The message we don't want to hear

There I was, about to compose a post about politics, power, and the exercise of my legal duty under Section 7 ...but!

I saw I have fallen off one of the more important lists of bloggers in a mummy world. Then I wondered ...maybe I should try and worm myself back into the club with some cutting-edge celeb material! I could make my post essential reading for today's modern mama looking to escape the drudge of baby crap. And maybe - with my new breathless style and flog-blog-ability - I could power my return! I could wink at a few PRs with my constant name dropping. I could earn myself enough revenue from the nappy ad to buy a Starbucks biscuit!

And what better way to lever myself back into the mummy blog world? Than right here! My fantastic glamour lifestyle in Hong Kong, international city of cutting edge fashion!

Viva Vivienne Westwood!

Readers around the globe will be clawing their way here for today's hot topic! Which is... How many top nob fashion models do I see in Hong Kong wearing posh gear?

Ladies, the answer is, HEAPS.

Like, I saw that famous one with the forehead striding around the IFC shopping mall. (Oo la la CHLOÉ!) She was so tall she had to stoop. She had that modelly walk where you fix your pelvic girdle two metres ahead of you and bend your calves backward (I can totally do that, no problem). She looked like she was legging it from the paparazzi or something but I can tell you her dress sense was TERRIBLE. It was all shorts and trainers and some crappy shapeless jacket made of nylon. I don't know, say Juicy Couture.

The other bunch of models I saw recently were all in the Elements Halls in Kowloon. Maybe they don't count? At first I thought they were prostitutes. But then! I realised they were about their hard work biz while decked out in something like Christian Lacroix. But I can see the work in a catwalky show! The challenge is do the whole lot together: the modelly walk, pelvic hip thrust, push-out lips and frowny stare. All while perched on 10-inch Louboutin heels.

Those of us in the know can tell you this is to exude confident sexuality. It is not concentrate on staying upright (even if you are wearing the lie-down shoes).

And last night, there was a whole load of the modellys on the Star Ferry! Maybe with Marc Jacobs. He's big round here!

Now, about the Star Ferry. Everyone in the fashion world knows that it is NOT the whole point, if you are a visitor to Hong Kong, to see the breathtaking vista of the urban skyline from aboard one of the original wooden decked boats. That is so yesterday... seeing the giant thrust of a city ascending the mountain into the clouds, all the lights reflecting in the historic harbour, and everyone expecting you to feel that moment of awe; your commanding vision combined with your knowledge of insignificance among the surge of the choppy waters.

But this is not the point at all if you are a six-foot tall modelly type with a trendy hair-do wearing Versace! The point is to spend the journey not looking once out the windows, but occupying all the ferry seats in a large noisy gaggle, elbowing everyone out the way, shouting a lot, and pouting at cameras for 2,365 shots of you aboard the iconic Star Ferry!

Ladies! You need to escape from all the nappies and kid crap to enjoy the celeb! life! and style! You can surely now come to grit's day! and lever me back on the buy-now-mummy blog list, the one where they tell you how to make a load of money from your blog with the nappy ad while promoting the topics that we all want to read about! SEX, FROCKS, CELEBS, and how celebs are getting it WRONG with their BABIES.

Ha! When I am back there, I will do the covert, undercover job I was doing last time!

(Spreading the message that education is more important than shoes.)

Celts in Hong Kong

The spelt flour breadmaking, torc crafting, and Roman thrashing on the Celtic day proceeded extremely well. Except travelling home on the underground. What with the outfits, I made the junior Celts sit a long way away from me.

Slowly I'm finding the virtue of ruthlessness

I don't know what shifty excuses, underhand activities or downright lies you use for the type of problem I have today, but I call it Oh My God the Travelling Aunty is coming to visit.

For a long time I have been respectful of the kid stuff that collects in all the corners, in the drawers, against the walls, over the beds, under the sofa, and on every surface their fingers can reach, but doesn't there come a point?

Round here, the point is, Remember she is a social worker. If she claps eyes on this lot, she'll be calling Childline.

But we have been here before, have we not, dearest readers? You know how clearing up kid crap is handled Grit style.

In the beginning it was all, Aw, I cannot throw out the little pink bead with the threaded wire! It is Squirrel's fairy handbag and I must treasure it forever!

You see? I was so sensitive and respectful of each precious item! Of course Squirrel didn't care about my soft-hearted sensitivities; she had already poured her devotions into 300 miniature paper scrolls describing unicorn laws.

I had to keep them, too.

When the clutter came up to my eyebrows, the need for survival kicked in. The clear out operation became Dig! Pssst! Get the kids out of here for the day and I can do away with their stuff! Even then I boxed up the precious items. I should have been stronger and told myself the peelings of child play were never a substitute for the real thing.

After that, Michelle came round with bin bags. Thank goodness! She saved me from almost complete submergence under a sea of stuff. Under her direction, nearly everything went. Except for those items I snatched from her indifferent hand; cherished items I had already invested with excess love. Like a slice of painted timber, and a hand-made fabric bird adorned with dollops of glitter glue.

Now, in a rented house with a Travelling Aunty soon landing - and no Michelle-type strong woman to lead me to clarity - I must find within myself the gifts of sightlessness and memory loss.

I have to forget these are the paper rooms for the happy match people, this is the cat toy for the hungry leopard, and this is dolly's diary where she writes her angry thoughts.

I must not pick them up, nor handle them, nor recall the play. I must lay down the law of cleanliness and godliness, tell the offspring to preserve only their best and finest, then send any squeamish onlookers out the house on an errand to buy consolation chocolate.

Once the run is free, I can sweep up the remainders, bag them and bin them and, on the way, remember to take a photograph of the paper beads hand-crafted for the disappointing party night.

Oops.

Sshhh

I see Adrian Mole is in the news this week.

That reminded me. Locked away at home in a place we never look is a sealed box. It contains diaries. They're stowed away, safe from prying eyes of partner and children.

Sadly, they're not even mine. The box was dropped off, late at night, by a travelling friend. I'm under strict instructions never to peek. I took an oath. And I won't break it, I promise.

But I wondered, where would I squirrel away secret thoughts or confessions, away from the closest friends, or even from Planet Internet?

Friends have their limits of patience, and t'Internet is okay for shameful parenting and guilty late-night forums sneaking under the name Anonymous. But those are still rather practical places. People might try and help, and offer solutions. That's the last type of reaction I want.

A special book to capture a few of life's irresolvable dilemmas and a couple of enjoyable confessions would be ideal.

So I pretended I was aged fourteen again. I wanted a secret book. I hard-bound, stitched and glued a book in beige suede, and I didn't decorate it, not one bit.


