sorry seems to be the hardest word

Dear Marianne,

John Prescott apologised for having sex with his secretary yesterday, and they lapped it up, even his bird was moved, but I can think of so many more important things which he should have apologised for. The failed education policies, the disintegrating NHS, the terrifying erosion of our human rights, the thousands of children who have been killed in Iraq. I've never really minded who in the Government is shagging who as long as they're not shagging the country, and this lot have been shagging us rotten for quite some time.
Mind you, he could apologise personally to me for the mental image I have of him naked, which I had conjured up as a consequence of his behaviour, goodness knows Prescott with clothes on was a struggle.

One way or another, we all invest a great deal of emotion in the word sorry, knowing how and when to use it is an art. Some people are really good with the word, they are quick to say sorry and they mean it. Others have to have it dragged out of them or sound insincere. I used to be awful at saying sorry - it was years of damage in a long miserable relationship - I don't want to talk about it alright!! Oops sorry. There you go, ten years ago I couldn't I have said that.

We encourage our children to say sorry, but only if they mean it, which causes problems; liberal arseholes I hear you thinking, well yes. And to prove your point, a little while ago Archie refused to say sorry to a boy he had been fighting with in the school playground. The story - so far as I can tell - was that Garry had said something rude about Archie's Mum, or as Archie put it, "He cussed me Muvver innit!" Yes, thank you Piff Doddy I said, he sighed and sucked his teeth, I did remind him that he was a blonde haired, blue eyed white middle class boy - but wot-ever.

Anyway, after the wrestling on the ground came the standing against the wall and after that they were offered their release if they said sorry. Garry gave a surly "sooorrryyyaa!", but Archie refused, because he said that it would be a lie as he wasn't sorry; so Archie lost a week of play. I beamed with pride and then told him off for fighting and then told off the school for its policy of public humiliation.
According to the school head, standing children against a wall is a strategy they use for bad behaviour, I thought it was bullying, but there you go, I'm not a dinner lady with bugger all training and a general loathing of people under twenty so what would I know.

I have a big sorry brewing, I have to produce one for the children who have been galvanised into being upbeat about our move to Brighton, despite leaving friends, schools etc. Now the buyers have gone wobbly on us and we will not be moving for another six months I fear. I may not have it in me to try to sell it again, could I cope with a third round of hoovering this year? Seriously, I really am daunted by the prospect of getting the "house straight" (as we euphamistically say to one another), it is so exhausting and often pointless, what good is cleaning, dusting and baking bread on the day if the gate is hanging off it's hinges, the crack in the side wall is two inches thick and the garage door has been grafittied with suck my nob, again! (that's "suck my nob", not "suck my nob again!")
Sorry is so hard to say, when it is just a sorry, with no follow up like "but here's a new bike" or "don't worry we can stay in auntie sandra's mansion whilst she is away for five years".

I am sorry though, sorry we have to sell, sorry we want to leave this Town, sorry I can't just buy us all another pad with my spare cash, sorry I didn't get a big job in the city, sorry I spent eight years in further education for no return, sorry it all feels so uncertain, sorry the solicitor and estate agent will make money out of our distress, sorry for having to be sorry.

I reckon there will be an awful lot of sorry saying after Tony Blair and John Prescott leave office, not by them I think, but by the next lot who want to run the country. I would consider voting for the slightly autistic Gordon Brown, or smug Jack Straw, the childlike David Milliband, even the conceited John Reid (no, not him, ever), if they apologised for all the domestic and foreign policy cock-ups of the last ten years. But they would have to mean it of course and I don't think they really do mean sorry, they mean, I will do what John Prescott did, I'll stand against the wall for my five minutes of public humiliation, I'll say "sooorrryyyaa!" and then I'll get back to "messin' wiv ya country and cussing ya Muvver up - innit!"

Rx

the monster mash

Dear Marianne,

Craig was away to London last night to meet his old mate Dirk for a drink at the Hole in the Wall.This concerned Anna in two ways, firstly because Craig does all the cooking, so it would be my stuff she would be eating for tea, and secondly because he is the Monster Puncher, that is, he makes sure that no monsters get near Anna and Mike's bedroom. So,I had to explain that Daddy always leaves a trap when he goes away, and this then led to a tense dialogue about the nature of the trap and the inevitable question, why punch them if you can trap them?

