Yes, they do wear knickers in Northumberland. Now shut up.

Today, frenzied preparation for the lovely week ahead, visiting the lovely borderlands, and the lovely slightly strange family.

Shark, Squirrel and Tiger, who are struggling to remember anything past Yorkshire, are packing the entire contents of house in one side of the car, while I unpack it on the other. I tell them two outfits only. We pass a Morrison's. We're staying next door to the Co-op. And the trading laws are exactly the same for Sainsbury's in Northumberland as they are for Buckinghamshire. If you forget to take knickers, socks, wellington boots and shovels, then guess what kiddos? We just buy what you need. Shopping is high on the list, anyhow, if only to revisit the Corbridge Larder.

On the other hand, I must take the brochures we use when visiting these parts. The ones bought in 1954, 1970 and 1962. For retreading the family steps, there is no need to buy a new guide when the old one will do.

That is the best tasting beer I ever had in my life

In the 1960s, parents knew what to do with kids. They shoved us in the back of the Zodiac, drove to the pub, left, locked the car doors, and every hour came out to poke a bottle of fizzy pop and a plastic straw through the window. If we were doing well, we got a packet of crisps.

That level of parental attention was considered sufficient to ensure the crazy child-snatching axeman hadn't dropped by the car park to harvest new victims.

And as for making every living breathing moment a kid-friendly learning-rich experience? Forget it. No proper drinking pub in their right minds would be interested in providing kids with stuff to do. So in the back of the Zodiac we had to make our own amusement last for two hours with one chewed up plastic straw.


I am proud to say I have followed in the footsteps of my parents. Look at this achievement. We waited ten years to abandon the kids outside, ignore them completely, and take ourselves inside the pub.



Girls, at least you got swings.

250 pictures of blurred butterflies

Proudly we bring home that selection from Wild Britain. A place I would recommend for primary age children, if only they would nail down the sodding butterflies in the rainforest walk. That at least would prevent Squirrel grinding down her teeth to stumps with the sheer frustration of the impossible task: capturing just one beautiful specimen of flapping butterfly loveliness.









In the end, we cheated, and photographed a DEAD one. Now you just have to guess which one.

Pack the cave outfit, just in case

We are heading back to Northumberland.

Calm down Grit. Only for a week. Dig cleared his diary, booked a cottage, and said, Next week, let's go and see the family. Before I leave for Hong Kong.

I don't know whether to ring church bells or throw myself in the canal. We don't normally holiday with Dig anywhere in England. We travel about, me, Shark, Squirrel and Tiger, and find our own pathway. Now there's a lot to face, actually being with your own husband and children for a whole seven days.

Maybe the first panic attack will hit me about Junction 15 when the fancy of a lovely family holiday finally leaves me, and the true consequence begins to dawn. That I am locked in a melting tin box on the M1 with my own husband and kids for SIX HOURS. By Junction 16 Shark, Squirrel and Tiger will snap under the tension and embark on the mother of all battles because they intuitively realise there isn't enough room in the car for all five of our breathing bodies and bolshy beings.

At Junction 17 I will be sobbing, and shout that we are not buying a bigger car no matter what. The aliens will cry in echo that we don't have enough space. Or windows. Or plastic-coated flip-down trays. Or ventilators. Or sound waves emanating from the CD player. Or light beams. Or anything.

By Junction 20 the rebel army fight will take place and an epic battle of mighty warriors will finally clash in steel, over who gets the armrest.

To broker a fragile peace settlement, I expect around Junction 22 I tell everyone that I am now in charge of everybody and we all transfer seats. I will climb into the middle back seat to squat like a police officer with elbows, sat between Tiger and Squirrel, while Shark clambers into the front passenger seat.

Throughout all of this, Dig will ignore us. He will not speak a word but have his eyes set on the motorway before him. It will be just like that time he drove to Ullapool and only woke up when the road ran out and the car juddered to a halt at the edge of the harbour. I stared ahead at the Atlantic and wondered whether Berwick would have been a good place to talk. In Dig's head, stopping the car for anything will be unthinkable, and that includes wild boar and nuclear missile attack. It would confer a sign of failure and submission. So we will complete the seating transition manoeuvre at 80mph in the fast lane. Wave if you see it.

But my mood will change as we peel towards the A1. The further North we travel, the further I will tumble down into the sink of self pity and the more I will cry. That is my next problem. By the Angel of the North I will be inconsolable because the brutal reality is that we can no longer visit the Pile in Northumberland whenever we want. That is so unfair because now I want to visit Northumberland. But we cannot do that because we sold the Northern Pile. I will cry some more at the cruelty of life because we do not own two houses. Misery is made worse by thinking how I am spoilt and selfish because now all I want in the world is two houses and I don't see why we can't have two houses. Unfair it is that we can't afford two houses, couldn't maintain two houses, that one would fall to bits while we slept at the other.

If only the self pity would stop! Horrible, stomach churning memories, sorrow and loss, will flood back once past Newcastle. I will relive the trauma of the house sale. Uncle Eff living in the attic, Aunty Vee stealing the furniture, the funeral, the subsidence, the refrigerator, the last morning drive to tip the Swivel King at the dump.

Then there is the next big problem. I have to meet up again with Dig's extended family. Stop there, Grit, because that is not a problem, obviously. They are lovely, lovely, lovely people. Just a bit strange, that's all.

But it will be a strain. I will try and not mention stuff. Not reminisce about the refrigerator or the Swivel King. Then Shark, Squirrel and Tiger will fight some more, maybe on the windy beach, in someone's garden, or perhaps locked up in a tiny cottage graced with lightweight doors, lace curtains, beige carpets and pottery ornaments. Each of these moments will lead to disasters which cannot be washed away into forgetfulness with my bitter salt tears, although I will hope.