I thought, I'll write some loves, lacks, desires and terrors, sealed inside the secret compartments, then I'll slip this unobtrusive volume quietly on the dustiest bookshelf back at home. It can sit, undisturbed by casually wandering fingers, between Sweet's Anglo Saxon Primer and An Introduction to Systemic Functional Linguistics.

In years ahead, when my daughters are packing up their mother's books to donate them all to charity shops, and they discover this unmarked volume, then it would be worth my time, hanging around as a ghostly mist, just to watch the expressions on their faces.





Where would you keep your most secret thoughts? (I promise not to go looking.)

Get ready for the dragon

Did you people in England just make it through the most depressing day of the year?

Pop round here. In Hong Kong China, they're gearing up for the party.

(I can see happiness: drink tea, chuck a few lions about, blow things up.)

We'll aim to be there.

I'm more optimistic than last year, when I wasn't looking forward to the rabbit. Strange, because life is more unstable now. But I think there may be fiery breath ahead.

Proud of the mish-mash

Just to say, somedays I give myself a good pat on the back for my incoherent ragbag of opinions, bucketful of contradictions, random approach to life and frizzy mess of alien hair. I take it all as a brilliant metaphor for my half-formed fantastical life that never comes to anything.

But this pottage of mish-mash is how I've grown to like it.

People who have a consistency of life actions, choices, or decisions which they can pin precisely to an ideological line, who are able to compose clear rationales for what went before, then plan exactly what is to come, well, don't they scare you witless?

I start to worry about them. Maybe they disregard nuance, won't make compromising deals, and fail to tell themselves shifty self-excusing half-truths like the rest of us prevaricators, compromisers and sometime self-deceivers.

I mused on all this today. I happily set out to cut, pierce, and stitch red leather to make three notebooks.


Chain me. All this red dyed leather somehow quickly becomes strongly erotic and dangerous, doesn't it?


No messing. I stamped this one with studs and chains and a long soft tassel for the incongruity. On the inside you can chain the heart, or not. For the inside pages I cut up printed ephemera, the sort I couldn't show to my mother.



Cupid woz here. Red leather with a torn edge to the hide. It made me think me of skin ripped from muscle, so I stabbed it with a sharp golden dart and lashed it with a red leather thong. Satisfying. Blood red pages on the inside, stitched on the binding. When it stabs you, hope it hurts.



Spider Love. Small pocket size. You can't get inside unless you use your clumsy hands to unclasp the chain. Where you'll see I've beaded red thread, like spider eggs. And I found a delicate cobwebbed paper. No good for writing on, but I had to use it: one piece boasted a delightful squashed insect in its fabric, so that went in, top page, obviously.

So, yeah. Red fetishised leather moulded under a cruel and distant eye.

Perfect expression for a wussy, conflict-avoiding type of vacillating vegan who breaks the landspeed record at the sight of spiders, blood, and anything embarrassing, and who last laid down sex on a scrabble board. (I lost. It only made the minimum score.)

You did ask

When that question comes, Why do you home educate? I usually look at them, and size them up.

Are you a person I'd like to make uncomfortable? Who would you be if I broke through your politeness? Should I inflict on you the full-steam-ahead two hour lecture?

But I'm usually feeling kind. I wave it away, and give a flippant response. I can lie in bed until 10am.

Maybe I kept my mouth shut one too many times this week. I'm feeling a discharge coming on.

I've seen the inside of a classroom.
Enough. I have too many urgencies.

I wanted the aspirations of my children to come first.
Enter any institution and a child's needs, wants and relationships must be a lower priority than the workings of the organisation.

Sure, the administrators say the child is being listened to, and that everything is happening in the child's best interests, but in the end, the situation is only ever progressing one way - one that suits the institution. The child has merely to be manipulated to reach a stage of agreement and compliance with the paperwork.

It sort of pissed me off, watching the techniques for how this happened. And I wanted to be straight when I dealt with my kids.

I wanted my kids to be individuals.
I hated to think of my children sucked into a mass conveyor belt system. One likes fish, one likes horses, and one I haven't yet figured out. They're different, dammit.

And I didn't want them feeling powerless, or being coerced to fit in to a system from the age of five - one that had sanctions, humiliations and punishments for not fitting in.

I want to have fun.
Okay, I know I am a grown woman, but I want to enjoy being alive. I want to get out of bed at 4am to hunt nightingales; I want to dig holes in the soil; I want to sit at a firepit toasting bread; I want to stand in a field after dark listening to an astronomer enthuse about Orion. Kids are a great excuse to release your inner 12-year old.

Open and closed arguments.
When a classroom teacher gives an answer, it often reduces to 'That is how it is'. I have given answers like that myself. Really, the answer should be, 'It depends.'

A teacher in a classroom has moments to respond to any issue arising, and they feel the pressure to provide an answer that closes the debate down, and moves the lesson forward. That leads to superficial answers and pat conclusions. If they want to open the debate, class time has to be scheduled. That's artificial; the moment of interest has passed; the debate is limited by the bell; and then you find the kid who originally asked the question is off sick.

I wanted a situation where, when a child asks a question, I can answer it honestly, with 'It depends.' Then we can spend two hours talking.

The language of teachers.
I'm told research shows how kids constantly ask questions at home ... but when they arrive at school, the child stops asking questions, and the adults ask questions instead. But get this - the adults ask questions to which they already know the answers. So what's the point of asking the question? Eventually kids learn to play this game.

But I wanted a real dialogue with kids, not a pretend one. I wanted a discussion where I didn't know all the answers, and where our dialogue was a genuine construction of shared ideas.

The language of kids.
Yes, I want to protect my brood. I want to shield them from other kids who stream out of school effing and blinding. I don't want mine to feel coerced into ways of speaking, acting, and dressing that I feel are inappropriate to the values and ideas that I want to promote in our tribe.

And sod off with any accusations of middle class over-protectiveness. I believe some aspects of language, behaviours, modesties and courtesies transcend class.

Social horizons.
I wanted my children to have a wide social experience. I wanted them to see and meet different people living many different types of life. I simply couldn't see how school could offer a wide social experience.

Contact with adults.
As much as possible, because kids aren't kids forever. I wanted my three to be brought up surrounded by the models, behaviours and norms of adults leading the way. I wanted my children to learn how to interact with adults who were not in authority over them, but who were grown up people with their own interesting histories, opinions, ideas and conversations.

Attention span.
Who honestly believes that kids have little attention span? In my experience, they can concentrate for hours on something they like. I wanted to give them the time and space to attend to whatever interested them. So long as it wasn't torturing the neighbour's Mr Tibbles, what could go wrong?

Acquiring skills, ideas, and ways of seeing.
People are amazing, right? There's a woodworker, electrician, linguist, product developer, designer, writer, dreamer, all living down someone's street. I have a belief that everyone can be a teacher to a child. Yes, that includes the eccentric and the idler. All have a view to impart. Why shut my child away from these people and supply them only with one teacher who has a narrower range of life experience?