I was only in this predicament because we had to make stuff up in the first place. You read them a monster story, you let them watch Monsters Inc., they go to bed cuddling their favourite monster toy and then you spend the rest of the night telling them there are no such things as monsters and to stop worrying about them.
I have spent many nights shouting at monsters under beds, generally making sure that they are good and not bad monsters; it seemed easier to invent Daddy the renowned Monster Puncher for Anna.

You have to keep an eye on the made up stuff though. For three years all the children thought that Eddy, our bald cat, was from Father Christmas, then two of them worked out that Father Christmas was made up and so we had to come clean about the cat's more humble beginnings in Scotland. Now Archie is on the verge of discovering that Santa is us, slightly merry and very tired trying to shove stocking shaped selection boxes into slightly too small stocking shaped stockings, without being heard or getting the giggles. But he is not quite there yet.I know this because the other day the whole tooth fairy made up stuff, came home to roost.

Now, I don't usually go on about Archie being my step son,but you need some background here. When you have children who are not always with you, ordinary things get complicated. For example, there is the coming and going of clothing. There have been a number of times when I have sent clothes back to Archie's nursery or school just to have them sent back and told they belong to me, only to discover they were Archie's, but from his Mum's house. On the other hand I have sent him back to nursery wearing nursery clothes which I thought were clothes from his Mum's house. Are you keeping up?

Its not only stuff, its ideas and attitudes which differ from home to home - so you have to tread carefully around issues such as Father Christmas and the tooth fairy; you just don't know how far the other parent has gone. And no we don't sit down and discuss this sort of thing regularly because we are too busy worrying about whether to leave each other to cut hair and finger nails.

At some point between eight - when his last baby tooth came out - and the other day when another tooth came out, Craig and I had decided that Archie must be past tooth fairy stage (he is ten). So when he proudly presented me with the tooth he had been twisting and pulling for a couple of days, I reminded him, to "... pretend you are going to put it under your pillow for the tooth fairy" because we didn't want to upset Anna, whose teeth are also falling out and who has become quite rich under the patronage of her tooth fairy recently. He responded by saying,"Doesn't the tooth fairy exist then?!". It was quite a tense moment, we had relatives over, it suddenly felt really very hot in the kitchen. Craig and I looked at each other for help, but no fairy godmother intervened.
Eventually, I mumbled unconvincingly, "of course the tooth fairy exists, what are you like..." but he looked a little lost. I heard him questioning his older siblings and cousins about it outside.

Craig, was all for telling Archie again, but I couldn't now bare it, so Craig (who didn't want to ferret around under a ten year old's pillow) convinced him that after the age of ten tooth fairies pick up the tooth from the, wait for it...fridge! You'd have to wonder about your parents sanity at least by this point. Anyway, Archie was not to be swayed and he duly put his tooth in an envelope in the fridge. At four in the morning I woke in a cold sweat and sent Craig down to put money in the envelope and part freeze his nadgers.

In the morning Archie came down to retrieve the treasure - which in this house is fifty pence per tooth. "Oh" said Archie disappointed. "What?" said I irritatedly. "I usually get £1". This was it then, the mystery and the magic is nothing compared to the money. "Well", I said, "would that be when a tooth falls out at your Mum's house?" "Yes". "Well that's because she has a different payment scale than us for teeth". "You mean you're the tooth fairy?!" "Yes!" you wee money grabbing bastard - I thought the last bit. And that was that.
I felt crap, but it had to happen. We had a chat afterwards about how great it was to be growing up, and how good it would be to be the big brother who would keep the mystery going for Anna and Mike, but I could see he was struggling.

I can completely understand Archie's reluctance to let go of the mystery, the made up stuff, his childhood. This time next year he will be at secondary school with a bunch of nutters (other children)who will all be taller and wider than him. If he gets cornered I'm sure he would love to able to say, "My Dad's a Monster Puncher and he can take anyone of you easy". But he can't, not without being laughed at, so he will have to be hard and macho and fight his own corner using his wit, cunning and perhaps fists.

Anyway you will be glad to hear, I'm sure, that the Monster Puncher arrived home safely from the big city. A bit wobbly and giggly of course, but luckily the trap he set had worked and there were no monsters to be dealt with, otherwise we may have had to call on Archie to sort them out.

Rx

one step beyond

Dear Marianne,

The daughter of a friend of mine has been isolated from the rest of the school by her headmaster, for having black and white hair. Why would he do that? Perhaps he thinks that two tone hair is catching, perhaps he thinks that it will return to brown if she is left alone long enough, perhaps he is keen on apartheid; well obviously he is keen on apartheid, that's what he's practising.

