Quasi-Intellectual Ramblings

It’s late.  I’m writing essays again.  The joy.  The veritable joy.  I can hardly contain myself.  I may well run naked down the street waving streamers and singing songs about the post modern novels of youth.  Except that it’s cold and I can’t think of much that rhymes with post modern novels of youth.

I am trying to capture the euphoria that happened on Saturday when I got my essay on comparing Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights, Philippa Pearce’s Tom’s Midnight Garden and Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons back, to find that I had scored 92%.  This was a big deal because a) I had hoped for a mere pass and b) I had a new tutor and I wasn’t sure if the last tutor had marked me highly because we got on well, or because I was actually doing good work.  Now I can actually believe that I am producing good stuff, which is great, and has kind of set the final seal on any doubts I may have had about launching myself back into academia in September.

It was a stinker of an essay and took me ages to structure in a way that made any sort of sense at all.  They are three fairly disparate books and getting it to gel and not seem more like some kind of autistic scrapbook of random and half baked ideas gave me sleepless nights.  Since then I have finished off an essay about Peter Rabbit, which was easier, because I just had to write about one book, and now we’re back to the whole compare and contrast idea again, albeit in a highly disguised form.

I hate compare and contrast essays. I really do. 

This one is turning out to be brutal for several reasons.  The first of which is that I had four books to choose from on this module and I have to incorporate two or three of them in this essay.  I have chosen two rather than three because of time pressures and work load.  I have earmarked one of the books for use in my next, and final essay (Beverley Naidoo’s The Other Side of Truth) and so don’t want to use it here, because I don’t want to have to worry about repeating myself in the next essay, for which I would get marked down.  I just don’t need the aggravation.  One book I have discounted altogether (Jamila Gavin’s Coram Boy), because it was about killing babies and things, and I’ve read it once, and that was enough for me thanks.  This leaves Mortal Engines and Junk.  Both of them are great books, but which do not sit so neatly together thematically as say, Coram Boy and Mortal Engines or Junk and The Other Side of Truth, or even Coram Boy and The Other Side of Truth.  This means I am hunting about looking for strands which link the books together, and it is proving somewhat hard.  Not impossible, but more challenging than my weary brain can deal with at the moment.

The other complicating factor is that as well as having the compare and contrast element, this also demands deeper thought about other, external issues, like historical perceptions of childhood and the nature of children’s fiction and how it has been published and disseminated to children over the years.  I have to think about the books in relation to these issues as presented in a long and rambling essay by someone intellectual and stimulating.  This would be fine if I felt intellectual or stimulated. 

I didn’t do any work yesterday.  I decided to give my brain a holiday.  I don’t know whether this was such a good idea.  I started this evening surfing on the fumes of past victory, and have steadily gone downhill ever since.  I am now at the embittered, entrenched stage in proceedings where I have rewritten the same paragraph nine different ways and it still seems clunky, overlong and footling.  It does not help that despite drawing interesting diagrams on bits of scrap paper and writing myself cryptic notes at the kitchen table earlier, I still only have a vague inkling of where all this is actually going.  The answer seems to be ‘to hell in a hand cart’.  Which is unfortunate.

It will come.  Everything I do academically seems to have to go through a long, dark, tea tray of the soul moment before I can just get on with it and stop moaning.  I am trying to moan quietly though, as Jason does not seem to understand that moaning is an intrinsic part of the enjoyment of the process, and without the woe and pouting nothing would actually get done.  I have tried to tell him that it is my being so cheerful that keeps me going, but he doesn’t really get it.  So I am doing secret, underground moaning in the quiet reaches of the night.  He will never know, and he will be stunned at the end of the week when the essay is finally born, all bloody and bawling, but his wife has been silent but deadly about it all.  He will probably think I have been snatched up by aliens for experimentation and that they have sent down a pod Katyboo in my place.  If it got the essay done any quicker I’d offer myself up for some alien probing, but I don’t think it will help.

Biscuits on the other hand, are an excellent study aid.  I have just realised, after sitting at the keyboard for several hours, that the last time I had a biscuit it was still daylight.  No wonder my creative powers are on the wane.  I must go and refuel.