The curriculum & the testing of the curriculum.
Some knowledge is to be acquired first? Other knowledge delivered later? Then a child can be tested according to their understanding of the knowledge delivered? Pah.

The freedom of reading.
The process of learning to read? Scared me witless. I messed up a lot. I only narrowly avoided a breakdown. But hey, they cracked it, aged between eight and nine. Now they can spend as long as they want reading whatever they choose from the library (if it still exists.)

Play.
I wanted my children to have the time to play with each other, or with friends; to sit in mud and sand with unicorns, climb trees to escape goblins, run across fields chasing rabbits, and dash through woods looking for treasure. I wanted my kids to move, not sit still. Which child would seriously choose a day sat indoors by preference when the sun is shining and the air sharp?

Creativity.
I watched art, music, dance, history - all the subjects that mattered to me - be sidelined in the race for literacy and numeracy targets. I wanted music by experience, art covered in paint, and dance round the kitchen table. I wanted my history with wet feet and pinked cold cheeks on a battlefield, and I wanted geography to mean crossing a river and falling off the stepping stones. Practical, active, experiential.

Uniform.
Our local primary school has a uniform from age five. I burn it with my laser eyes. I had to be physically stopped from spraying graffiti on the local school outfitting shop. Who doesn't want to enjoy the sight of their five-year old taking pleasure in dressing up?

Food.
I don't understand how parents can bring these contradictions together. On the one hand they are beaten up about feeding their offspring, on the other instructed to turn them over to the junk-food mongers of the school premises. It doesn't make sense to me.

I want the kids to eat well. I feed them myself. We eat together, at a table, food that I damn well thought about and cooked. And if they don't like it, there's grass outside.

I don't like imposing a model of childhood on kids.
Schools look at children as if they are already adults. They instruct them in sex, but keep them away from politics. Isn't that perverse?

Me, I do it the other way round. I watch the kids play; I see them in conflict for control and I see them face issues of power in their relationships. So I teach them politics. I don't teach them about sex, because they don't play sex. On sex, I wait till I'm asked 'What does that mean?' then I answer.

In a crisis, I want my kids to come to me.
I don't want to be separated from my children by any institution that tells them how difficult it is to talk to parents. No, matey, a child should feel they can go to their parent, that they are a trusted person to talk over issues. I want to be that person, thanks. I don't trust a message like that given by a school.

I am a bolshy mare.
So I have to ASK PERMISSION to take my kid to the excellent Iron Age museum in Andover? From a headteacher who wears his trousers too long?

I DON'T THINK SO. The relationship would have lasted days, blown up into confrontation, and ended, bitterly, when I keyed his Volvo.

I like power with my responsibility.
I want to encourage the values, attitudes, behaviours and ways of approaching life that I believe are positive. If I am my child's main adult contact, I can discuss those values that I hold dear, without being undermined.

You can say that I'm brainwashing if you like. I call it passing on my culture to my kids.

In some countries, that process isn't liked much either. When people are really determined to prevent the passing on of values, there's one solution used. Cut out the tongue of the mother.

I could go on. And on. You've probably suffered enough.

I can lie in bed until 10am.

And he has a shifty stare

We have completed our final discussions about the UK Education Secretary, Michael Gove.

The outcome is, he has to go.

Have you ever worked with someone you couldn't figure out? When, say, they implement a new policy, and you think, Eh? What's going on there?

Then you reason, they either just committed an act of alarming stupidity, or there is a master plan, and I haven't seen what it is yet.

So you waste your time trying to work out whether they are inept, or whether their latest action is an inscrutable step in a hidden agenda. If only you could make the imaginative leap to get there and see what's ahead!

For some time I have had this feeling with Gove.

When he visited China and Hong Kong in 2010, then went home to Blighty, he wrote this:

'the Government has been responding to the economic and social crises we face with big and comprehensive programmes. And nowhere has that been more needed than in education, where I am happy to confess I’d like us to implement a cultural revolution just like the one they’ve had in China.' (28.12.10)

My original reaction was, What an idiot! Doesn't he know what happened in the cultural revolution?

Now, I think his words were much more sinister and scary. It's a statement of intent. He was telling everyone exactly what he was going to do.

Yes, he's looking to effect a cultural change in the social status of teaching. He's going to label, ridicule, humiliate and bully teaching staff before throwing them to the loudest, most resentful voices of the parent population for the inking. He's determined to strip any final respect anyone can harbour for the profession. He's forcing schools to change, to become academies (whether they want to or not), as a means to destroy the present system. Once schools become a vehicle to divert public money into private hands, the role of every participant will be changed into a seller-buyer relationship. Yes, he's destroying state schooling. It is a cultural revolution. Mao already showed him the principle: destroy first and construction will look after itself. In Gove's reconstruction, that will be the market.

Thinking all this puts me in a problem. I believe schools need shaking up. They use a Victorian factory model that needs updating. I resent the simplistic worlds modelled for children via the curriculum, and I loathe the testing, the lack of flair, and the either/or/arts/sciences choices slapped over a child's ambitions like the cold hands of a corpse. School culture can be stultifying and deadening. Kids are locked away from the community. There's a lack of social mixing. Expectations drift to the mediocre. You can see the creativeness and inventiveness of new staff slowly ebb away. And I agree, there are some suspect and hopeless teachers, where it's difficult, even after years, to shift them.

Schools need to freshen their ideas, yes, but Gove's way?

So many, many more good people work hard in challenging situations with little room to develop professionally. They'll never see rewards in A grades, but are motivated to impact positively in a young person's life. Many parents want the fine responsibilities of education removed from them; they don't have the resources, time, or stomach, to put together an education alone. And many children want another place to go: for some unfortunates, the classroom is a sanctuary from a turbulent and destructive home life.

I don't want to see any of these people, who needs state schools, trafficked to corporates and privateers.

If Gove continues rearranging education, then yes, he'll be one of the most dramatic Education Secretaries we've had. But I don't consider that any glory. In the last few years, schools have been thrown about, driven by ideology, run by institutional mentalities, set up like businesses and been used as agents of social control. It's time they had someone who did less, allowed teachers more creative freedom, and listened to the ideas of scholars, educators, and children.

Letting go of those emotions

A favourite person in all the universe (they run home ed sessions IN THEIR FRONT ROOM and invite my kids to SLEEPOVERS) just wrote something which really chimed in my brain.

To the effect of, Which is more satisfying? Aggravated assault or departing the family home?

I have now tried many approaches to this fundamental problem: being in the company of your own family all day long.

How do you get rid of the anger, deal with frustration, and free yourself from the relentless double binds which children impose on you? Thanks to years of being in company with my own, I can clearly see the many strategies available to the demented full-time mother caught up in the daily maelstrom of the argument with kids.