At the end of the week I will have to come away, come back home, and then I won't want to, because in a quiet, reflective moment I will enjoy being with the strange extended family. I'll want to make new resolutions; try harder and be kinder, nicer. I will have recalled some turntheclockback happy memories, when Dig loved me and didn't employ me to wash socks. And I will remember other joyful moments too, much better than the 15 minutes thwarted cycle ride round Kielder Water in a panic attack. So then I must resist the urge to stay here, in Northumberland.

Escape plans are rubbish, anyway. I only have one. Plan One: run away, grow a moustache, change my identity, eat berries, live in a cave.

Unable to see that one through, I will come home here to Buckinghamshire, sad and soul mangled. I won't travel back home pocketfilled with lyrical poetry of tilting sunlight soaking the moors, nor storytelling of heaving water breathing on ancient Lindisfarne shores.

No. I'll have tales of wasted hours, sitting shivering in the car while kids fight, watching the rain bash against the windscreen, sniffing mournfully into a medicinal brandy, sorrowfully clutching a seam-busted handbag filled with picked up lumps of wet sea coal.

We'll leave behind a smile and a wave goodbye. And a trail of snapped off plastic-coated flip-down trays, smashed ornaments, cut legs, broken cameras, lost maps, empty diary days, family stares, sad partings, regretful silences. Because after all my good intentions, I mentioned the refrigerator.

Questions never asked about this blog

Dig thought I would keep this blog for about ten hours. I'm delighted to have proved him wrong.*

It's been going a while now. But recently I'm aware from the secret stat counter that new readers are finding this strange gritland, populated by the delightful and charming Grit, the absent Dig, and the weird three-headed creatoids from the Planet Vestigular.

Readers, you are welcome here, you really are.

I am also humbly aware that some folks return dayafterdayafterday. How loyal is that? Would you like a statistic for your strange but kind ways? If I am reading that secret stat counter right, of all you people who visit, over 60% of you come back! To my way of thinking, that is amazing. You may be another reason why I post a daily diary entry.

Of course, I could have those stats wrong, and six of you can't work out why I'm not yet selling pigeon grit.

But I am not a professional blogger, nor even a very clever one when it comes to the look of the blog. It looks total crap, doesn't it? But I thought that maybe now was a good point for a FAQ.

Only no-one asks me any FAQs. So I could do a Never Asked Question, like a NAQ. Yes. That's what I'll do.

Here it is then. Grit's NAQ.

Grit, what is this blog about?
Home education. But those words are not big enough and wide enough, nor high sky enough for what we choose. Home education is a lifestyle, it's a way of looking at the world. It's a theory, a philosophy, an outlook, a delight, a challenge, a madness.

All of those reasons are what this blog is about. Along with why my face hurts, why my heart bleeds, what opinions I might have about stuff, how many books and art and furry animals can we love. Oh, and this blog is also about the days that go so well I could kiss strangers in public places. And an outlet because sometimes I feel so bad I could cut myself in two. Blogging has less blood. Then there are some days when I just like to take a pop at Ed Balls.

Grit, why did you start this blog?
Sometimes, I wrote Michelle long emails about the day. She would reply lol. Michelle is very polite, and I worried that lol could be a way of saying, fuck off. Then again, maybe she really meant GET A BLOG SCREW HEAD HIPPIE. So that's what I did. Thanks, Michelle! lol.

Grit, why do you have to record every single day? Are you mad?
OK, I admit to this slight problem. No, don't worry about it. It'll be fine. It's just a slight fear. That I might lay my head on the pillow one night and know I have achieved NOTHING in that day. That was a day not worth living. Next, I die in the night.

Writing a diary is a form of achieving something, even if it's a diary entry full of crap. Shark, Squirrel and Tiger can hold my very last diary entry in their trembling claws and sob over the picture of Tiger looking like she is about to kill, or the cute blind hedgehog groping its way towards DEATH, and know that mama thought of them, sometimes while she banged her head against the wall, but always when she loved them and their strange alien ways.

More procedurally, I also feel driven to record how we spend the time in case the Local Authority call and accuse me of not providing an education for Shark, Squirrel and Tiger. I have a very poor memory, probably thanks to the aluminium they keep putting into deodorant. The Local Authority might trick me and convince me that I actually provide no education at all. Then this blog is my strong arm righteousness. I can look here and go YAAAAABOOOOOO! SEE? Yesterday we saw a hedgehog! Suck on that, sucker!

Finally, I write a diary about every day, good and bad, because I think then you get a good all-round picture of what life is like if you choose home education. It is a big decision. Bigger than all the universe some days, and more impactful on your life than an imploding star. So it is good to be prepared and see the misery and joy you might be in for.

Of course all these reasons might be tosh. I might blog because I have a weird hoarding compulsion. Only with words and time, and not plastic bags containing numbered chip wrappers.

Grit, why do you sometimes not blog for days, then it all spews out at once?
This morning I had to lever the kids out of bed to leave the house at 10am. Dig had an appointment at 10.30 and we needed to drop him off before we drove on to a workshop which started at 9.45.

At 9.30 Dig says he must send a parcel via DHL and can you sort that? By 9.50 the kids are not out of bed, the phone has rung twice, I recall that yesterday I promised faithfully to email someone about something, and then at 9.55 the gardener knocks on the door wanting to chainsaw his way through the privet.

At 10am, the kids are still reading in bed and I regret not having a defibrillator. At the end of the day, I might do a brain dump before bed, otherwise I am going to die for sure. Three days later I correct the spellings and add the connectives like And. I am fond of those. And is simpler to type than notwithstanding.

Grit, why are your posts always late?
Did I mention that issue I have with days and clocks and keeping track of time? It's like I am living in a parallel universe here, hoarding a lot of plastic bags, and caring for three-headed creatoids from the Planet Vestigular. Soon the alien beings will be returned to their mothership. I must look after them till that time. Everything will fall silent and I can post on time. Then I may have nothing to say.