Hopalong Mama

It’s not often that I get to share pearls of parenting wisdom, mainly because I am a low rent, parenting harlot who will fob her children off on any passing person over five feet tall who has a pulse and all their own teeth.  Nevertheless, every now and again I rub up against the coal face of parenting and feel that when these events happen, that I should share them for your edification and moral well being.

As you may be aware, I fear exercise, fresh air, the countryside (except when viewed through the windows of a speeding car as it makes its way to the urban jungle), and most outdoor activities.  If I take the children out it is usually to a shop, or a cafe, or a museum, or a library.  If forced I will take them to the park, but I can’t like it (as Tallulah used to say).

Today it was the usual freezing quagmire outside.  My mother, who was babysitting the children for us until lunch time today, mulled over all the options available to her and decided on a bracing walk.  Across the road from her house is a footpath which leads to fields, and she decided that it would be the ideal time to take the kids there.  For some reason she also decided that despite the snow/lashing rain of the last few days that it would not be muddy.  There were no wellingtons/appropriate footwear choices apparent, and they all set off into the wilds of nature.

Approximately fifteen minutes later my poor mum slipped over in a giant lake of mud and managed to do serious damage to her ankle, unsupported as it was by any stout footwear as she had chosen to embark on her wilderness ramble wearing ballet flats.  Ours is not to reason why.

Luckily my dad had accompanied them and managed to help her home, otherwise she’d probably still be lying in the mud with the children astride her in case they sank.

We arrived to pick the children up as she was hobbling round the kitchen in agony, trying to put a brave face on things.  We packed her off to the hospital with a flea in her ear.

It turns out that she has a severe sprain and has torn her ligaments.  At this point, due to the absolutely shoddy quality of the x-ray, they are unable to determine if she has also fractured her ankle.  If it is still killing her in a week she has to go back for them to try and take a better x-ray image.  She has to be off her feet for five days and it will take six to seven weeks for her to heal properly.

Poor bugger.

I feel rather guilty because it came about in the pursuit of entertaining my offspring.

But I also feel that there is a moral to this tale, which is, when faced with the dilemma of taking the children out for tea and cakes or a bracing country walk, go for the tea and cakes every time.

Porcupine Quills are off…

So.

Not what I would call an entirely successful weekend.  Not a total washout.  There were highs, there were lows. The usual Boo style see saw effect.  Mainly what happened was entirely the opposite of everything we had planned.  That made things complicated.

You may recall that we were due to trot along to Heston’s gastronomic freak show of delights on Saturday afternoon.  This just did not happen.

A friend organised this trip.  She is lovely.  She is a very, very nice person.  She is also the goddess of chaos incarnate.  If something is going to go wrong, it will go wrong through, near or to her.  When she suggested this trip to Heston’s six months ago I was twitchy.  Then I decided I was being paranoid, and signed up.

I was right to be paranoid.  My brother, who is also her friend, and who was also coming with us, got a phone call from her at 8.45 yesterday morning to say that she had just called the restaurant to confirm the confirmation they had sent by e-mail several weeks ago.  It turns out that they had made an almighty balls up, and for some complicated reason, had just left our party of six off the plans for yesterday’s dining altogether.  This despite the fact we reserved months ago.  To say that we were not happy would be the understatement of the year.

I go out a lot.  Jason goes out a fair bit, but in the grand scheme of things we rarely go out together, because it is a) rather difficult and b) rather expensive to sort out babysitting, particularly if you wish to go away for the night rather than for say half an hour.  Despite the worries about the nature of our dining experience, we were ecstatic to be going away together.  We had moved heaven and earth, and also booked and paid for a hotel.  My brother was even more annoyed.  He is on a budget and had saved like stink for this.  Not only that, but he had taken one of his few remaining days off work as holiday, and booked a hotel.  At this stage in the proceedings we were all looking at being several hundred pounds each out of pocket what with one thing and another, and with no dinner.

I have to say that apart from the initial monumental cock up on their part, they were very good.  They offered to give us a free dinner and a free lunch, including wine, at a time of our choosing any time up to the end of the year.  They are also going to reimburse all our costs, including hotels, lost work time etc.  This is superb customer service.