What worries me most about this is that he found the time to bother his arse. Surely he has a list of things to do as long as his arm, with items such as budgets, timetables, interfering parents, meetings with investors... blah blah blah. Not anything directly related to education or children of course, you're not expected to educate anyone at school anymore, process them for exams - yes, enlighten - nope. So perhaps I left something crucial off the headmaster's list: humiliating children to stamp out individualism. How can coloured hair be a problem for a school, is it because it is a posh Kent school and the headmaster has the time and the inclination to get in-bloody-volved. I think yes - A* for me.
I know that when our big kids were at a seriously stretched inner city school in London their expereince and the experience of the head teacher were coloured by issues other than hair...colour.
A sample of the average morning at Pakebourne Junior School:
Teacher: "Hello children I am your supply teacher for the day. Please stop hitting the wall with your head that boy - stay away from the broken windows that girl!"

School secretary: "Hello supply teacher from New Zealand here is the new girl for your class (that makes 35 children)she is from Turkey she has no English, and she is scared."

Headteacher: "I cannot leave this part of the building to meet with you since the father of Brian in year three wants to stab me."

Stepmother: "Have a nice day Stan."

Stan: "Arsenal have signed Thierry Henry!"

They had a great time, and sometimes a rubbish time, but nobody went for them because they had the wrong hair or wrong uniform, because there was no uniform and hair was, well...hair. Nobody had time to worry about that sort of thing, because half of the kids didn't speak English, half had parents who weren't quite there for them, half were too poor to eat properly, half had stories from their home countries so awful you wouldn't tell to an adult, and half were...oh hang on a minute, I got unclassified for my O level maths.

Anyway the point is that you don't need league tables, or a uniform to learn about the world, or one tone hair, or a straight back. You do need happy and contented children supported by happy and contented teachers and happy contented parents. You need music, and the arts, you need physical activity, you need children out of the classroom. We can do this as a country, can't we, we can be modern, use computers, educate our children in everything from osmosis, to algebra, from the Impressionists to Badly Drawn Boy and web site design to hockey. We can make learning enjoyable and relaxed, taught in classes of no more than fifteen children by enthusiastic well paid teachers. A broad and thorough education for a broad and modern society.

And then I woke up and it was all a dream.

Meanwhile, I thought you might like to know that Becky has just had her hair coloured red and it does not seem to have affected her ability to read and write, listen, talk and learn stuff. So with a scientific study of one child, I can reveal that my findings prove there is no correlation between hair colour and the ability to learn. However, if you attend a GOOD school in Kent and have coloured hair, there is a 98% chance that your headteacher will sit you in a room on your own for a week, where you have a 100% chance of learning nuffink.

Rx

somewhere over the rainbow

Dear Marianne,

We are selling the camper van, known to all the family as Rainbow George (no reference to the crazy man who sold his house in Hampstead to fund a comeback for crooner Ronnie Carroll). When we bought the van four years ago there was a happy consensus amongst six of us that Rainbow was a nice name for a nice colourful camper van, but Archie was in a dark Green Day- type mood, so that we had to affix his suggested George to the end of Rainbow, or else.

Anyway, we have to let go of the beloved Rainbow George, - top speed 54mph going downhill with a following wind – because he is dying, actually I think he’s dead. So that when I say selling the van, I mean giving the van away, to a bloke called Paul who has hands the width of my head, which are always covered in oily stuff; he is a real man’s man. He is also a camper van man, he has six kids and a wife, who I suspect has forgotten what he looks like from the ankles up, – he spent a year doing up his bay window camper van circa 1970 (so no need for road tax), replacing the seals, welding the axle, moving the sink… we had a long chat. You too would know that these are important details if you had a camper van, you would also know that when you are on the road in a “dub”, you have to wave at other camper van drivers despite your innate English reserve which makes you want to hide, not wave. Paul, the camper van man drove his ancient beauty to the South of France with wife and kids and a spare engine along for the ride, not necessarily in that order I fear; crazy man! (I mean that in the sense of crazzeee maaaann, and not, mad bastard).

I will miss the rust on wheels that Rainbow George has become, because he was a complete unnecessary luxury which we all enjoyed. We loved the fact that we always had a queue of cars behind us when we went cross country, we loved the fact that there was only one seat belt in the back and room for the kids to roam (it was Russian roulette in reverse for them every time we went out). I loved the fact that when I was hippopotamusly pregnant with Mike I had to get help from Craig to turn the wheel, I loved the fact that we couldn’t get anywhere fast, I loved the fact that one day the gear stick came off in my hands as I was parking, I loved the fact that another day the sliding door slid right off its hinges and into the car behind, I loved the fact that everyone laughed at it but really wanted to go in it, and I loved the fact that the head of our local residents association complained about it because it was, well… a camper van.