Grit, why are you called Grit?
Grit is an irritating substance that pokes you in the eye or wriggles itself into your shoe and makes you so angry you could kick small furry animals. And that is life now. It is all so much daily pointless annoyingness and misery. Yet all that unshakeoffable painful experience might yield one moment that is lovely and beautiful, unique and delicate. Like a pearl. So I like to think that in amongst all the grit there grows a pearl.

I accept it's mostly grit.

Grit, are your children really called Tiger, Shark, Squirrel?
No. The three-headed aliens are really called Starnugget, Moonhose and Liquishia.


* Hmm. Come to think of it, that just may be the real reason why I blog bloodyminded on.

That's what I need. A hedgehog.

Courtesy of a day out with St Tiggywinkles.

And now it's really tough, thinking up reasons why we cannot keep a little cute baby hedgehog in a special tiny box with a hand-knitted blankie to clutch, right next to our beds. Then we could cuddle up with a three-legged wistful looking deer and wake joyously next morning to the soft quack quack of a friendly funny bird with a wobbly wing and a dangly leg. Because that is what we want to do with our lives. Oh yes, it is.

Exploring the tensions that hold this stuff together

Plan A: Teach Business Studies to Little Grits

1. Visit Innocent Smoothie HQ.
2. Enjoy it.
3. Talk with kids about stuff. Business. Fair trade. Marketing and cash flow and profit and distribution and avoiding bankruptcy. Stuff like that.
4. Feel smug. Sprinkle self with extra smugness.

Easy, huh? Theoretically speaking, brilliant planning. Learning, not through school-mediated knowledge, but directly in society. Immersion. Opportunistic. Making it up through ordinary things that happen everyday. Talking, through real-life situations. And enjoying it. Because educate/alternate path is normal and natural and FUN.

On a practical level, bloody hard work.

So, to anyone thinking about the theory of home education, think through how the thing works in practice, that's what I'm saying.

First, you will have a thrilling sense of freedom. And responsibility. Then you will be gripped by insanity. Once removed from school, you feel every minute of every waking day must be made into a productive learning experience.

After five hours on the first, official, home educating day, you reflect how making everything a productive learning experience is a crap idea. It's only dinnertime and you're already exhausted by researching the chemistry of cake, demonstrating the Big Bang theory with a bucket of flour, and trying to make a maths equation with one egg and a tea spoon. In Poetic French. Meanwhile, Tinkertop is driving you bonkers because all she wants to do is run to the park and shove creepy crawlies down her knickers.

Welcome to the next stage of home education: reasoning how there are learning opportunities only some of the time. Leaving the rest of the day free, to express personal identity.

That feels good. For a while. Until you wake one morning and reflect that really, now there is a good bit of personal identity and sod all else. Tinkertop can barely add 4 and 5, but she can march to the park on her own account and identify 4,652 types of minibeast blindfold.

Of course you try and make that feel good. Console yourself. She might become a biologist. Until she bursts into tears at tea time and shouts that really she wants to be a mathematician. Patiently, you drag out all the maths books that have laid discarded for 4 years. Horror struck, she crawls to bed at midnight having a big squeal because after four hours sobbing she is still not able to work out 4+5.

Which is all to say that home education is a state of constant struggle between theory and practice; an everyday struggle between your own inner voice matched to that of Tinkertop yelling in your ears.

Which brings me to Plan A.

And what a brilliant, theoretically sound plan it is. Until I try and put it into practice.

Not because when we finally descend on their Saturday party, the people at HQ Innocent Smooth are not nice. They are. Very nice indeed. Young, attractive flicky-hair types who have teeth. And they look very healthy. Maybe a bit too healthy. Like they drink fruit smoothies all day long just to grow perfect hair and skin and nails. (Not that I am jealous but I have now consumed five litres of their blackberry mash in the expectation that I wake up tomorrow morning 20 years younger with a glowing bikini body like Elle Macpherson.)

Anyway. That is not what I want to say. I want to say that it is very difficult to bring the self guided and self willed Tiger and Shark to the state of consciousness that bloody well shuts up and agrees with me. And my lovely Plan A. That Business Studies is a very good idea, that we are doing it in the most possible FUN way there is, how it perfectly accords to my grand theories, and that it will be of great practical and social benefit.

Now you autonomous home educators are clapping your hands mercilessly in glee. Do not tell me I am half way there, that I can see the route to autonomy, so I may as well give myself up to that conclusion. No. It is moments like this that demonstrate what a constant tension this choice of life is. Struggling between the things I think kids should know and the things they want to choose for themselves.

So it is in that fragile position - balancing between well worked out theories and several years of bitter practical experience - that I show up at Innocent Smooth HQ with two foot-dragging bolshy business students. Ambassador A and Ambassador B.

Oh, happy children filled with the joy of learning!

From this point, I am claiming that Ambassador A was sleep deprived. Sleep deprivation is bad for Ambassador A.

Everyone knows that when you sleep, all the nutrients go into your brain and make you smile the next day. Without those nutrients, your brain may shrivel and your nostrils flare to the size of train tunnels. Growling like a dinosaur you stare with frozen eyes. Unpredictably, you might then burst into tears, suddenly propelled by a lethal cocktail of frustration, incomprehension, thwarted autonomy, and the fact that you have an empty smoothie box in front of you which you are obliged to make into a rabbit. At which point, I ask myself, will Ambassador A fall headlong into a deep pit of despair, smack her fist on the table, bust into a flood of tears and shout in pain, as if twenty demons inhabit her socks, NOOOOOOO! I HATE THAT FLAVOUR SMOOTHIE! WHY DO YOU NEVEREVEREVER LISTENTOANYTHING I EVERSAAAAAAAAY?

I could pin my hopes on Ambassador B.