But, it’s still shit that this is what had to happen, and that in order to get our free dinner and free lunch we are going to have to plan like armed forces trying to take out a strong hold in a hostile desert environment.

Gah!

Better news was that mum and dad still offered to have the children for us so we could be free, FREE, FREE.  This was immensely gratifying.  Although by the time we had dropped them off and run a few pressing errands it was four o’clock, we were exhausted, shell shocked and entirely lacking in inspiration.  In the end it seemed like far too much effort to go out just for the sake of going out, so we had a very nice curry delivered, and sat up until the wee small hours watching entirely unsuitable television and enjoying ourselves thoroughly.

This morning we ate breakfast in the lounge amongst a nest of pillows and quilts and made a huge mess whilst watching more unsuitable telly until it was time to get the kids.

It was great.  We watched endless episodes of House, which we have gotten terribly behind with for one reason and another, and rounded off our viewing marathon watching one of our favourite films, the most excellent Human Traffic starring the delectable John Simm and which I never, ever get tired of watching for some reason I cannot quite understand.  All about club/counter culture in the 1990′s, and taking place over a weekend of wild partying in Cardiff, it is just so raw and funny and sweet and brilliant.  Plus it has some bangin’ choons.

Here is one of my favourite scenes:

Farci of Porcupine Quills Anyone?

It has been a day of mixed blessings.  I am feeling much more chirpy due to only having a minor headache which has been solved beautifully by the power of Ibuprofen, a slightly less frozen shoulder and people feeding me fudge and  cake at regular intervals through the day. None of these things are to be sniffed at, and I feel that I can relinquish at least one of the Chaise Longues of Death ™ for the time being.

I have been to my mum and dad’s today.  They have kind of offered me a job.  I am going to help them sort out some of their antiques via the power of the interweb, and in return they will keep me in lunches for some time to come.  This is all good.  Today was my first day and I must say that they are very lenient employers. They were very relaxed about the fact that I turned up late due to being nearly wiped up by a Mercedes who decided that it owned all the country lanes in these parts exclusively, and therefore saw no reason why it should not drive round blind bends in the middle of the road doing fifty miles an hour, making everyone in their path pee their pants. Nor that this was immediately followed by me being stuck behind a hedge trimming machine for two miles.  Still, I did bring biscuits.  I think this helped.

I have created an Etsy Shop for them which is called Boxofmisc.  There is only one thing on it so far, but there will be more.  There is also a blog which might be called boxofmisc or Rummaging Through Auntie Wainwright’s Personal Possessions, it’s hard to tell.  I’ve always been a bit confused by the fact that you can search on one thing and title it another.  It took hours, but it’s a start and it will all be fine eventually.  It was quite good fun.

I hurtled home to do a bit of unsticking of breakfast pots from the table before Aunty Squirrel came round for her tea, and as I fell through the front door there was a letter waiting for me on the mat from the local education authority. Tilly’s application for a place at the school we want has been rejected.  I was bitterly disappointed.  In fact I cried.  I don’t really know why. I knew it was a long shot.  It’s the only school within umpty miles that isn’t failing, and it is also a genuinely heart warming, uplifting kind of place to visit.  I don’t know anyone who wouldn’t want their kid to go there.  And we are miles out of the area.  I think I just imagined because we had worked so hard to do all our homework, and visit and I had learned to drive, and spent several mornings since then learning the route to school, that they would know how much it meant to us and just waft us gently into a place.

They sent the rejection along with a form which I am supposed to fill in for the next choice of school and a list of schools which have places available.  It is a joke.  Most of them are many, many miles away and totally unsuitable in every way.  I am not filling in this form.  I rang to appeal.  The lines were all jammed and the answering service would not even allow me to leave a message. I rang the school, whose phone line was ‘temporarily unavailable’.  There was nothing else I could do short of door stepping County Hall.  I could have done this actually, as I only live about five minutes drive away.  I decided against it thanks to the equal measures of tears and fury that were coursing through me at the time.  Not a winning combination when you want to get your own way.  I will try again on Monday.  Hopefully I will have calmed down by then.  Jason was wonderful and came up with many practical suggestions which did not include driving down the corridors of power in a chariot with knives attached to the wheels, which had been my first, and let’s face it, only option for a while.

