The glamour, the glamour

OMG, I must, must, MUST tell all you school-choosing mothers this news!

You know some of the things you've read about those middle-class mummies choosing to home-school Tinkertop?

OMG they are TRUE!!!

The home educating life is EASY! We roll out of bed when we like, spend our days reading Fifty Shades of Grey, fuss about our homey-homes, fluff our cushions, plan our menus, and arrange our wardrobes, and all we have to do is set the offspring to complete a CGP maths book (and who needs friends anyway?), then we simply mark our darlings 10/10 and it's time for papa to come home! He's on evening duty and when he arrives to lead the offspring through some improving enterprise, then off we mummies dash! Out for our evening meet-ups! Tapping our kitten heels, swinging our Jasper Conran leather bags, and adjusting our satin knickers!!!

Believe me, all of that is TRUE.

xx

Or it could involve a day-long ear-bashing argument about a woolly bat; hanging on a telephone to arrange next week's social meet-ups; responding in writing about the forestry group; printing out GCSE Latin texts; reorganising the art session; reading Nathaniel's Nutmeg aloud while everyone runs off so you have a big shout; telling her to stop doing that before it ends in tears; watching the front room be trashed when two of them play 'Horse Jump'; listening to a litany of complaining about the mothering failure to schedule a visit to the community orchard and produce 5kilos of chutney; producing three meals plus a packet of biscuits, and finally spending an evening sat in a cold car in a Luton Sainsbury's carpark waiting for the sulky home-schooled child to emerge from the Woodcraft Folk demanding yet more cash while realising that all day you have worn yesterday's Asda value knickers down the leghole of one jeans. Yes, it might involve all that, too.

Invader

Rat! Overnight visitor, kitchen-bound, quietly slipping the drains, sliding over the pipes, back-flipping the floorboards and wham! Home and dry.

Hours of night-time fun then to be had, dancing cheek to cheek with my Co-op squirty ketchup bottle (used, abused, ultimately dismembered); playing fast and loose with my onion (undressed, discarded, spat on); and finally, shameless, nameless horror, leaving two of his ugly stools perched precariously atop my filing cabinet. When I open A-G, they declare themselves, wobble in, and squish against my Car Insurance.

But I have the measure of him. I know his fate. If I don't trap him, it is the white van for him. The one that discreetly, unmarked, draws to a halt outside, when the lady rat killer slips into the house quieter than he, when she'll place a cocktail for his evening party where he's sure to find it, how she'll lay it temptingly, to be sipped before his fun begins, and ends.

Until that point, that moment when I take revenge for his assaults on my ketchup, onions and A-G, I am rat-proofing. Against my night time invader, each evening before bed I feel around all my kitchen underskirts, plug my floorboard holes, secure my corners, niches, pipes, and I lay traps of wood and wire. Each morning, I narrow down his entry.

I have found it. That tiny gap between sink and wall. Rat! Ratty, rat rat. I have you. Count your party nights now with my onions. Number them. Three, two, one.

See you later, daughter

Thanks to the news - maths teacher runs away with teenage schoolgirl - our local group fell into that conversation. Again. The one that starts, Would you trust your daughter to them?

No. Not if we're talking education. For which read, learning about life at a speed my daughters feel comfortable with; learning about themselves, their skills, interests, ambitions, intellects, desires. I trust the world at large; the world that isn't containment and isolation. Outside, in this world, with luck I can keep my eye on proceedings, know my daughters, myself, our contacts, the community, this society.

If we're talking grades at exam passes? Schools have a process for that. But still I trust myself to help pin-point the help each daughter needs with those GCSEs, A levels, university entries.

If we're talking physical risk? Sure. A bunch of middle-aged men are kitted out in skin tight suits walking backwards into the local quarry, taking my daughter Shark with them.

And that is no problem at all.

Not all was lost

Drove around the countryside, looking for a wood. As time ticked by, I got increasingly stressed. Didn't help.

I wasn't as shouty as that time I went looking for Salcey Forest.