What best to do?

1. Hide in the cupboard under the stairs with a bottle of brandy.
A strategy with obvious disadvantages. The thudding on the stairs is amplified and you continue to hear the smash of hurled objects. The insults I hate you poopy brain get out of my life I never want to see you again etc etc., all echo in your chamber.

On the plus side, a dark cupboard does offer the safe regression to the womb and, in the brandy, the comfort of the amniotic fluid.

So, as a strategy for your emotional escape, doable. (Unless you have foolishly turned the space into a 'computer room' with an unturnoffable fluorescent light and no door.)

2. Kick the shit out of the kitchen bin.
As an emotional release, extremely satisfying. But only in the short term. Maybe for about two minutes. Say, until your big toe hurts, or you realise the kitchen bin you have irretrievably dented cost you two hundred quid and boasted a state-of-the-art Philippe Starck foot pedal. Then you don't feel so good.

(It may be why our kitchen bin is now a plastic bag hanging from a nail, but I'm admitting to nothing.)

3. Slam the crockery.
Class-related emotional therapy. You can smash an Ikea dinner plate into the pot sink, sure! When you chip it, crack it, or it explodes, you can buy two more for under a fiver, so not much loss. In fact a price worth paying rather than two years in prison.

I have found, however, that with Minton or Royal Doulton in my furious hands, the whole catharsis becomes much more problematic. At the final throwing moment my brain must tot up the damage.

Then again, the superior range of dinner plates can take a lot of bashing.

Hmm, if you are a crockery thrower, worth investing in the best, in my opinion, to ensure they last the emotional damage.

4. Adopt a serious face.
Completely rubbish strategy with no merit whatsoever. Your true emotions have no outlet. Denying your feelings and placing them under the added pressure to be an uber parent will guarantee your anger furiously boils up inside you like a volcano. When the crust on your face ruptures, you can be sure it is going to be bad.

5. Threaten stuff.
Grounding. No TV for ever. Bed without supper. Incineration of Mr Flopsy, etc. etc. As a strategy this serves your need to control rather than release your emotional tension.

I have also found the strategy requires a certain steely heart and a dedication to emotional cruelty. I have tried it, of course, on many occasions, but am fundamentally spineless therefore fail to see it through effectively. If I have confiscated Mr Flopsy I invariably return it five minutes later with a backsliding excuse to cover my weak resolve. After ten minutes I will issue a grovelling apology. Therefore, no release of emotional energy whatsoever. Only the addition of misery and guilt.

I cannot recommend this strategy. Well, only if you are a heartless bitch with a control agenda and a mind set on revenge.

6. Hit someone.
Have I hit my children? Of course I have. Shark once threw a shovel at my head. What do you expect me to do? Turn the other cheek so she can decapitate me with a mallet?

Parents lash out because they are people who probably have had enough, haven't slept for a week, and they're facing the horrible realisation that their marriage has ended. Cut them some slack you moral idiots and stop trying to make people feel more guilty than they already do.

Now that's out the way, I can say, as a considered strategy for emotional release, hitting is a simple non-starter. After they recover their senses from their moment of shock, the kids hit you back.

7. Shout.
Emotionally satisfying in the immediate experience, but eventually futile. It gains only a headache, sore throat, and bad feeling. Made even worse after the neighbours complain, indicating they heard every word.

8. Eat the kid chocolate stash in front of them.
This strategy can work well, especially if you are on medication which does not permit alcohol abuse yet you still require some emotional support.

The downsides are that the kids never notice; they are too engaged in thumping each other. And, if you are going through a bad patch, it guarantees your enormous arse in a mere two weeks.

9. Make grand moral statements.
This strategy is typical of many holier-than-thou parenting strategies, usually scattered about by people who never stared a determined five-year old in the face.

In my view, grand moral statements are not much good in an emergency: discussions on how to run a happy family using Aristotelian precepts are essentially intellectual, therefore do not release your emotional tension.

Anyway, the kids can't hear because they are yelling, and even to your ears you sound like a tosser. Save it till over dinner when everyone has calmed down and their mouths are full of pasta.

10. Go berserk.
Throw yourself from a window, hang yourself from the stairs, put your head in the gas oven, etc. etc.

A really bad strategy to deal with overwhelming emotions, and one I have not tried, obviously, although I have entertained it on more than one occasion.

The state of mind needed for self-annihilation is one where you totally fail to see any funny side of living. There is a funny side. Of course there is. There must be. If there wasn't, we'd all be dead.

However, in the middle of tense and emotional situations, when you are seeking escape or release, I know that humour is difficult to find ...which is why I endorse the only strategy for emotional escape that ever truly works.

11. Leave the house.
Slam the door behind you. Kick it. Call your children cruel and horrible names under your breath, then stomp about with a face like a slapped arse until people stare, or until you feel a bit foolish.

But remember, when you return in a fudge of self-justification, righteousness, and shame, it is humiliating to ring your own front door bell, then stand there five minutes, waiting until your eight-year old with a grudge over your failure to provide strawberry sauce decides whether they'll let you back into the house, or not.

So don't forget the door keys.

It only looks like play

Join a bunch of kids in the park. We parents leave them to it. We observe from a safe distance, like David Attenborough behind the bushes. It's a bit like watching a primitive society form, based on fundamentals of tool handling, skill-sharing, trade in knowledge, consensus towards group work, experimental behaviour, creation of laws, and tribal decision-making regarding the usefulness of elderly keep-fit equipment.






Give them ten years and they might evolve to be engineers, architects, urban planners, social scientists, lawyers, policy makers, and, in the case of the one on the far left, designers of gym equipment for fish.

We nearly did it

We nearly finished composing the Periodic Table.





Would have done too, if we had enough biscuits.


And then someone kicked off the eating frenzy by nibbling on Iridium.

We can lose ourselves

It is true. This is one of our biggest delights.

Given constraints, such as the imperative to eat, wee, and go to sleep, we free-in-the-heads can go pretty much any place, to do anything.

Yes, this freedom is a liberating consequence of being human, but in home ed land, can you believe it has extra spice?

We are already living a life suspected by some and judged by others to be downright wrong. In this counter-culture, barbed and resentful comments can wound, fears can run deep, and quick, sideways glances from the disapproving can weigh down a spirit, but with an imagination and a place to put it, we can secretly say, sod them all, we're off.

Then we can put our freedoms into practice; which probably doesn't help our image, or lessen the jealousies of the desk-bound. In our limitless place of learning outside closed doors, corridors, rooms, and designated areas, we can go where we like, when we like, and we don't have to ask permission.

