way, they probably will, and could choose anything they like to show us up as an example. Like, we did not convert to Christianity in the course of our labours.

However, I feel secure that should the local authority knock at the door demanding to see evidence of education, we can easily show off our knowledge by recreating that discussion about whose leg we would stew first if we were all stranded on a desert island pissing each other off.