Then, I was careering around the random lanes of Gayhurst, the car screeching on two wheels as we spun round hairpin bends, and I'm shouting to the children Look out for trees! They unhelpfully sent me hurtling towards neat rows of firs standing to attention in perfect country gardens - manicured trees, pruned, cleaned and tidied up trees, trees who hold their arms prettily by their sides, compliant with complementary herbaceous borders and sweet alpine flora. I started yelling then, too. I wanted messy trees, blown down trees, spindly trees and every type of tree, the disaffected, grumpy, awkward trees, the little bastard trees who wander about, muttering, cursing, looking for trouble. Look out then for the peace-keeper trees who muscle in when the night turns ugly, when they square up to each other and rustle their branches, and the rebels say, You looking at my leaves?

The children fell silent. I may have become slightly mad. But I was driven by the hour and growing desperate. And today it's the same. The small mammal group? Due to assemble in the wood at 10 o'clock? Look! It's 11 o'clock! Surely they'll already have set the traps, trapped mini mouse, found her, examined her tiny fearful eyes, soft brown fur, thin trembling tail, all gone aahh! then let her scamper back to Mr Mouse, and we'll have missed it all!

Yes, it's nearly as bad as that time in Salcey Forest when the group assembled and went off without us to look for the elephant in the lake. We missed that, too.

Well, eventually we do find the wood. Late. It is just as I said it would be, there on the horizon, encircled around by spreads of neatly cropped fields, rows of fences and close shorn grass clipped by quiet horses. Access is hard. That single track road I missed and missed as we drove by? It is a hidden, private wood. We slip inside with a strand of public access. But bursting entanglement, this land is densely filled. Inside, messy, spilling, disordered, a frontier space for any woodsmen to relearn their crafts while they tangle with mad birch, vengeful elder, the blackthorn sprites and whipping hazel to catch them unawares. It's a perfect space. For light to dapple, mud to congeal, growth to sprout, oak to soak, ash to splash, and for kids to peer, looking quietly for mini mouse.

We missed the group. Of course we did. But for an hour or more, we caught the wood.

Go on, do something for the weekend.

Not bringing arts to the community

What a waste of time that was.

I just talked at the totally immobile face of the director for the local Arts Centre. I wasted 30 minutes of my day doing that. I mourn every second.

But I was led there. She said she was interested in setting up community events. As it turned out, she was interested in where was my source of funding. Unfortunately for her, it's our own pockets.

The deal I offered was the usual home ed. A group of 10 alternative educated kids, aged 11-14, for two hours once a month, using their facilities, picking up the intuitions, skills, and examples of their artists, loving the Arts Centre forever, forging links, becoming great publicists. Providing us all with the satisfaction that we're sending out kids to local colleges to pick up GCSEs and A levels in Arts and specialist crafts, maybe gunning straight for apprenticeships or art schools via their own business on the way. What could be better for our local community to work together, demonstrate commitment and allegiance blah blah blah.

No deal. The Arts Centre policy of installing a CRB-checked officer at all workshops was just the start of a way to say No. The real issue is cash. Home ed kids bring in a measly fifty quid divvied out between paying parents. This falls sadly short of the two hundred and fifty darlings required by the Arts Centre before they even think about letting their artists touch a paintbrush.

There's no shortage of demand on our side. I observed their heritage funded events - free to the clients - are routinely booked up by home educators, long before any other community actually gets to them. With an involuntary pinch of her nostrils she agreed, commenting that in her experience the South London lot were particularly savvy. Apparently they can sniff out a free arts project designed to engage the community long before the community hears about it.

For home educators, it bumps up against that issue we have. Funding.

Unless you come up with an alternative source of funding... Save it, lady. I'm not the person that's going to try. I have no inclination to jump through the hoops my local council would dream up to bung me a few measly quid to spend at the Arts Centre. Neither do I want to be the link person drumming up business, negotiating finance, nor filling in assessment forms.

I'll probably follow the usual home ed route. Try and stitch up something in private and bypass the community arts completely.

It's a feature of the modern age

I use this as example of practice. Just in case a dinosaur still lives. One who assumes home ed equates to kids alone, isolated, missing out on learning, or otherwise excluded from all normal life.