This is the point you see, it isn’t just a rusty old thing, it represents a world which the chairmen of local residents associations don’t seem to care for, it provides you with all those things you are expected to feel and to enjoy when you are young and to give up when you are adult. It reminds me of camping, my mum’s orange lipstick, purple wallpaper, white wood furniture, bean bags, paisley shirts, flowery skirts and life in the slow lane. We didn’t own a camper van, my parent’s couldn’t afford one of those cool dude cars, we had a Renault bread van with the funny gear stick at nose height, windows cut in the sides and wood panels built over the wheels for seats. All five of us would be in the back, sometimes six when Dad got nervous (which was often), and he would join us in the back just so he could hold on to the door, I suppose in case a freak typhoon should rip it off and we would all fall out and die. I can laugh about it now, but I’m sure it was the reason I didn’t have a boyfriend until I was nineteen.

It was actually Candy Thomas who owned a yellow and white camper van, well her parent’s owned it, and she just bathed in the reflected glory of the beautiful beast. Candy Thomas was the coolest thing in junior school, I wasn’t sure why, maybe because she had lived in Africa, (I considered Redhill exotic then), her brother was very sweet and sexy, her parents were hippy and groovy, and they had a camper van. I can’t quite remember now why I chucked Candy over for Christine when we had to choose partners for milk duty, but I think deep down I knew that Candy’s camper van set her apart from me. Now, my camper van, which sets me apart, has to go, and with it those moments of freedom, fun and carelessness. In a move heavy with a sense of masochism, we have replaced it with a second hand Rover 400 with fake wood trim and everything, and now instead of sitting up high in Rainbow George, I receive a knowing nod of acceptance frm the chairman of the Residents’ Association.
Help me Marianne - I don’t want to grow up - if it’s not too late I think I will see if I can get my van back from Paul, and then maybe I could convince the chairman to pull us along in it in the Rover.

Rx

let's get lost

Dear Marianne,

The start of a new term has brought with it the traditional themes of children’s tears and tiredness, failed ironing of pleated school dresses, sunny days and cries of, “Has anyone seen Anna’s lunch box, Mike’s shoes, Becky’s keys, anything belonging to me!?” But this year it also signals the prospect of moving on, which makes me excited and scared and I need to do stuff or we won't be going anywhere; we may not be moving until December but I need to get my arse in gear.

Right now though, I'm doing nothing, I'm sitting on my own, staring out the bedroom window my face covered in the dust of a hundred old photos.

I am supposed to be clearing out the loft and under beds and in cupboards in anticipation of our relocation, part of my general scheme to avoid thinking about moving again. I shouldn’t really be worrying too much, we are not buying a house, so I don’t have to get panicky about the dates for Exchange or fret about Completion, or feel stressed about a communal right of way going through my kitchen or worry that the survey on the new house will reveal thirty years of rot in the basement. But I do have another worry list: I haven’t yet found a house for us to live in, or a nursery for Mike, an Infant school for Anna or Secondary school for Becky. Actually the secondary schools are not schools anymore, they are all colleges of one sort or another – for languages, for media, for arts or more worryingly for community. Don’t get me wrong I love community, some of my best friends are communities, but you put that word in front of the word college and it always ends in tears.

I rang two colleges recently and got a good reception from two fraught admissions staff, both women of course, the third place I contacted was a Catholic school - well I thought I’d have a go it’s in the family. I wanted to know if the School was required to have a quota of atheists in their intake (yes we are seriously lapsed). I received a call back from another admissions woman, who spoke at me in a telephone voice especially selected for parents whose children wouldn’t be coming to the school. She let me know that there are at least eight children on the waiting list for year nine, so I might want to look at other schools in the area; will Becky be attending a Catholic School in Brighton - is the Pope a Communist?