The one who doesn't want to be here. The one who is sulking because she wants to stay at home and draw horses. The one who hates all smoothies, living and dead. The one who, when put in any situation with timed demands on her, like pressure and questions and stuff to do, behaves a little like the core of a nuclear reactor with extra scorching flame underneath. Building up the type of nuclear overheating reactor where all the needles marked TIME PRESSURE DOSTUFFNOW ping their way past number 11 on the dial for 10, which heads straight to core meltdown, discharge of radiation, and blasting apart of all the earth. That is OK. I can deal with that in our own special way.

So I'm not posting a diary about the tensions between my expectations and the demands of my children. Nope. I'm not posting about the struggle towards an autonomous education and Mama Grit's bloody good plan. No, not at all. Because I do not want to think through the consequences of a life without a plan.

I will merely say that Grit's fantastic Business Studies Plan worked. Mostly. Even if Ambassadors A and B were not quite on tip top forms.

After all, we left Innocent HQ wearing our shoes, with no dents in the head, not covered in snot and tears and with no police escort.

I would say that is a good result for an excellent plan.

And I recommend to home educators that if you do a Business Studies project like Grit, then go along to Innocent HQ next time you are trolling tired around London. They invite you. They want to see you. Because they're nice, and will even talk about Coca Cola owning 58% share.

All I needed was a flimsy excuse to kidnap a floor manager in Tesco

OK, now Mama Grit is teaching Business Studies to the gritlets.

Mostly, as you all know, because I am superefficientorganisedperson of the alternating educating variety.

Also because Innocent Smoothies junkmailed me by accident, announcing a Saturday morning kneesup. What a big neon strawberry arrow to an educational exploitation opportunity!

Plan A.
Visit Innocent Smoothies HQ, London.

Imagine! They make seductive coo-cooing noises at us. We try not to smash up their office furniture. They ply our flaccid overtravelled underhydrated bodies with upmarket ultrasmooth strawberrymash. We restrain ourselves from brawling in the car park. They send us from their HQ into the world, smiling with joy as brand ambassadors for delicious Innocent smoothie juice. We replace the photocopiers we have tried to steal.

Plan A is good. It will work.

My only reservation is the guilty temptational lusty fantasy (Number 546) I harbour about strawberry smoothie. The one which involves no cake at all (sub-section: No Cake). The one where the milkman calls and I beat him senseless with the hall table. I then strip down to my Asda value undies, pour strawberry smoothie all over my semi naked wobbly body and roll about the carpet drooling in smoothie lust.

(Of course I will not play out this fantasy because it is a favourite fantasy and enactment would spoil it. Also, we visit Innocent on a Saturday morning when the under-5s are present. They would be horrified, because they only came to meet a talking bunnyrabbit.)

But first, before our visit to HQ Smooth, there is: The Plan Before Plan A.

Actually, I have The Plan Before the Plan Before Plan A. This comes before all other plans. But that is already doomed. I have dumped it. FYI, here it is.

The Plan Before the Plan Before Plan A.
Bring Tiger to a state of smoothie agreeableness.

Doomed. She insists she hates smoothies. She wants to stay home and draw horses.

OK Tiger, I will not force feed you smoothies in the manner of a foie gras goose. But you are coming to HQ Smooth because it is too complicated to leave you at home. Plan A for tomorrow is already military clock, with sister1 on ice, sister2 who knows the value of a tenner, Mama who spies a Business Studies project, a geology museum asking to be tortured, and daddy Dig getting off a train. So you're coming.

I smile beguilingly. Hey Tiger! Howabout we whip up some enthusiasm for this, and go make an exhibition of ourselves in Tesco? Let's call it Business Studies: The Plan Before Plan A. Yes?

The Plan Before Plan A.
To be done in preparation for the fantastic on-site Innocent HQ visit! Like, NOW.

March into Tesco with clipboards and facial expressions of mean and authoritative purpose. Mini Ofsted inspectors of the smoothie sauce world.


Stand obviously with clipboards. In the way. Force shoppers to flow round us. My true purpose becomes apparent. Disrupt Tesco! Be irritating to everyone! HOME EDUCATED MINI HIPPIE TYPES IN THE MIDDLE OF SOCIETY YAAABOOOOO!


Write notes about things. Like carton sizes and where they are on the shelves and special deals and brands and everything. (And draw pictures of horses, but ssshh about that.)

Scrutinise cartons.


Be eye-spied by Tesco store manager. Capture him, interrogate him about supermarket design, turnover rates, shelf-life, product promotion, sales. Chop off his head to ensure he leaves with dignity intact.


Irritatingly, Tesco staff are helpful, interested, supportive, friendly, and enthusiastically engage in the sprung-surprise enterprise. I was rather hoping they all would be foul tempered, bloody minded, chuck us out and threaten us with the police. Then I could blast that out on the blog instead. Damn.

So hang around some more. Conduct secret survey on which shopper is brave enough to pick up a smoothie while being recorded for top secret consumer preference research purpose.


Be bribed to leave when mama Grit forks out twelve quid in six smoothie varieties to taste test at home.


Now, I declare Grit's Business Studies (The Plan Before Plan A) a complete success. Excellent preparation for a practical on-site visit to Innocent HQ (Plan A) which you can do too. They invite you, so go.

And of course I recommend this approach especially to all home educating hippie types with brass necks, thick skins, no dignity, and lust-fuelled fantasies for thigh crushed strawberry smoothies snatched over the bodies of dead milk men.

Grit's Gruels

Here we are, innocently supping on the finest vino vintage, refreshing ourselves with the sweetest fruits, and tasting the exquisite and expensive delicacies of the world, then a miserable bloke on Radio 4 spoils it all.

He warns that now we have a ConLib government, everyone in the country must pay the National Debt Or Else. And it is like Big Money. Thousands and millions of pounds. Maybe zillions. My maths is not good.