It's a Phoenician ship.

A steady stream of London- and shires-based educators march back and forth to this ship, and have been doing so, probably on a daily basis, since it moored at St Katharine's Dock in London.

As the little grits climb aboard, one home ed family is departing. And as we depart, a bunch of Hertfordshires arrive.

We hear not many schools are visiting. As we're led around, our guide says of these home educating tours, you guys are keeping us afloat. That's sad to hear, isn't it? The ship may be on the doorstep of a hundred schools - a demonstration of individual vision, great problem solving, endeavour, trial and error - but the Phoenicians aren't prescribed in the National Curriculum.

Never mind these ancient mariners can teach us equally and ably about trade, power, politics, navigation, the role of peace and war in protecting economic interests, stuff which we can apply to the 21st century. Nope. Between the scales of league tables and exam scores, Phoenicians are not worth learning about.

Along with much of history, I hear, bar Henry VIII and the Second World War, which Every Child Must Study in Detail, Amen, enduring six evacuations by age 12, and writing three sentences on the 1936 remilitarisation of the Rhineland by age 16. Tick.

So this month we opt for the Phoenicians instead. Well, their ship is here. Let's take advantage of it to teach us what it can about the past, the present, and the future. And it ticks a chord for us. Inspired, individual, off-beat.

Isn't it brilliant? Built by hand using traditional methods to test those ancient sea routes. Track it yourself.

Apart from the story this can tell you about our society's endless opportunities for practical history out of school, this day can also tell the dinosaur what a formidable network home educators enjoy.

Dear dinosaur, we are here, evolving quicker than you with our networking, planning, meeting and arranging; all of which you know nothing of. Education out of convention has a remarkable ability to cooperate, coordinate and cohere. Don't assume we all dance to the same tune, nor educate the same way, nor often have much in common beyond our shared educational lives. But by goodness, news of the Phoenicians arriving travels fast.

Perfer et obdura!

Vero, the little grits from the scholae Grit have begun their studies in Latin. With a TEACHER.

Ita vero, you read that right. Her name shall be Lingua Latina and she comes round once a fortnight.

As a real proper ex-teacher of the retired variety and the spit of Giles' Grandma, she wears a gabardine coat, flat woolly hat and a stern expression of grim control. She is to sit at the kitchen table on a stash of Cambridge Latin Book 1 whereupon she will lay down the law regarding glue sticks and pencils.

But I know it for what it is, this teacherly authority over the crayons and the six-year olds, thus cannot help but love her for her weaknesses. I know they exist. I am looking forward to Latin lessons enormously. I have quietly resolved to learn mischievous Latin phrases and drop them in our innocent games of Snap! at unguarded moments. And in this naughty provoking endeavour, I am finding X-treme Latin is helping, enormously.

Sit iucundus tibi dies.

Can we please have a home ed stand up?

Is it anti Semitic to fool about with Hitler?

Well, I'm not likely to submit myself to the Joke Police. Not to arbitrate or judge me on my behalf, tell me what my words really meant, no thanks. Not even for my ill judged jokes, casual expressions, incautious references. I'll take responsibility for my stupidities, blind spots, prejudices, knowings, provocations, and naughtiness myself. I think I'm now old enough to do that.

Yes, I'll have respect for your world view, but don't demand that I edit from my spoken register every flippant word. Neither am I going to fret too much if my joke against you falls flat, if I get it wrong, step on sensibilities, confront a belief I never knew existed, until that offence was taken.

The way I see it, face to face, is that I have a responsibility to be aware of who I speak to, as you to me, for us both not to be unhumorously insulting, venomous, vindictive or plain nasty - unless you give it to me first, in which case have it straight back, with barbs attached. Neither should we approach each other with a list of prohibited words, illegal metaphors, and phrases placed under by-law legislation.

Better than language regulation I think we could loosen language up; all enjoy a few more wandering jokes, casual banter, rough and tumble, linguistic snap, crackle and pop and no offence taken.