Of course, not to bang on about this again, but in my day we went to our local infant, junior and then secondary school and thank god there was no parents’ choice in the matter. I went to a comprehensive school in Crawley part of which was burned down by two boys in my class; it is now a community college. I have been reminded of the detail of my school days because I have been sorting through “My Personal Stuff” box. I get this out every few years, so that I can sort it out and chuck away irrelevant rubbish, instead of which I add more “personal stuff” and put it back under the bed. From my box of personal stuff I see that I received some “O” levels from the school, I also read that at the end of my Junior school I “had got in with a bad group of children” and that I talked too much in science and was actively disruptive in maths in year three of comprehensive school (I would just say in my defence MISS, that our superb maths teacher was off with cancer for over a year – and nobody bloody told us, we just had to guess, AND his replacement was an R.E. teacher with very little understanding of algebra or ven(?) diagrams). I also see that I received a Merit and a Pass Plus in the Russian Method of Ballet at ages seven and eight, I also have a letter from Mary Ninness, my first Junior school teacher who went off to teach servicemen’s children in Germany and wrote to me from there. There are pictures of old friends, pictures of my parents looking young, postcards circa 1976 (the year of the great drought) and a couple of teenage love letters.

I am sure there are books by psychiatrists about this sort of thing, hanging on to the past, unable to move on, vanity, perhaps it is historical separation anxiety? Mind you, just a word of caution to the “thrower outers”, my mate Dave is off to Kuala Lumpar with his family for three years, and since he has to get a work visa he has to produce evidence of education. Despite the fact that he is now an accountant for a big grown up firm he still has to produce his “O” level certificates for examination; he’s 46 he sat his “O” levels thirty years ago! He couldn’t find them in his loft of course, so he now has to wait for two months for the Scottish Education whatever it is, to find the certificates and send them. I offered to walk to Scotland and look through all the filing cabinets containing all the exams results of the last thirty years and then walk home again (because it would be quicker), but he couldn’t hear me over his sobbing.

This cautionary tale is irrelevant of course, because I keep more useless rubbish than “O” level certificates, and for whatever reason, I find myself unable to throw any of it away again; I will however be adding a clown painting by Anna, and a scribble by Mike. Tonight, I will put the box away under the bed until the next time when I have moved on but need to look back and lose myself in the past for a while.

Rx

i need a hero

Dear Marianne,

There was an unholy scrum of children, teachers and parents outside chestnut class on Tuesday morning. This is because the hallway is home to two sets of toilets and pegs for four classes, this coupled with 80 freaked out Mothers and their five year olds paralysed by fear created a bit of a log jam which even the most helpful of class helpers couldn’t do anything about.
Between us we found Anna’s peg and put endless bags on it, took out the water bottle (didn’t we used to drink from taps in the loos) and made our way through the unmerry throng to the door of the classroom, where I told the teacher that Anna’s lunch bag was not labelled but that Anna would know it. This was really for Anna’s sake rather than the teacher’s and although she smiled a weak smile at me I knew she was thinking: “do you really think that I care about your daughter’s lunch box or that come lunchtime I will evenly vaguely recall you or the lunchbox, you sad over protective Mother”. I may be putting an unfair spin on the teacher by inventing thoughts for her, but I can’t help it – she has my daughter by the pig tails for the whole day and I just don’t know what goes on do I?

Actually I was trying to make it up with Anna who was not only paralysed by fear, but also upset because I had put her in her winter uniform and despite the fact that I had assured her it would be the thing to do, pretty much every other girl was in her summer dress. This is the sort of thing that can stay in a childs mind for years and which they then draft in to arguments later to prove a point; generally that I am a bad Mum. I have done similar things over time with all the children, but I always take solace in the memory that my sister in law sent her son off to school in his uniform on “super hero day”, and because she was working she was not able to make amends so that her son had to be “super uniform boy” all day. Anyway despite my faux pas with the dress Anna gave me a big cuddle and with her name on a post it note stuck firmly to her cardigan ventured in to the classroom alone. Hooray I thought no worries or wobbles with Anna.

Of course, by day three (today) Anna is very wobbly about going to school, apparently she is upset that some of her friends are not in her new class and more generally she is upset because everything is new; new teacher, new pegs, new rules etc. and despite knowing that this is part of the process at the beginning of each new term I get dragged in to her drama. Anna is probably upset because she was the last to sit down on the carpet, or lost her way to the toilets or because since I don’t know what she’s talking about when she says: “those round strawberry things in packets” I can’t buy them to put in her pack lunch and now she feels different to the other pack lunchers.

Even though I know it is only these small things which are the cause of her unhappiness, and that they will pass when she settles in to the new regime, it doesn’t stop me inventing a scenario to freak me out for the day. As soon as she steps in to the classroom, she is bullied by her teacher, who I am sure now I think about it, is a dead ringer for Miss Trunchball from the film Matilda (no of course I haven’t read the book) which is Anna’s favourite film and she is Matilda, so Miss Trunchball has locked her in a cupboard with nails in the door and now she has got her by her pigtails and is throwing her out of the school window.