But then I hear something worse. That every household in England owes the government thirty thousand pounds! Shit! We haven't got that money, not even down the back of the sofa. And they won't take your first born, you can forget that. I asked.

What to do? Grit's body is worth a couple of quid. Then I eye up Dig for the insurance, and sure enough when he sees that twinkle in my eye he's off through the door.

So we are in Big Trouble.

Right. It's time to grit those teeth, get out of the groove, and economise. Selflessly, I shall do my bit. I offer up to the nation the finest selection of Grit's cheap eats. Consider it a gift, in the national interest, and in lieu of 30grand.

(PS. Of course my cheap eats are vegetarian! We may be poor, but we hippies float on the moral mountain top of righteousness.)

1. Vegeburgers
Cheap tinned red kidney beans
Three-day old brown bread scraped out the back of the bread bin
Onions. The local shop sells a 5Kg bag for a couple of quid
Leftover cooked veg from sometime earlier
Tomato puree
Salt and pepper or dried herbs

I bet you are already busting your buffers in anticipation. Mix up all the delicious flavours in the whizzy machine. The one with the broken thing. It still works. Glue the mix together with tomato puree. Make lots of burgers and fry them. Serve with knocked-down salad rescued from the reduced bin and hawthorn leaves. Delicious, nutritious and 88p for six!

2. Bean slurry
Beans. Howabout blackeye? They are easy to soak and boil.*
Two cans chopped tomatoes
Vegetables. Stuff like onions and carrots and broccoli and stuff.
Cube of chopped spinach. (When questioned about green bits, claim they are herbs.)

Put all stuff in saucepans, cook it, mix together.
Serve with cheesy rice. What's that? Ha! You'll go crazy when you discover how easy this is! Cook brown rice, and grate a load of cheese in it!

I might get myself a big pair of wobbly bosoms like Sophie Dahl, and market Grit's book: Cheap Eats for Idle & Mean Gits.

*Danger! Soak and Boil! Otherwise you all will DIE!

3. Lentil slop
Red lentils
Celery, onion, potato chunks, carrot and more carrot.
Stock cubes
Lots of water

Put all stuff in a big saucepan and boil up for 20 minutes.
Serve with croutons. (Stale bread hacked into chunks with a power saw, tipped into a dish, tossed with olive oil, salted, peppered and shoved in the oven for 10 minutes on hothothot. Properly cooked they look like smashed up housebricks.)

4. Chickpea something
Tin of chickpeas
Carrots
Onions
Sweet potatoes (When questioned, lie. Say it is carrot)
Red peppers
Yet more tins of chopped up tomatoes
Big cloves of garlic

Serve with mashed potatoes, sculpt an unpronounceable Icelandic volcano, pretend this runny red stuff is lava, and run a geology lesson. All at the same time. Smugbastardhippy.

(Grit cuisine, is a cinch, isn't it? Quick, easy, CHEAP. And all without any deep feelings of food guilt, shame, inadequacy or any culinary skill whatsoever!)

5. Rice splatter
An enormous mound of white rice
Anything else edible. (Excellent after a late night dumpster dive.)

Put the enormous rice mound in the middle of the table, and put a dozen different things to eat all around. There is nothing wrong with peaches, peas and lettuce. They accompany baked beans, melon and cucumber exceptionally well. Persuade yourself. It's been a successful dive into the skips.

There! I have saved you for the nation too! Only £29,987.12 to go!

Sentimental old git

I don't post half enough on this blog to reflect a passion I have. To do it justice, I would need another blog, but I already got too many of those, so it must share this space.

Here is this passion, hidden, alongside the other daily. It's in here, amongst all the disjointed ordinary and extraordinary. It's in this life with kids, home ed, people we meet - the people who teach us to gaze adoringly at lichens or bees or flowers or Meccano or stars - all jostled and shook up alongside everything else: politics, bigmouth, braindead mush, random shots of headless bodies in cupboards and, beyond it all, sunlight streaming across fields.

But this passion, it is constant, and gives me pleasure, everyday.



Art with kids, art by kids.

I could say a whole lot about that. But instead I'll just say thank you. Because today, as I watch Shark, Squirrel and Tiger select colours and shapes, and compose them into new wholes, I know I haven't made their thoughtfulness and care by myself. Thank you to all the people and artists who've worked with us, in studios, galleries, scout huts and community halls, across woods and fields. Thank you for continuing to inspire us with your ideas, through your stories, on your blogs, by your photographs; in crafts, ideas, successes, failures, creations and imaginings.



To all you people, far and wide, who've helped my kids in so many ways you'll never know, thank you.

Mother Ghost, I do not deserve your fish

Mother Ghost is chasing me with gutted fish.

I don't care if gutting trout is a dying kitchen art. I don't care that women nowadays don't properly belly cut a mackerel.

She knows I cannot stand the grisly sight. Its oily blood and flopping bladder. She knows that to escape, I would squeeze my entire body through the miniature ventilation window in the bathroom, rather than pull the lock on the bathroom door, creep back through the house, across the kitchen, past the red drain, see the dead heart and the terrible staring eyes.

But when she catches me, I know she is going to rub my face in its turned out innards.

That will be her punishment on me. She is one furious Mother Ghost, and it's just deserts for what I've done.

And worse, a bit of my conscience thinks I do deserve me. Oh yes. Because when I heard that a posh and privileged baby-faced Tory boy was Prime Minister of this country, my heart filliped a double somersault, I fist pumped the air, felt like I lifted my body two meters off the ground in jubilation, and screamed YES!

Mother Ghost, forgive me.