Would I have a problem with humour aimed at the world of home ed? No, not at all. Neither done by school choosers nor home ed choosers. Widening the language we all use to explore, provoke, define, tempt and express ideas is fine by me. If we want to be serious about it, each home educator can use a joke against them as an opportunity to state their educational philosophy, approach, and rationale. If we want to be flippant about it, we can use the opportunity to pat that salvo straight back, find shared areas of understanding, create common ground, move any debate around, and simply find the people who laugh with us, at each other, and at ourselves.

Now please can we have a British version?

Whatever happened to John Cabot?

One story goes that John Cabot sailed from Bristol in 1498 and was never seen again.

Our home ed mapping group come up with some theories. He bumped into America and decided to settle in Newfoundland; his ship was lost at sea and he is at the bottom of the ocean; he sailed too far north and was eaten by a polar bear; he was abducted by aliens and is living on the moon. To introduce their theories, our mini scholars produce between them a presentation, a news report, a dramatic reenactment, and an animation. Then we all applauded each other, laughed a lot, and ate biscuits.

Who can possibly think that home educated children cannot work together in any project nor collaborate to produce any results?

Who can imagine that parents do not have the responsibility, authority, skill, perception nor understanding needed to educate their own?

What we need is more understanding that home ed is suitable and efficient, can be perfectly tuned and tailored to the age, aptitude and abilities of each child, produces some satisfying results in all disciplines and comes with no terror, no bullying, no prescriptive toilet times, and a hugely supportive network of people. And biscuits. We need lots of biscuits, including home-made flapjacks and chocolate chip cookies. And cake. Add that, too.

I accept the chair

In recognition of Grit's enormous scholarly achievements, her ground-pounding research into home education while standing in fields and ditches, and her many original and worthy publications at the University of Pontification, she is today awarded her very own Birthday Chair.

Professor Grit modestly stated, at the official Chair Handing-Over Ceremony, I accept this honour and I will bring my own blankie, as The Chair is positioned just by the fire and opposite the TV.

To mark the dignity of the ceremony, Professor Grit will this evening lower her stately rear end into The Chair, then we will all watch Taming of the Shrew (Zeffirelli, 1967).

Prof Grit will end proceedings by leading the little grits in a chorus of Not Bloody Likely in close harmony before bed.

Thank you.

Gird, loins, that sort of thing

It is with foreboding I come out of Wales, I can't deny it.

Even though the landscape is beautiful and makes us all want to run about in hiking boots declaring poetry

... and we all vote the sheep the prettiest in the world. In fact we speculate they are fairy sheep in disguise

... and, after meeting the gentleman slate splitter, I find myself surprisingly fallen in love with Wales, all things Welsh, and gentlemen slate splitters.

But I still carry a foreboding. There they are. The Welsh Government. Creeping behind me. I can see them if I look over my shoulder. They have plans. Like, 'compulsory registration and monitoring for children who are home educated'. Who doesn't believe it's a scheme tested in Wales? Or, if they're successful, that the ptb will aim to up and run the same system in England before I can unfurl my Badman banners?

I don't doubt the route planned. We seem to be entering a linguistic landscape for the 'accountability of the individual'. Handy, if by that means I am drawn into a system where I'm coerced into participating in pre-set packages and fined if I don't. And will I get any sympathy? Pah. Joe and Joanna of the general public probably think registration and monitoring is a great idea! Maybe they're surprised that maverick home educators aren't inspected already, don't have to be teachers, or aren't made to hoick our non-compliant arses up to a school supervisor who inspects the children for bruising then tests us on our annual timetables.

I shall adopt my usual strategy. Go about the world noisily with my big home educating smile, pointing out the arguments as I can, telling anyone who listens that home education isn't scary and unknown. It isn't school-bashing, it isn't nirvana, it doesn't suit everybody, it doesn't turn the practitioner into mother superior. It is a legal option, you get to enjoy creating a principled and thoughtful way of life, and home educators are just like everyone else. They are not, in my experience, coordinating a clandestine network of child abusers, mind demons and maniacs, but are often disappointingly normal. People who itch, bleed, sorrow, joy, cry, and laugh.

And the other thing I did today was buy a bed.

Caution. Mother on soap box.