We can be up and off indeed, with extra quiet content - some would say smug self-righteousness - because, in the spirit of our duties - responsibilities, freedoms, rights, whatever you want to call them - we can take a child by the hand and not only lead them off the path of the National Curriculum, we can neither follow a timetable, nor work to hours, days or terms; not run the home like a school; use no lesson plans, nor set work, nor mark work, nor give formal lessons, neither present a blank face with a 'developmental objective', nor make anyone put a chair on a table so you can sweep the floor under the desk: we can simply do away with the desk.

Then yes, I can understand the lack of whatever looks like school combined with a free-range mind can suggest to the hour-tied onlooker a complete state of chaos and bewilderment. I guess they wonder what on earth home educators do, if they don't do a lot of what looks like what they are told to do, in school.

Well, as I said, we can pretty much do anything, anywhere.

To my way of thinking, when each morning opens, the possibilities are so ridiculously endless, the nuances so variable, and the permutations of any action so wonderfully limitless, there is sometimes only one place to pin ourselves down.

If Shark, Squirrel and Tiger are to experience as many states and futures as can be shoe-horned into one day, we must be at the library. Here they can let their minds wander, or they can go looking for an author who holds them long enough to extract their agreement to be held by ink on a page.

But I confess. Today, I have a secret urge.

I have found that I can slip away, even from the freedoms of the library. I can leave my three tender exploring minds for hours in the company of witch dolls, chalk horses, puppet people, and humans fashioned from melting stone - and I can take my own exploring soul down the bewitched back streets of Hong Kong Island.

Leaving their eyes quietly fastened on the endless pages, I can leave the library to aim for a precise slice of Sheung Wan, filled with all the strange practices of the printing of papers; I can peer into the mechanics of print, boards, cardboards and cutters; I can watch the pressers, slammers, stitchers, and loose-leaf folders go about their day.

Printing was one of the biggest industries in Hong Kong, but the biggest book work has upped presses and moved north, leaving behind a business of pamphlet and card print with slam-thunk machinery that would not be out of place in your local museum, Victorian section.

Working these print presses, in the space of your broom cupboard and spilling straight to the street, are the skilled people who always loved handling inks and papers, bindings and glues.

Between them slips the infrastructure they need: stationery stores, paper suppliers, envelope sellers and, most traditional Chinese, chop street. In these tiny booths with knife, stone and wax, your business chops are crafted to grace your freshly-printed letter paper, handmade to your most precise requirements.

Tucked between them, between the paper cutters, any size, and the stationery store with the rolls of green wrapping smelling of ink, is my bone finder. She finds me bones - ask no questions, tell no lies - which she sells to me in pairs, two at a time. These desirable pieces, fashioned to look like yours, half the length of your forefinger, snap it off before your knuckle, I need. I stitch these bone likenesses into leather and wrap them with bleached, pressed paper, making my miniature books. Folded in my bone finder's shop, squeezed between the end-of-line beads and the sinuous twine, strange, which I swear was not there before, I could lose hours.

It is how we free-in-the-heads and learners out-of-doors can choose to spend our days.

By dark, Shark, Squirrel and Tiger are still seated in the library, heads bent, engrossed, each with a pile of books, chosen ones to bring home. In my pocket are my bones.

Simple life

We are staying on island, travelling only to the front street to buy noodles and avoid the fish skin, so expect no exciting tales of adventurous living it up in Hong Kong for a day or two.

I am saving all my energy for the Travelling Aunty, who will come upon us soon, putting down her suitcase and demanding dragon dancing and walled villages and all things Chinese.

In great anticipation of her arrival, I have looked at the calender and warned Shark to sweep under her bed. I don't want the sewer rat coming back and taking up residence the very night Travelling Aunty arrives. I already put her through enough rodent-related trauma with the mouse and the waste-paper basket. I want no repeat of that.

Otherwise, I have been involved in making more delightful notebooks. So I am not good company. My mind is utterly filled with that. You could say anything to me and I probably won't hear. Having acquired the indulgent red leather last week, I am now in the process of feeling it, and folding it, cutting it up and stitching paper into it.

I think there might be something a bit Freudian going on. I want some of this beautifully sensitive and textured red for my Damaged range; note books that do away with cuteness but explore this pleasurable red with broken glass, barbed wire, and knives. I am enjoying it hugely. I hope the process produces objects that are vaguely disturbing but which you want to get your hands on, nonetheless.

I won't be able to sell them to the Chinese, of course. They do not, as far as I know, associate red with sex, blood, and destruction, because red is the colour of happiness. (And officialdom and the Communist Party.)

Well, that's all I shall say on the subject, in case Anya Hindsherface is a-watching my blog.

For the educational week, the children are all being directed to the assignments, which are going fairly well. Those blogs (over here if you are desperate) allow me to start the day in a way that I can feel involved. Usually it only lasts an hour, then we can all gratefully push off to our various locations and pursue the things which matter to our souls.

I think that might be it for our Monday. I am not displeased with it. Howabout yours?

The achievement cup is overflowing

1. We have taken down the Christmas tree. I say we. It was mostly me. Dig helped shove it into the box. It struggled, and finally entered reluctantly, with a knee in the middle, much as a toddler into a car seat. Now I can abandon it in the downstairs toilet and forget about it forever. (Tree. Not toddler.)

I assumed the children would be mortified at the loss of Christmas Joy, so I have been putting the end off, even risking the wrath of the Christmas Spirits of Superstition with the date. And I bought lard-chocolate to hide in their sad, limp stockings!

The idea is, when the children sadly pack away their stockings from the delightful decorative window ledge where they have lain discarded for two weeks, there is the final surprise delight! Befana's present!* The one everyone forgot! A bar of Cadbury's dog chocolate! Yum.

Well, no-one could give a toss. Not about the tree or the stockings. They just scoffed the chocolate, so obviously I'm kicking myself. I could have had the ruddy lot down and packed away by Boxing day. (Memo for next year.)

2. I wrote our week's assignments. This is a home ed blog! It is true! I do home education! (There is another myth busted for 2012.) Actually, we are into that child age where effective parenting is to piss off and leave them alone. They cracked the reading several years ago, so job done, really.

But I am keeping the assignment blogs going (sounds good, eh?) partly because I would like Shark, Squirrel and Tiger to think about bringing structured study into their days. (Look at my saintly halo, Dig should be v. proud of me.) Also, some busybody from the local council might collar me and demand pompously to know my provision of education.

If you don't know about the blissful life of home ed, then I should tell you that someone from the council can ask, and they have a legal right to do so.

I have a legal right to tell them nothing, although it probably would be foolish to do so, but if I want I can tell them anything. Not stupid things, obviously! (Although I would be minded, if pushed.)

We can tell the local council what we do in any form, say a written folder with pictures or examples of what the kidlets have done. Then, if they are provided with information, they should push off and leave us alone.