My mother was born in 1920. She had no childhood in a mining village in Yorkshire. She shook her head in memory of the tin bath, the candlewax, the kettle. No nostalgia there. She grew up watching a Conservative government lower taxes for the rich, and in a family poor enough to worry how to pay for the doctor to call. She watched women campaign for social reform, she saw the birth of the Communist Party in Britain, she saw her mother weep in the General Strike. She voted Labour, most of her life, because there were people who cared about her, and the society she hoped for.

And I, Mother Ghost daughter, just celebrated a Tory taking power. You can see why a part of my soul is shrivelling up with the shame of that betrayal. I may as well dig up the Mother Bones and sell them because this would amount to the same thing.

Now excuse me while I dodge the swinging blows of that punishing and vengeful fish. The Mother Ghost face is mean, and she doesn't smile when she swings that weapon in my disloyal direction.

Mother Ghost, put the fish down, and listen.

Look at my alternative. The Labour Party is not the same. They have pushed and pushed into our community, into our lives, and right to the door of this house. Sometimes I swear I have gone to sleep at night feeling their body weight creak against the windows. I've woken up, eye to eye with that dreadful bill, championed by Ed Balls, with so much horrendous implication for us as parents, educators, citizens.

Then I watched that awful bill make its steady walk to Law. With each step, coming closer, bringing with it the right of judgement by government minister. Giving up my rights, to a stranger who can walk into my house, inspect our home, demand paperwork, licence me, identify fault, interview your grandchildren without me, then force my compliance, and deny my freedom of choice. That was the Labour Party, eighty years on. And the thought of that bill re-emerging again, as ministers promised it would, if only they could return to power, chilled me to my heart.

That is why I celebrated the Tory win. I felt excited about that news, scared at the same time. I hope - and that is a pointless, foolish feeling, but I still feel it - that the most eager of the Tories are hindered by the Liberal Democrats. Perhaps the worst of what the Tory party can do is made less harmful, less bitter, less divisive, less fearful. Maybe it won't last. Maybe it will last long enough to cause disaster. Maybe they'll be stumbling men, tied together in a three-legged juddering stop-start circle, and will hobble on, eventually curling off to a new direction.

Mother Ghost, think about how times have changed. I have not wronged you. We need your protection. Your gutted fish will be better placed round another's head. You could turn your wrath to a worse one than me, and worse for us all if he takes the throne.

The arch-schemer, the long-game player, the strong-armed bully. Please, Mother Ghost, not me. Take your gutted fish to Morley and Outwood, and there, slap it round Ed Balls.

Someone asked me, What's your day like?

You asked for it.

7.00 Lie in bed cuddling bucket of coffee. Plot. Today, water. I have motive.

8.00 Yell GOOD MORNING LITTLE CAMPERS from vantage position on landing. Follow it by YOU HAVE 59 MINUTES TO GET OUT OF BED. Proceed to shower and dress me up like the lady I am. A £1 jumper from the Scope shop teamed with baggy M&S drawstring trousers c1977 with a hole in the crotch. They are so ME.

8.30 More coffee. Shout AT 9AM I POKE YOU WITH SKEWERS. But I am good mummy. I use only wood, never metal.

9.00 Hi everyone! Welcome to breakfast! This is your house, so just do as you please, like scatter cereal all over the table and cover your face in jam. Now while you're doing that, let me prop up this geography text book, show off pictures of the water cycle and read aloud this interesting text. Sometimes, when I think attention is wandering I shout WHAT IS PRECIPITATION followed by very good, good girl, lovely daughter, good good good. WHAT IS TRANSPIRATION etc. etc.

9.30 Say Are you all going? Where are you going? Come back to me at 11. I have a television set. Then do tedious things that I must do. Otherwise I must buy paper plates and wear one pair of knickers two weeks running. Hope to put knickers in correct bit of laundry equipment and not in dishwasher or kettle.

10.00 Wander into office. Regret that. Is foolish. The office is filled with times and dates and nuisance calls and work not done. Hear children screaming in distance. That is good. This is an opportunity to explore strategies for conflict resolution. To help that process we have rules pinned up at the back of a door. Somewhere.

11.00 Shout WHERE ARE YOU ALL. COME BACK. I HAVE A TELEVISION SET AND A CHOCOLATE MILKSHAKE.

11.30 Put on the programme about river systems and flood management. I am very organised mummy. I recorded this at 4am! It looks like a GCSE course. Who cares?

12.00 Say Where are you going now? Are you going to play? Does anyone want to do maths? Please don't dig up the lawn again. Come back at 1 o'clock. I have lunch.

If small child foolishly short cuts through kitchen in pursuit of cut up fabric, shovels, tennis balls, pots of glitter, lure them, by crying, in pleading tone, Look at my lovely books about rivers! Do you remember the day I couldn't turn off the tap? Here is a picture of the Amazon! I have found a lovely website! Would you like to visit the sewage farm again? etc. etc. Sometimes this works, and a small child is lured by a seductive picture of a tap, then a ten minute discussion can be had about drainage systems, blocked pipes, Archimedes screw etc. etc.

1.00 Throw cheese rolls around table, while reading from a book about Handel. Because guess what kiddlywinks? To fit in with our watery theme today we're listening to the Water Music as we go out next in the car. Papa wants you to grow up to be accomplished young ladies who look like they know stuff. He says I am wrong and there is more to the world than Talking Heads c1989.

2.00 Arrive at Stanwick Lakes!


Yes! This is it! This is why I have made you suffer! Now go and bother water along with the other home ed kids for a couple of hours. They have a fantastic water play park. Here, through practical experiment and wet socks, you can learn about water transport, suspended particles, rocks, water energy, pumping, flow rates, flooding etc. etc.






No, don't tell me what you're up to, how many times you pushed Squirrel in, or how much of it you're putting in your pockets to take home. I'm off to talk about how hard this home ed life can be, over coffee with all the other lovely friendly ladies in the lovely warm visitor centre.