We have not told Tilly.  She has been worrying about getting in on and off for a few months now, and she would be absolutely devastated.  Now is not the time for her to be devastated.  We still have things to try and we will try them with the minimum of fuss and bother, and should they fail she is then fully entitled to be devastated, but it will do her no good at all right now.  Poor mite.

So a day of mixed blessings and an impending battle on our hands.  I will spend the weekend oiling the chariot wheels just in case.

Actually I will be spending the weekend doing much more exciting things than that, and I completely forgot to tell you.  Tomorrow Jason and I are going to visit Heston Blumenthal’s restaurant, The Fat Duck, in Bray.  Yes, the one where lots of people got poisoned last year, and in which even when they are not being poisoned they are served things like snail porridge and egg and bacon ice cream.  It will be a culinary adventure, of this I am sure.  Some of it may be delicious even.  I hope so.  I’m sure he didn’t receive three michelin stars just for making things which sound and taste like your kids have had a hand in the menu design.  There must be more to it than novelty.  Please baby cheezus.

This is what Heston looks like:

I think he looks a little like Beaker from the Muppets.

Voila:

  And he does cook things in bubbling test tubes, so it is possible that there is a family link.  They may even be one and the same.  After all, you never see them in the same photograph do you?

Now, I am excited by all this culinary hoo ha.  I like to try new things and I like to try things that might surprise me by being delicious, and I think a man with three Michelin stars might just be able to do that.  He seems to do it a lot on the telly, where he cooks these wild gastronomic orgies of a meal,  and the initially troubled and sceptical people say: ‘Well, I never thought I’d like basted dormouse shoved inside a garden hose and doused in ptarmigan cooked in a swirling vortex of negative ions, but Heston has proved me wrong today.  It was bloody delicious.’  That’s what I hope it might be like.

Jason is merely horrified.  Horrified at the expense and horrified at the faffing. He is a meat and two veg man all the way down the line.  When our friends asked us if we wanted to go, some time last year, I signed us up enthusiastically and Jason reluctantly agreed because he was curious.  Now the day is nearly upon us and he’s not so much curious as petrified.  I have promised him that we will stop at the motorway services on the way and I will buy him a Whopper Meal to fortify him in case it all goes horribly wrong and he has to eat a bread stick in the shape of Willy Wonka’s hat and survive on widgeon tears all evening.  This has mollified him slightly.  That and the knowledge that whatever is placed in front of him, the children will be with granny and we will not have to force them to eat reindeer gizzards and like it or sit on the naughty step.  This is a relaxing thought.  And the thought that we don’t have to pick them up until Sunday lunchtime as well.

The Return of the Chaise Longue of Death ™

I know I have mentioned this before but I have very basic dreams of spending at least a day of my life not feeling ill or tired.  Sadly it is not to be today.  It will probably the day I drop down dead, knowing the bitter irony of my life.  So today I am sure to survive, because today I woke up feeling like I should strap two Chaise Longues of Death (TM) onto my feet and use them as roller skates.  I have the headache from yesterday along with a sore throat and a frozen shoulder.  If I were a horse they would have taken me out into the field and humanely shot me through the head by now.  As it is, I soldier on bravely.  Bravely but irritably.

Luckily it was a nursery day today.  I packed Oscar off and scrabbled home like a rat up a drain pipe, into the pjs and onto the sofa.  I had dreams of reading lovely, lovely books.  Instead I was a very good girl and read horrible but necessary books, for the next essay.  I managed to finish the entire of Melvin Burgess’s cheery little novel, Junk.  It’s not nice, not nice at all.  It is however, brilliantly written, and well deserving of the many literary prizes with which it has been sprinkled.  It is not a book I recommend for under fourteens, unless they are very precocious, dealing as it does with abuse, prostititution, homelessness, teenage pregnancy and of course, heroin addiction, and all of the above in a graphic, no holds barred kind of way.  On the other hand it was exquisite, compelling and beautiful, in an incredibly troubling way.  I wouldn’t recommend giving it to your granny to read either, by the way.