Well, because I can't remember what I'm doing one minute to the next, my choice of information is online; it is a demonstration that an education is being offered. (Whether it's picked up or not is another matter.)

But I doubt anyone will ask. We're not even in England for a start. I don't know why I bother. Don't get me thinking.

3. The children are all quiet today, reading books about ice and fire. Shark has been on her fishy friend forum. She is sploshing over with information on tanks, filters, thermometers, and stuff. I don't know, I tune out after five minutes. Where did she inherit this fish love? One of her ancestors ran a fish and chip shop. Must be that.

4. I have found a half-bottle of gin. The Travelling Aunty is coming back to see us soon, and I am fixing up a hectic schedule for her of museums and outings and more treks into the wilderness. (I will tell her we are heading off to the last woman-eating Tiger outpost of Hong Kong to see if she believes me.)

I could keep going with the achievements, but in light of the gin element of number 4, I won't.

Planet Earth should send me a medal, or something.

*I now think we are the only family in the country to do this. Until last year I thought everyone did it. It was when I discovered no-one knew who Befana was, or what I was talking about, did I begin to suspect we were odd.

Hidden talents

I am forced to take it easy for a couple of days after yesterday's explosion of venomous angry froth. I need time to recover. And the weekends are when I invent my assignments. That way, I can give the children something to ignore all next week, apart from me.

Well, the chicken shed set me a challenge. Tell you seven things about myself.

SEVEN!

I interpret that to mean not all on the same day. (I can't think up seven things, just like that.)

Plus, I like to think I am a complex woman whose mysteries are disclosed slowly, over time, which is more loving, and sublime, than get it all out in the open. I mean, where is the magic?

My first revelation has to be a peek then, into the struggles of the soul that lies beneath.

Peek into the Grit soul, number 1.

I like writing messages on bananas.


See? I was WASTED at that crappy ad agency I worked for, maybe all of two months, before they found me out and sacked me.

I even write on the ones I eat.


I am as addictive as sniffing unwashed laundry, aren't I? I bet you can barely wait for revelation number 2.

Places to avoid: Macau

I hear some people enthuse about Macau. It is a World Heritage Site! I see many comments praising the fine, ancient, colonial buildings. I have heard tell of the wonderful food, and the Portuguese flair that inspires this historic town.


I feel it is time to take your beer goggles off.


The team sent by the World Heritage Outfit to assess this rotting place may indeed have been a single blind man, desperate for intimacy. Pity him. He was probably cruelly taken advantage of by someone who just said they were an indecently-clad busty blond (38-29-36).

In reality they were a conniving resident called Paolo. The deep voice and hairy belly were not the result (as claimed), of emergency medical treatment, but because they were the front end of a part-owner of a Macau casino.

Pity Paolo. He probably has to pay protection money to the Triads, so understandably he is desperate to draw in more gullible punters to this blasted site. He must focus his mind on the sole purpose of removing the last cash from the pockets of people who probably can't afford to give any at all. If the creation, exploitation, and asset-stripping of their dreams can be assisted by a concocted veneer of attractive historic charm, then so be it.

I would like to tell you straight. There is no charm to Macau. None at all. Macau is the world's top gambling centre, outstripping the strip of Las Vegas, and it shows. It is the world's most soulless place, driven by the brutality of gambling, stinking of deceit, throwing up rotten displays of glitz to create dreams of wealth when in reality it is decay, abandon, and I had to suffer it for a full wretched eight hours, the final one of which could not come too soon.

But because I begin everyday with grit in my soul, we embarked on the lovely historic tour of the old town, the pride of which seems to be an old front of St Paul's Cathedral.


Obviously, a bit of old church wall confers history legitimacy on this miserable run-down town, and so it drew thousands of bussed in visitors in the 20 minutes I spent propped up against one of the iron-clad floodlights.

Each one of the visitors who were marched up the steps by sour-faced tour guides to click away on cameras in front of the thing bore an expression of forbearance and sufferance. One looked clinically depressed. I only saw one person smile in all the time I sat there. It was a young man following a blond woman. She looked ruthlessly addicted to old churches, and he looked ruthlessly addicted to the jiggle of her rear.

I would like to say things brightened considerably when Dig found us a place that could serve a vegetarian lunch, but I am sorry to say it was on the main tourist drag in Starbucks. (He could not extract a straightforward lunch from anyone unless it had dead animal or sea slime draped over the top.)

Well, you may say I got my deserves in this corporate chain, because I was abused with appalling service and a cold hot chocolate drink. I declined the cheese sandwich. It had clearly seized up from the strain of trying to look like a sandwich, and had reverted to its original form of two sawn up squares of peeling cardboard propped against a slice of yellow formica.

Then we visited the Museum.

Here the town shows how truly, madly, deeply, it already had given up its soul to absurdly betting on anything, from the Blackjack table to two water drips running down a window. Long before the Portuguese got here probably, and long before the greedy hand-rubbing property developers turned it into a lucrative playground for the gambling-obsessed and money-laundering needy.

Well, what else is there to bet on when you are sat round the bamboo hut, having eaten all the pandas, but crickets, fighting?

I leave only vitriol and take only photos. Of the merciless contest arena for the crickets, the tickling sticks (which drive them to fury, apparently), and the coffin for the loser.



If that alone is not bizarre enough to lure you to squander your meagre income, remember that this place is run by people who think it's a good idea to turn the streets into a race track every November. It makes sense if you consider this is an opportunity to gamble whether you are going to be knocked over and killed by a Formula motor sports team, or not.

I think I should speak bluntly now.

I hated Macau and I never want to step foot in this charmless place ever again. If I must, it will be for the same reason I did this time. The visa run.


Finally - but please do not consider this an addendum - I apologise to all the lovely people who live here, who are perhaps as happy, sad, joy-filled or miserable in life as anywhere else on Planet Earth.

Wiki tells me your literacy rate is 93.5%! Don't let the British government know that. Michael Gove will visit you and before we can say Jack Robinson, he will think it a good idea to make Britain worse than it already is. Poker cards will be delivered along with milk for the children.

And I probably did not do your old colonial buildings justice, this is true. I am sure many are there, valued by the residents, enjoyed and preserved as best as can be. I can detect the mix, elegantly arched, delightfully peeling, and cherished with new paint.


I fear for those that are evocatively non-restored, waiting for death. Or conversion into a new themed casino. It amounts to the same thing.

Sounds like the makings of a business plan

I have a thought.