4.30 Depart the lakes with pictures, information about watery educational workshops, and results of discussion with very helpful education staff. Promise to organise workshop as soon as possible.

5.30 Drop Shark at after-school drama. We have had a tiring school day, learning about water. Squirrel and Tiger run to dig up the lawn to create irrigation channels for unicorn farmland.

6.00 Consider making artwork in form of water book. Consider this problem a lot while drinking tea and contemplating what a hard and terrible life is this home education business.

8.00 Indian takeaway for dinner. We should eat more of these. Apparently 72% of our meals should consist of them. Must try harder.

9.00 Kids push off to bath and hang around at the back of daddy Dig's head while he tries to watch a programme about the Royal Navy. Memo to self: Samuel Pepys is good for a laugh. We might do him next week.

10.00 Book reading stuff. Individual light turning off. Busy outdoor day. Plenty of active play. Kissy kissy nite nites etc. etc.

Tomorrow is French lesson. Over breakfast of croissants, pain au chocolat, read lovely bilingual books, abandon kids to websites and garden, go to gym, talk to other lovely home ed people, get back in time for after-school clubs etc. etc. Hard life.

Happy? With this approach to education? Oh yes we are. Smug bastard.

Frock on, frock off

Woke this morning to the sound of pigeons scrabbling about, sliding off the roof. They do it now just to piss me off. I no longer have a fetish for the fat self-satisfied little bastards. They are probably up there now, enjoying how the roof tiles make some fantastic water slide into the blocked gutters. The more of them dead, the better.

Anyway, pigeons disturbed me. And I may have been enjoying the best erotic dream, the one with big hands and cake, before those rats with wings muscled in on the act. After that interruption, I quickly sank three pits down, to the circles of self indulgent misery sulks. Dreams are never true. Not even a bit of them.

For this miserable state of affairs, there is only one solution, and that is go to town and take my clothes off in a cupboard.

Come on girls, you all do this, so don't deny it. The first solution to a self-pitying start and a miserable love life on a failed Sunday morning is go and buy clothes you'll never wear.

But that moment is fantastic, isn't it? Metamorphosing from one identity to another. I metamorphosed from ragbag washed up beat up old hippy to washed up old hippy in ragbag beat up gear. I may even show you photos.


I like this cotton, silk and linen crumpled look. I am made the sort of free woman who strides through continents, faces frontiers, explores sensuous passions. I am woman in control, glowing, natural, shaking her free hair to the rising dawn. In a field. In my dreams I probably slept in that dew filled field. Actually, I do remember that. I did sleep in a field. I was cold and uncomfortable. It rained on me, the soil was all lumpty, and I cried.

There, I cannot even grow that metaphor nor be that dream-filled person. That's how bad things are. All is hard reality, loss and wasteland. Not even a metamorphosis in a cupboard fixes me now. So I didn't buy the look. But there's always hope, right? If you like that sort of thing. I can say, I might tomorrow. If I get cake, big hands, free spirit, linen crumple, then I might. I might.

A fire, a mars bar, and a punch up.

To the British Library for the Magnificent Maps exhibition. Go. It is fantastic for pervynerdies like me who want our kicks paper based, vellum rich, decorative gilded, pretty pictured, tiny lettered and splashing with sea monsters. Niche market, I know, but it's free.

Shark, Squirrel and Tiger gave it 9 out of 10, promised they would draw maps of the garden so I can call it an education, and asked to come back. Then the fire alarm went off.

We do not have a good strike rate with those. I now add it to my list which includes the hairdressers, the London Aquarium, the gym, the Royal Institution and the posh hotel somewhere up north which was my fault.


Anyway, fire alarms can be very sociable events, can't they? All the sad looking people outside. I bet marriages have been made and divorces begun in these foot shuffling minutes wondering if we are going to be burned to death, blown up, or let back into the shop. Lucky for us we meet up with chums outside, decide to abandon maps altogether, and go off to drink coffee before catching the train home.

At the station, there is a bit of a disaster when Dig appears waving one of these.


He says it is all my fault and I haven't brought his children up properly. He says they have never eaten a Mars Bar. I very much doubt that actually, but they know how to play one parent off against another and they all look intently at the said dog chocolate wrapped in plastic and claim daddy is right. They have never ever, ever, ever seen one in their lives ever before. Honestly.

Ha! Well I've got a flanking manoeuvre to outwit you little grits because daddy need not go back into chocolate shop of hell and buy two more because in my handbag is a KNIFE. I brandish it here for all the security guards in England to see and they can come and arrest me right now this instant.


I am riding on the edge of danger. I am a woman with a killer instinct. I have an intuitive sense that I would need to slice up a Mars Bar into equal bits on a station platform.


Lucky I nicked that wood picnic knife from Woburn.




Now there is just the punch up to go, which, after the sniff of Mars Bar, is enough to set things off nicely on the way home. There is a bit of finger pointing and accusatory You looking at me? before the pushing, shoving, lapel grabbing and slapping begins. You'll notice on the crowded train that no-one sits next to the gritlets. Not even us.






Fortunately the punch up is good natured and there are no metal bars, rocks, puffins or spears to launch. Further, we have not been burned to death, arrested for carrying knives, begun a bitter divorce, vomited with brown lard overload, or informed that as all the trains are cancelled, the taxi fare home is £160.

All things considered, a very successful day out. With maps.

I did mean to stay up all night, I really did.

But I am weak. By 2am I am passed out on the sofa, snoring, surrounded by empty beer bottles and flattened packets of crisps.

I'd like to think Dig might find that sight arousing. But he had taken one look at the exit polls at 10pm then taken to his bed, saying that years of political experience told him things were not likely to change much, so you get your hung parliament, well done, goodnight, see you in the morning.