I feel a pang of sympathy with the hardships endured by the Welsh slate miners of 1896. Even though I'm not Welsh, not a slate miner, and wasn't born in the 1890s.

My touchy feely is stirred up by today's educational visit to the National Slate Museum based at Penrhyn Quarry, North Wales.

I blame my mother. The mother tongue passed to me this particular responsive chord. Listen to the trials of the working poor. Aged six in 1926, she remembered the General Strike with a special reason: her father was a foreman in a Sheffield mine. He was a total bastard, manipulative and cruel, so I'm not romanticising the past to convey the idea that he lived through a time when working people were boiling dishcloths for dinner while the indifferent wealthy were serving pineapple froth in picturesque mock castles.

What sets me off today is this mother memory evoked by the gentleman slate splitter. A deadly combination. He tells us the economics of the slate mining industry, the bargaining of the slate sellers and the easy profits to be accrued from slate mined in China and South America. Then he tells us about The Great Strike of Penrhyn. He says, For three years I don't know how they slept at the Hall at night, when they knew how people down here were starving. 

Well, my touchy feely nerve is ringing nineteen to the dozen. I lay aside the aspirations I originally began with - to introduce the little grits to Welsh industrial heritage - and begin lecturing my offspring on the selfish money grabbing bastards who care nought for people and all for power, privilege and profit, and don't forget your grandmother and the history of the labouring classes. And this is only a starting point, because from here I wander off into green belt development, home education registration, shareholder loyalty only to profit, environmental impact of mining in South America and where peas come in the supermarket profit industry. It'll be a history that comes in useful when you're trying to sort out the future, unrolling right before your eyes, so follow the money, and when you track it, look on a global scale.

With my offspring locked in the car travelling at 70mph I end dramatically about four hours later on Junction 15 on the M1 with the words How do you stop this history being told? How? HOW? CUT OUT THE MOTHER TONGUE.

Unlike the little grits, you can be spared the lecture. You can read about the Penrhyn Strike in Wikipedia.

The quarry holds a significant place in the history of the British Labour Movement as the site of two prolonged strikes by workers demanding better pay and safer conditions. The first strike lasted eleven months in 1896. The second began on 22 November 1900 and lasted for three years. Known as 'The Great Strike of Penrhyn' this was the longest dispute in British industrial history. 

For brevity, and without the dramatic strangling sounds, finger jabbing, or multiple hand gestures, I recommend it.

Squirrel, learning a skill bound to keep her poor, exploited, and out of work.

I take my pleasures where I can

Today is old phallic rocks day.

I don't tell the children this, obviously! I tell them we are meeting Fizz to explore old prehistoric ways to live.

At the very thought of squatting in a roundhouse nestled on a hill surrounded by ancient hawthorn bushes while knitting shoes from deer gut, Shark, Squirrel and Tiger jump about with excitement. There is suddenly a flurry of talk - if not activity - around spear-making, tree medicine, clan vows, wolf brothering, knife-carving and debate about whether or not you can get away with skinning Mr Tiddles, given the ridiculous sensitivities of the modern age.

For this complete and total immersion in the daily drama of Ancient Darkness BCE, we can all thank Michelle Paver.

I am sure it is her. It is unlikely to be my choice of inspirational reading material. A Guide to the Prehistoric and Roman Monuments in England and Wales by Jacquetta Hawkes, the hardback edition that I have armed myself with from the local Help the Aged 50p bucket. There is nothing wrong with it! Okay, apart from the bent cover and the way it reads a bit 1951, but that's alright with me. I enjoy stories about a pink nursemaid mixed in with the Quarley Fort.

But, to my mind, better than all, we have warm human beings Chris and family to point us prehistoric roamers and phallic rock hunters to the houses of Din Lligwy, the Lligwy burial chamber, Bryn Celli Ddu, and Holyhead's Ty Mawr huts. Here then, for your old stone appreciation (I shall save the much stroked phallic rock till last):

The children have a fantastic Paverish time of it, claiming houses for their own, making ferny beds, weaving grass, vowing vows and, bizarrely, carving a entire cutlery set, presumably for use after the hunting of Mr Tiddles. Thanks to Jacquetta, I learn about iron age life on the island too, 'the late stronghold of Celtic Druidism in Europe'.