It is to magically transport myself to Sham Shui Po whenever I want where I will hunt down beautiful and amazing haberdashery items like acorn-shaped buttons


and I will tenderly stitch these lovely worshipful items onto my own, original design, hand-made leather notebooks, which I think are fast becoming the desirable must-have items on Etsy


even though I don't have an Etsy shop, never mind about that, but then, someone who is a real celebrity, alright I don't actually know anyone, just someone, howabout Vivienne Westwood? is she dead yet? well, she is photographed adoring an original Grit-stitched Note Me Note Book, and then no dastardly evil person will steal my ideas, like I'm pretty convinced about that Anya Hindswhatsherface, what with my cloth shopping bag that I wrote all over, and WTF! along comes her design!? and we're all calling that a coincidence?? but anyway I'm not holding grudges, because the personalised, character-filled, Grit-stitched Note Me Note Book is now all the rage and becomes

a fashion icon overnight!


and there is the most amazing storm in all the fash hag mags - Vogue, what about them? where the photographer must simply have moi in the publicity pictures where I look alarmed! but also cute, not scary, say I can be girl-next-door Ralph Lauren model, maybe twenty years younger, and not digitally retouched to make me look thin or anything, I am simply beautiful when I hold my Note Me Note Book in a coquettish and pouty but totally natural way


and then Hermès comes along! and pays a million pounds! or maybe more! I don't know, enough to mend the garage roof and buy a Prada handbag, they come along and buy my Secret Jotter of Brilliant Ideas, the one I keep hidden in my bra-and-knicker drawer (and obviously where I jot my totally fantastic and original ideas about notebooks), and then the fame brand of Note Me Note Book is so successful as a global enterprise that yes!

I accept the Legion d'honneur!

and this involves me being able to start the enterprise all over again aged 22, only this time with a permanently naked available man and no liver damage.

Fairy Godmother Note Me Note Book
(currently out of stock)

Sounds like a totally brilliant plan and I should be able to do it all, say, by next Wednesday.


Note Me Note Books coming soon to Etsy!

(When I said soon, I probably meant later.)

Maths, again

I finally got round to dealing with some maths for Shark, Squirrel and Tiger.

Flippin' Nora, that took hours. With maths, I have a lot of issues.

But communicating personal issues to kids is sort of inevitable, isn't it? I mean, you can have a phobic reaction to spiders, and you can assure your kids you DO NOT have that phobic reaction while you calmly climb into your hazard suit and strap a broom to a six foot pole to sweep that tiny spidery little fella out the house, if you like.

Then you can say to yourself, isn't it strange how the kids will pick up your radar of fear, no matter how well you disguise it! How on earth do they do that?

So I'm honest with Shark, Squirrel and Tiger. I tell them, I hated maths at school. It reduced me to tears. At some part of each week I'd be a quivering nervous wreck, dreading what Mrs D. could do to me.

Not surprisingly, I am seriously disadvantaged at maths today. I sweat, shake and my palms itch if you show me a page of numbers.

Of course I tried to make the scary numbery things all Dig's job, but he does fuck all, so I feel it's kind of onerous on me, I don't know why.

Maths would be easy to ignore, but then I fear the kids would be at some strange disadvantage in some indistinct future scenario, possibly regarding a mortgage or summat (like they won't be anyway!).

So, I launched my shaky soul over the hurdle again, and I tried to make maths positive. Even though my kids now look at numbers sideways with suspicion, and they know that I know they are not going to be the world's next maths geniuses. Upshot: we all look at each other and think, we should do something.

Well, I was overjoyed to get this link from Ditta, and we all enjoyed maths Vi's way.

Then, in response to me reading a lot of poo-poohing to her approach, I got cross and sat down and wrote this over there, right all over my kids new maths page.

Now I'm all exhausted. So I'm not writing anything else here.*


*I know this actually looks like writing, but it isn't. It's a brain dump. Some peelings... Grrlscientist & Fibonacci flim-flam.

Starting home ed?

Oh wow, the Spring school term is starting. There's acute anxiety somewhere out there regarding this momentous day. How can education proceed if not in class 3G with Mrs Binns and Crusher? Visitors are arriving at grit's day to find out in a steady flow. (Okay, dribble.)

Have a few ideas, off the top of my head.

Home ed is a big, scary, responsibility
Yes, the buck (whatever that is), stops right there, under your backside. If Tinkertop is not reading by age 12, you cannot point your finger at school. If she finds serial killing or house breaking an attractive career from age 21, you cannot blame it on her being bullied in class 4F.

Seriously, it's the same worry for us all. The knowledge of my responsibility terrifies me. What if Shark, Squirrel and Tiger reach age 18 with no inclination to study or earn their own living? I'm stuffed. Let's hope it's unlikely.

Um. Today Tiger spent four hours sewing a long-eared bat. And I have to count this as a productive day of education towards employment.

Home education is the most thrilling freedom
You can shape your life, the life of your family, and create a truly adventuresome way of living. You do not need to ask permission from the council, headteacher, or PTA. You do not have to enter into stupid and pointless school gate competitions with other parents about spelling tests and reading books. Personally, I have found this exhilarating.

People will hate you
Okay, hate is a bit strong. But doing your own thing can cause resentments and raise hackles, surprisingly. I think it could be threatening (or maybe that's just me). I have had suspicious glances, covert expressions of who do you think you are? and been cold shouldered from circles of school group mummies.

Maybe I come across as self-centred and arrogant. (Who could think that of me?!) But I can only thank everyone involved for hardening my brass neck and sealing my armour.

Nobody, nothing, and nowhere is normal
It is easy for voices in the mainstream to position home educators as overprotective and overbearing; as controlling parents, withdrawing children from society, and denying their kids normal contact with any other human being.

You can only deal with that in your own way as you live each day. Unfortunately, it has resolved me to shove my children into the maelstrom of the wild world, with all the weirdos and wackos. (It might not help their social adjustment at all, but they are probably growing up to be quite broad minded.)

Sod the maths, just look at the floor
You have to learn to live with mess. And for those of us with control issues, a cluttered house is a bigger psychological frontier to explore than whether the education we provide is actually any good.

Round here, a clear spread of carpet quickly became the stuff of legend, matched only by the mythological strength I needed to keep anything clean. The only way I have found to cope with the crap is simply not to look at it.

Children are with you all the time
Big issue. Their continual presence place restrictions on your life, yes. Me, I have tried dumping them in various worldwide locations, frisking them for breadcrumbs, but nothing works. They follow me right back home. Thanks to their continuous presence, I have failed to satisfactorily buy shoes for a decade or conduct an illicit affair.

You explore personal limits
Many home ed blogs do not cover the yelling part of parenting, choosing instead the Hama beading, pancakes, and smiling. I applaud their endurance.

Me, I am driven to call a spade a bloody shovel, so I tell you in all misery how there will be truly abysmal days when the kids are vile horrible monsters; when brandy over your cornflakes will seem like a suitable fortifying start to the day.