I wake myself up with my own throat rattling about 2.30, catch an eyeful of Andrew Neil and am immediately up and alarmed, like something horrible has happened to his face! Why is it all red and lumpy like an old foam pillow? I'm sure it wasn't like that at 1am, and maybe something totally wild happened while I'm asleep, like he and Peter Mandelson had a raging fist fight over who ate the last pork pie.

I spend a good ten minutes trying to work that out, but everyone in the BBC is behaving normally, like no-one mentions the punch up, so maybe I dreamed it. Then I began to dream of bed, and that seemed good.

I really wanted to see slimeball Balls stand up and face the baying hordes, so I'm cross at my own lack of stamina. I'll be kind to myself. Maybe the infill line of political interviewing over how to solve the international debt crisis overwhelmed me. Especially as the political commentators were Joan Collins' uplifted cheekbones, Bruce Forsyth's deceased hairpiece and Fern Britton's used gastric band.

So I woke this morning and there it was, a hung parliament, which is what I wanted. For the whole bunch of them to be so busy crawling around their own innards that they leave me alone to get on with my life. I guess they now do all the manoeuvring for power - not for themselves you understand - but in the national interest. Don't tell them that my interest right now is to enjoy the thought of them all floundering around some slimy length of intestine somewhere hoping to grab onto a floating bit of spaghetti.

And of course I discover on waking that BullyBoyBalls isn't Portillo. I am in mourning. That was so close, and I think there should be a recount, with all the people who couldn't vote going round to Morley and Outwood and voting there. It could just change that outcome.

But now it's all done and dusted. Apart from like, er, who governs. Yet there is one burning question left for me in this strange hanging-about-the-radio day. And that is how do those BBC presenters keep up all night? Are they taking something? I want some of that. There's Dimbleby and he must be aged over 70 and he can keep going all night. Why doesn't he fall facestraightdown into his papers zzzzzzzzzz at 3am?

Next time, whatever he's having, I want some in my beer.

For the best laugh I had all day

I just want to thank the person responsible for the page layout yesterday at the bottom of page 5 of the Independent newspaper, Election Guide 2010.

I'm not talking redesign. I could witter on there about the leading and letter spacing. No, it is for the following reprinted opinion piece about Balls, which is in itself gratifying to the likes of me and penned by Matthew Norman, but especially delicious for the practical page turning intrusion:

28 April: Matthew Norman - 'Will Blinky Balls consign Labour to history?'

On Monday's Newsnight Blinky Balls barely blinked at all. No doubt he noticed the line in a newspaper piece about him, that wakeful rapid eye movement is the body language for 'pathological liar'. ... Cocky, fake, slimy, inelegant, charmless, witless, weird, sinister, glacially cold and luminescently remote, he may be the most chillingly repulsive politician of even this golden generation. If Pixar set out to create a CGI character to embody everything the public has learned to despise about its political class, they'd be thrilled to come up with this lizardy schemer, who may have slipped through a tear in the fabric of space-time himself. Certainly he seems best suited to skulking beneath stone archways, in a purple robe, sibilantly sidling poison into the bloodstream of the medieval Vatican. ... If he has a political philosophy, it is the domineering, top-down, we-know-best,

- Continued on page 6 -

infantilising statism of Gordon himself ... For Mr Balls, it is football thug tribalism – a with-us-or-against-us Manichean sensibility next to which Mrs Thatcher seems a proto-Cleggian champion of consensus.

I loved that. Continued on page 6. This is a gag that could run and run, and of those of us who've suffered him, we could fill pages and pages of wicked wonderful on the perils of the hideous Balls - Continued on page 7 - unredeemed by any human feature, odious and smarmy, slipping into power with double tongue and corporate suit - Continued on page 8 - and we could continue, we could.

But I am so fingers crossed that Balls does not.

Days like today are the reason why I blog

Because it is one of our ordinary days. I would forget days like today if I did not mark them down.

I offload the kids at Woburn. First to sit in something that is pleased to call itself an educational session.

Really, it is more of the old sameas sameas. The kids can spot it a mile off. It starts with the routine about whether snakes are slimy.

Honestly, is there a script all education officers are following across the land? Uh. I forgot. There is. It is Target 3.4 and Are snakes slimy? is how you begin.

This is a problem with the uniformity of the National Curriculum, laid out like a greying corpse across the land. Its withered hands have reached far and touched tongues.

Education officers, once people, now incant identical zomboid murmurings, no matter where they are or what animal they're holding. It all sounds like a script worked for a level and a target, so the box can be ticked and the coffin carried off.

We do better, and Woburn does better, when we engage with the keepers and staff to talk naturally and normally about matters they know and love. Which they do, and in their faces and eyes we see real commitment and animal worship. All those monkeys look the same to me, but the soft looking keeper under the monkey bar is able to count them and name each, fondly, one by one. I bet they have to frisk her for monkeys when she goes home at night.

So I can say that Squirrel, Shark and Tiger did not roll out of the educational session brimming with enthusiasm. They looked a little tired. But they enjoyed Woburn, again; a place they've been to often in the past, and the memories helped them find their way again.

They mostly ran off then, and went about their business, so I can't tell you what they did. There were plastic swans involved. And lemurs, and wallabies, and pointing at things. Squirrel wandered around humming, probably. Shark came back with a story about how a harris hawk went off script in the pretty flying birds demonstration and butchered a duck minding its own business a grass hummock.

My wide-eyed anxious Tiger, beset with nervous fears and identity issues, stayed close by. Tiger had a wobble by the penguins and looked set to smash the place up, taking a couple of Humboldts with her because they didn't swim still enough for her to draw them. I went off to the special place I reserve in my head, labelled Emergency Escape Routine for Public Humiliation by Child and stared at the sky for a time. When I came round she was stabbing the tail end of a penguin with her pencil point so I guess the moment had passed.

Then here, on this quite ordinary day, filled with plastic swans, slaughtered ducks and sleeping lions, are the photographs.