Now, if you have waited all this while, then be rewarded, as I am, with the prehistoric phallic rock of Bryn Celli Ddu. Highly recommended.

A very positive castle day

Utterly wonderstruck by the loveliness that is the castle on the fair marsh of the Menai Strait, Beaumaris. Building begun 1295. Not yet finished.

 The little grits agree as to the wonderful castlyness. Here they are, scowling.

Friendly viewer, take these expressions to mean enjoyment. Only understand that the little grits take their pleasures seriously.

Honestly, I am not forcing them into this permanent holiday lifestyle home education malarkey! They are simply scowly-type characters, heading for deep teenage years. Unlike me, smiley-type character, heading for incontinence and dribbling.

They do scowl a great deal though, it is true. People usually greet them with What's the matter? which doesn't embolden me for the explanations I am about to give on our home ed lifestyle being completely tip-top, enviable, great, and generally all-round hilariously fantastic. And there are my scowlers, standing right by me, feet shuffling in the gravel, hands shoved in pockets, shoulders resentfully hunched, and faces looking a picture of abject misery.

Cheer yourself up. Have some more of Beaumaris. I wondered why the locals didn't pull down that stone to build the local pub. Chris said the Welsh wouldn't touch it. It's English. Edward I built it, ran out of money, built a bit more of it, then died, demanding his thigh bones be carried north and used to bash the Scots.

But I like to think Beaumaris is a testament not to the fierce and bony Edward, but to the deft planning and clever thinking of his chief architect, Master James of St George. You only need look at that brilliant defending symmetry and those concentric castle walls. There is a surviving letter, too! Where Master James sounds reet pissed off with the Westminster bean counters after they stopped paying the castle builders. Which means the castle stands only half height.

It was all perfect. I even liked the signs of mayhem and misery. Especially the curiously floating child and the person looking for something while birds fly overhead. Shark suggested the hazard was sneezing, more specifically These birds carry avian flu.

She set me on a lecture about the shared cultural references we need to encode and decode signs. Like, if I send out a sign, how can it be read in the way that I intend? I drew the parallel that she needs to send out signs on her fizzog that say I am happy with my home education, and not I am utterly miserable with my chosen education and forced to do this against my will. She stomps off.

But it's not all fun and semiotic analysis in the fair marshes, you know. We home educators have castles to see. Take Caernarfon.

I buy the services of a Welsh tour guide to tell us stories as we walk the castle. After he greets the children with What's the matter? and I politely explain we are home educated and we enjoy it very much, Squirrel lays into him. He makes the mistake of casually suggesting that children watch too much TV, at which point she gets all huffypuffy and says we don't watch TV actually, then Tiger unhelpfully pips in with a list of all the television she has seen in the last week, including Inspector Morse and the age inappropriate Four Lions. I say that home education is completely tip-top, enviable, great, and generally all-round hilariously fantastic.

I shall conduct more lessons in how to engage the public - particularly the Welsh Government who are gunning for us home education types - so that we all send out very positive messages about ourselves and our home education choices, and yes, probably about everything everywhere too.

Have some more of Caernarfon. Highly recommended for a wonderfully first-class castly experience and a thoroughly tip-top home educating day.

Travel, broadening the mind

Isn't Wales breathtakingly beautiful?

I swear I always said so.

Even though I refused for years to step across the border, and okay, maybe in 2008 I did so by accident and became slightly hysterical and ran back over the field to England where I was sure I would not be cursed, stabbed, maimed or otherwise assaulted and have my naked torso dragged behind a horse.

I'm sure I never thought that. Never about anyone with a Welsh heritage being capable of violence towards my English head, because that would be WRONG and BAD.

And anyway, say if I did, well, you can't pin on me the label that I am a screaming racist against the Welsh because my fears are merely sublimations from my several points of special insight.

First, I have (apparently), an entire extended family of Welsh people. I think I have met one or two of you at funerals, so please do not find this blog. But yes, I have married into a family proud of their Welsh connections to scholars and poets. So there.