Without overburdening you with grisly personal details, I do believe you should know truths of the home ed experience. In our history here, my kids have failed to worship the educational value of my worksheets or adore my lovely craft activities; they have undermined my goals, destroyed my ambitions, been revoltingly insolent and, in a final punctuation mark to my carefully planned spelling endeavours, punched each other. And I have shouted. Lots. Aware that I have no authority, I have threatened school, bribed compliance, attempted emotional blackmail, and taken revenge by eating their chocolate stash.

However! I maintain the emotional limits you are thrown towards at high speed only provides a brilliant opportunity to explore your parent/child relationships, and to articulate what you experience as a family. I believe it works positively.

(The alternative at some points has been to throw myself under a train, so I have to think that.)

Your home education will change
Over the years we have done free-range, school-at-home, do-what-the-fuck-you-like-I'm-hiding, please-please-please-look-at-this-worksheet, and organised lessons at fantastic cost.

Our home ed is re-shaping again. The point is, what I do now, I am unlikely to be doing in two years; the inspiration I seek now will not be the inspiration I seek next year. I consider this all good. I like to imagine it's in touch with my kids and what they need.

You will live on tenterhooks regarding the press
When a parent goes berserk and commits hideous damage to their own children, a tiny part of my horrible selfish brain snaps Please God do not let them be home educated. Home educators are at the mercy of the press; will a journalist exploit an angle to the story and do us the most enormous and permanent damage?

Shark, Squirrel and Tiger have now grown up with me yakking to them about how they are ambassadors for home ed. That's not been a fair pressure to apply to them, but unfortunately, I've felt it necessary.

So, there are some ideas. I have had time to write them today, thanks to the bat study, which is taking place unprompted by me and continuing in a free-range autonomous sort of way. It involves bat-sewing, strapping bats to the windows, making a charity shop front for bats, generally adding to the landfill aka the floor, and going aaahhhh at internet pictures of baby bats. (I defy you not to adore them.)

Just imagine! You could look forward to all this next Monday, if you wanted.

It's been emotional

I have this problem. Or rather, one of my triplets has this problem.

I'm defining it entirely as a triplet problem, but it may be a sibling problem. I certainly cannot identify it as a home education problem; if I did, I would open the access for all the nay sayers to say HAH we were right all along! Children cannot socialise if they are prevented from going to school!

I must nip that line in the bud. Tiger, my lovely sensitive child, is extraordinarily socially tuned. She assesses social situations with finer radar than many adults. Adults tend to deny things, anyway, because they think they are being polite. That tactic blows her mind. Tiger watches their denials and hand wavings and oh it's nothings, and it fuses the connections between her eye and brain. Some time later she'll tell me what's really happened, in faltering language but with brutally honest assessment and crippling acumen, so if I was at all involved in the pretence, I sort of want to crawl away and hide.

Social perception then, that's not her problem (or it will be unless she learns to lie like the rest of us). Taking part in social situations is a little of her problem, because she is shy. Sometimes she is so shy I have a powerful instinct to clip her round the ear and shove her in the back, to push her towards a group of playing eleven-year olds. I would do that too, if I thought she would happily join in, rather than burst into tears with the shock.

I don't know where her reticence comes from, since papa is the public speaker and I'm the public nuisance, but it sets in motion these emotional tsunamis which are truly hard to deal with.

Her relationship with Shark, for starters. Shark is easy going, affable, and confident, if she can talk on her terms and you don't try and interrupt. Her breezy, outgoing nature means she's easy to connect with, and (so long as you like fish), easy to befriend.

Tiger - sibling sister who looks alike - must seem a bit like hard friendship work when there's not much time and there's a lot of playground to enjoy. Not surprisingly the tendency is for her to be brushed aside as the quiet one. Which knocks at Tiger's self-esteem and sets the jealousy wave in motion.

I haven't a solution for any of this friendship rivalry, except we spent two hours last night, after the exploding ocean of tears, talking the rain down. What it is to want friends, what it is to feel you're in competition for your friends, what responsibilities we have to family members and to ourselves, where friendship begins, and how it can end.

Tiger nearly brought me up to her level by the time exhaustion took over, and I'm made a more thoughtful person thanks to her.

But still, can't help dreading the day the boyfriend arrives.

The year might improve from here

A forgettable first day.

I am moved to record what might pass as achievements, quickly, before they start taking the shape of disappointments.

1. I was a good household companion and helped assemble two Ikea shelves. These we found remaindered at the sad cat charity shop. Worth a tenner, so we could see a patch of office floor. The shelves are in a poor state of disrepair, like they've been stored outside, which is where most people on this island pile their furniture. Astonishingly to me, with my cautious English ways, stuff does not seem to be nicked. Yes, the island had a murder last spring, but no-one seems to steal shoes, clothes, cooking pots, strollers, sofas, tables, chairs, stone lions or Ikea shelving.

2. Tiger sat all day at the computer to conjure with the dark arts of a page layout system. She put together some posters advertising bats available for adoption. Yes, she intended bats, not cats, although I agree, her spelling is dreadful. I shall renew the resolution of encouraging her to a state of spelling order for her 12th year, and thus try to stay a step ahead of a School Attendance Order.

3. I ate peanuts. Not much of anything else all day long. This was becoming pathological by 5pm but I couldn't help myself. I tried everything. I told myself horror stories, that toxic peanut-mould would kill me by dawn, but it did no good. I merely hunted down the peanuts. I had locked them in a Tupperware box and shoved them to the back of the cupboard where they could be reached only by means of a chair and a screwdriver. The plan was bound to fail because of course I knew where they were. Eventually I decided that eating all the evidence of this shameful consumption of 2lbs of peanuts was the only way out.

4. I wondered what 2012 resolutions I should make. So far I have only come up 'imagine more men, naked'. That does not seem a very morally improving resolution, I know, but I am aged over fifty and can do what I like.

5. Squirrel took to her bed after being sick. Probably late-night partying. Okay, that is not the achievement. It is that I made her submit to my healing hand upon her brow, which she was very reluctant to do, but after cautioning her about helicopters being the only way off the island after midnight, she let me check her temperature. It seemed okay to me, so I left her alone and went off to find the peanuts.

6. Shark joined some Fun with Fish discussion forum. We checked it out to ensure fishy fun wouldn't catch everyone out, like watersports. No nude fish keeping involved, and nothing dodgy with fins. It seemed alright. A few lonely people eulogising about Neon Tetras. I trust her, anyhow. She spends several hours researching fish tank capacity before declaring on water temperature and acid levels. Did I say, in a particularly vulnerable moment, yes Shark, you can have a fish tank? I may have done. Don't push me. We all know I steadfastly maintain a No Pets Rule.

I think that might be it. I will tell you if I achieved something else, and just forgot about it. Like, went free diving, wrote a novel, cooked Baked Alaska or collected the laundry.