I realise that my world view is completely skewed by my children’s t.v. and film consumption. Before Anna became Matilda, The Railway Children was her favourite film and before that Robin Hood (the Errol Fynn version) I think that she may well have been born in 1926. Mind you when Becky was three her favourite film was The Wizard of OZ and she was Dorothy until she was about seven, so it could be genetic. We still have it in our collection, its all stretched and wonky and even in the Land of Oz, it is not always glorious technicolour. I actually feel physically sick when I watch that film now, because I have seen it hundreds of times and it has had a clockwork orange effect on me. I know things about that film that only the editor should know, I know for example, the difference between the film on the video we have and other cuts that appear on t.v. ocassionally, I know that Dorothy trips on the Lions cloak during the song: “Courage” and I know that Dorothy (well Judy Garland – but she will allways be Dorothy to me) nearly laughs during her first scene with the Lion and I know all the dialogue from beginning to end. I’m not telling you this to be a show off or Big Bob as they say in Dundee, but to illustrate to you just how deeply disturbed I am by all this.

Anyway, back to Anna and Miss Trunchball. I mentioned to her best friend Archie that she was feeling a bit wobbly, so that if he could look out for her a bit today that would be great. As I waved her off Archie put his arm around her shoulder and said:”I won’t let you fall over Anna” , he took wobbly literally of course, he’s a bloke after all, but I could have kissed him; if he’d have let me. Who needs Robin Hood, Matilda, Dorothy or even Uniform Boy when you have “Super Archie!”

Rx

just another brick in the wall

Dear Marianne,

It’s as though we’d never been away. Six weeks of holidays, park, ice-creams, rain and relatives and the conversation at the nursery returned immediately to children’s school uniforms, 11 Plus results and home improvement. Sewing in name tags providing the majority of comment amongst the waiting Mothers.
I really tried to say something, but I’d found it hard enough to live through the last minute school clothes shopping experience, with every other Kentish mother, wedged in between the dark blue gym pants and the lime green blazers in Hobsons; I didn’t want to relive it. The only question I was really interested in answering was the: “how’s the house selling going?” At last I can say: “Moving in December”, I know this makes the family tainted now, but I’m more than happy to join the leper colony outside Kent.


Anyway, Mike wasn’t keen to go to nursery this morning. As Craig pushed him up the hill in the buggy (which I think he will be using when he goes to university) he was still bleating: “no nursery, no nursery...” – I have been at this parent lark for nearly fourteen years and I still can’t cope with that. Obviously (as I should know what with nearly fourteen years’ blah. blah) he was fine, enjoyed himself, ate biscuits, drank juice and came home happily knackered; which is after all why we take them to these places.

And tomorrow Anna will be back to school, she will be in a new classroom, the location of which I know thanks to my friend Zoe who is a proper Mother, and who was therefore also able to describe the characters of each teacher (there are two, it’s a job share – watch this space for that to kick off) the names of the teachers, the name of the class, and the children Anna should avoid being friends with in the class. Unlike Mike, Anna is incredibly excited about returning to school, proximity to the toilets seems to be one reason, sitting next to her best friend Stephanie at lunch time is another, seeing Archie is very important, wearing her new shoes is another reason and playing in the big playground seems to feature quite strongly too. All of these things of course could be organised without the use of a school, the teachers etc. and more importantly without the early morning struggle between good and evil, that is: the morning cartoons versus breakfast, pyjamas versus uniform, hiding under the duvet versus being dragged out by your feet (only relates to teenagers) and walking forlornly up the hill with children, book bags, lunch boxes, P.E. kit versus Stan's suggested “oh fuck it, let’s nick off!”

That’s the trouble with going “back to school”, the only people who benefit are those with a share in BHS, Woolworths or Hobsons, everybody else was doing fine without it. I know I was counting down the weeks, then the days and most recently the hours, but now all the hanging around the house, wearing pyjamas all day (them not me), being rained on at the park, baking flat cakes, trips to Margate, watching Morris Dancers, fighting badly behaved cousins and making messy hand pictures seems like the right way to spend your time. If the most important things to us about our children’s schooling are sewing in the name tags, getting the right shoes and worrying about the 11 Plus then maybe it’s time to take a step back to rethink it all, and consider “nicking off” for a while.


Rx