Second, I have heard insider tales about the cultural elite of the Welsh and I cannot say the literati come out well.

Third, because the extended family are in Wales, I jolly well know how parochial and small-minded they can be. I mean, you cannot select and draw to the forefather's bosom only one member of a family on the basis that their middle name is Madoc and 'they look a bit Welsh'.

Fourth, I suffered my thirteenth birthday in Swansea. I had a miserable time of it. By miserable, take the full teenage experience of profound, deeply, life critically, death-formingly horrible pain. I subconsciously must have decided death was a better option than what lay ahead, since I came home and set about trying to achieve it. Swansea should take the blame for starting it all.

So you see, I am safe with my Welsh-fear heritage.

But it doesn't stop land in Wales being achingly beautiful, and I immediately wish we were staying for much longer. Then I could walk some proper sights, rather than drive-thru Snowdonia en route to Anglesey.

Now, because grit's day is, in part, a blog able to be read by a woman chained to a desk at a council office in the shires, where she has been given a shed load of home ed files to sullenly stare at, then have this. Our home educational experience for today. I wish you a moment to pause and reflect on the usefulness of your job sheet, and I bet your annual holiday is a long way ahead. Out here the sun is shining, the wind is gently blowing, and I don't have no boxes to tick.

Record 1: Visit to Parys Mountain and Amlwch's Port to explore The Copper Kingdom. This thoughtful, well-equipped, and beautifully presented museum sits in a geopark of worldwide status. Material indeed for the gritlets in their general geography studies and in particular for Squirrel's love of rocks.

Record 2: Walk along the North Anglesey coastal pathways for lessons in geology, coastal geography, history of Christianity, and rock climbing.

Our lovely friend and walking leader Chris is really a goat, merely in human form. She springs about these rocks, bringing their points, pitfalls, and sunken pools of water to life with her stories of growing up alongside them, how they change and stay the same, and how her sister nearly drowned. For that, you can tick Geography (twice), History, English, and languages. (Welsh.)

My mother would understand the attraction

Had to visit Chirk Castle.

Needed to, ever since I fell in love with Roger Mortimer.

Yes, mutter about the age difference, if you must. Seven hundred years? Sounds like nothing to me. If anyone likes to count such time-trifling, Dig was born in the eleventh century.

And the other hazards too, with Roger, my Roger. Ignore Isabella. I'm sure it was just a passing fancy and nothing serious. Not referring to her. I mean the dark deeds. Like murder, deceit, connivance, deposition of a divinely appointed king, that sort of thing. Ya ya ya ya. To me, simply makes him more thrilling and dangerous.

I can trace the moment, of course I can, when we met. And I learned who Roger was - 'brutal, intelligent, passionate, profligate, imaginative, and violent'.
 

Home educators missing out?

Too right. I'm missing out plenty.

I'm surrounded by a dozen home ed groups scattered across four counties, and they're all busy with activities that are far too interesting. One group is making a film. Another has organised a photography course, and a third is sat under trees, telling stories. Clashing with activities the kids already do, I can book in for none of them. And I won't even mention the drama group, swimming group, French club, Mandarin lessons, museum workshops, art gallery trips and the countless visits I can't sign us in for. Honestly, I haven't got a handy 236 hours in each day.

And have you any idea what just one of the local home ed mothers gets up to? She's organised golf lessons, sledging, skiing, trampolining, and horse riding. You naysayers, roll your eyeballs at that and say pushy mother, but where's she pushing? At the local sports facilities, youth clubs, and community centres. Exactly where a member of a society should be pushing.

But there's a problem, so we don't usually join in. Her children are aged nine and seven; most of the group that muster for a sports calendar are aged under 11. But Shark, Squirrel and Tiger say they want to be around the early teens groups. See? I have to let those activities slip away again.

Ditto. Say We'll have to give it a miss for the home ed South group, the home ed North group, the home ed East, West and just-off-the-M1 group.

But wait. I've only referred to the activities that are public. When I say public, I mean public to me, as a home educator, not public to schoolies!

Privately, groups get together for lessons, exams, co-ops, meet-ups - and they're sorted between known people, preferred people, people who you know share your kid's interests and values. Hey, I cook up one of those myself, with the fortnightly mappers.

So this is my problem. I'm missing out. Home ed life is too busy, rich, and varied. I can jot down 15 activities a week to choose, easy. But I only have seven days in each week. I have the age-related interests of three children to organise. I must focus on those activities likely to be critical for their choices in the next teenage wave, and I have a terrible streak of juvenile distraction.

Now, I simply must down tools and drive off to Anglesea.

The fun never ends

The annual Smalltown celebration. Inexplicable to anyone who doesn't live here.

Basically, it's the happy seasonal opportunity to explore your alter ego via old newspapers and the embarrassing contents of your wardrobe. Some of us do that everyday. But the idea is, once a year, we all do it together. You make your dummy, sit it on your hedge, prop it on your door step, hang it from a tree, or dump it in the gutters, then all the neighbours walk round, point, and laugh.

It's not much, but it's all we've got.

Well, I was too busy this year, so I left the household entry to the kids. They came up with Life in the Jurassic Swamp. Shark took 200 pictures of her ichthyosaurus in a range of subtle poses and said the battery ran out when she tried to take pictures of anyone else's endeavour.

It was probably just as well. She observed how this year a great many stuffed heads were drinking heavily from gin bottles, there were three hangings, and one was shoved face first in a post box.

There goes the neighbourhood

Went round to see the neighbours. Hopefully, I looked like a person they'd listen to. For that in Smalltown, I'd normally need red arms, a neck tattoo, and a pit bull. But I hoped the Moleskine and a black biro would do instead.

The thing is, we've long lived next to a house used as a shelter for difficult teenagers. Now that part, I am not too bothered about. Shark, Squirrel and Tiger are brung up very strong on the idea that we all help each other out. And everyone needs a few chances to straighten themselves, okay? Anyway, I might be visiting Shark there one day, after I kick her out for lip like she gave me this morning. So I can deal with it.

As I can with the knowledge that we take a direct hit on all the crazy things your average teenage can throw at a Smalltown residential street, from drug taking and prostitution, to 3am music and smashing the wing mirrors of 50 cars parked along a midnight street, including ours. For this theatrical display of teenage spirit, teaching prepared me. It was more than an eye-opener. It was like a crash course in the antics of a delinquent underworld.

But, after seventeen years, the contract changed on our local homeless shelter. Joan, the woman who previously held it all together, was one fierce operator. She believed in involving residents immediately with information on house procedures for all the inhabitants, from the damaged to the dangerous. She popped round, called Hello neighbour, and shared her observations about the car parking trauma, the wheelie bin theft, and how the window cleaner ended up in prison. And she had a mean kick. She helped out in a trice by kicking in our gate when the iron locked in the brickwork. Neighbours like that you don't find too often.

But now, as holder of the previous contract, she's gone. Along with the permanent staff. I miss her. Agency employees have moved in, supporting a fresh set of clients. Yet we still expect we'll need the huge tolerance and patience that anyone does, when they have a house bursting with miserable screaming teenage angst. Even if ours already have a home, we'll still need that kindness. I expect the homeless shelter will want the same from us.

Two months into this change in our street community, it's sad that no-one's come round to say Hello, neighbour. Maybe they're busy getting to grips with the police force. Representatives of whom arrived at 2am after things turned violent.

Best not wait any longer for the first move. Time, is it not, to equip myself with the Moleskine and black biro, proffer my hand and say Hello, neighbour. It's either that or chuck a brick through their front windows.

We finally did the 3 hours standing up

Day of success, made perfect for our triumph of - at last - becoming the stinkpots that I have so long known the griblets are, and I have wanted to become. For the last year Squirrel and Tiger have stayed deaf to my entreaties, preferring soft cushions and a seat.

But not today! Our home ed party stands in the pit at The Globe for Shakespeare's Richard III, an all-male cast with lead played by Mark Rylance.

If I have any complaint at all, it is that we groundlings are far too polite. A little more original practice from us of gambling, promiscuity, leering, jeering, brawling and drinking would go down nicely.