I have read it before, many years ago, but had forgotten how amazing it is. I am now re-reading Philip Reeve’s dystopian fantasy ‘Mortal Engines’, set in a future time in which London is a mechanized city, roaming above the smashed remains of a rotten earth, preying on other, smaller cities and stripping them down to ensure its future survival.  Despite its ’1984′ish overtones it is much more of a rip-roaring adventure story, and the first of a quartet.  I have yet to read the others, but this first foray is not bad at all.  How I’m going to weave heroin addiction and mechanised futuristic cities cannibalising each other together into a harmonious whole is, at the moment, slightly beyond me, but I am sure it will all come together in the end.  No wonder I have a headache.

Other than that I have done not very much at all, opting out of dinner in favour of a trip to the chip shop on the way home from buying Oscar a new pair of trainers (with three children we average a new pair of shoes for one or the other of them at least once a month. It is his turn), and turning for solace to a quite delicious bar of milk chocolate with salted almonds in that the very kind J sent me for passing my driving test.

I am slightly further forward with the M.A.  Jason has agreed to pay for it, bless him.  I have decided I will pay him back for it.  This is something I want to do entirely by myself, just for me.  It seems important.  I just have a few more questions for Roehampton.  I called them today but the help staff were out doing training, so I have e-mailed them.  When I hear from them the application form will go in.  As of September I should be a student again.  I haven’t owned an NUS card for over twenty years.  That will be odd.  I am still not buying a futon, nor Doc Martens, and I am definitely not going shopping at Iceland though.  I am too old for that crap any more, and drinking pints of cider just makes me want to chunder.  It’s going to be champagne and chocolate with salted almonds all the way.  Standards must be maintained.

The children are having an alarming conversation about piddling.  I must go and intervene.  Farewell for now.

I do not want to be Ray Mears when I grow up

Plans for Measure for Measure have had to go on hold, despite the trailer yesterday.  I promise it will be done by this time next week even if I have to walk over the shards of hot folios in bare feet to do it.

Yesterday was one of those days.  You know.  The ones where you don’t seem to sit still for very long, and you spend many hours trundling on the hamster wheel of despair, which spits you out at about ten at night leaving you bewildered and not much further forward with anything.  As of ten last night I had a filthy kitchen,  mounds of clean laundry obscuring half the kitchen table, mounds of dirty laundry obscuring half the kitchen floor, teetering piles of paper on every available surface and a lounge which every time I wandered through it left me thinking, ‘hmmm, something smells funny in here.  And not in an amusing way.’

I was supposed to have spent the morning with my friend, at her house, chatting and eating biscuits while my son played with her children’s toys while they were at school.  This would have been delightful.  Instead she texted me at eight o’clock to tell me that she had pleurisy and could we put visits on hold.  This seemed like a reasonable excuse.  Pleurisy does not sound fun does it?  I think it’s a kind of precursor to pneumonia, and is one of those old fashioned, deadly things where you hack up lungs and blood leaks out of your eyeballs.

To assuage Oscar who is not as impressed by pleurisy as me, and was standing at the front door with his coat on demanding to go and raid other children’s toy boxes, I suggested we visited the farm shop where Aunty Squirrel, who comes round to our house every other Friday for her tea, gets her pudding contributions.  I spoke to my dad on the phone, who decided that it was nearer to his house than it was to ours, and so we could pick him up on the way, and he could accompany us on our farm shop adventure.  It turns out that it is no nearer to his house than it is ours, but no matter.   We ricocheted across country, and made with with only minor teeth sucking incidents.

By the time we got there I felt I was entitled to a large cake.  Unfortunately we seem to have caught them on a bad day.  I was not impressed.  The produce was not locally sourced and all far too shiny and supermarket looking, the majority of the rest of the food I could have got at Waitrose cheaper, and the cakes were thin on the ground.  In the end we bought a packet of Jelly Tots, a bar of Green and Blacks chocolate and half a sack of potatoes and vowed never to return.  It was not my idea of a farm shop at all.  A few years ago when I was married to UE and living in Hinckley (which I do not recommend. Either thing.)  I used to get a veg box from a wonderful local farm shop.  Occasionally we would visit them, and they would always give the kids bread to feed the ducks in the idyllic duck pond in front of their shop, and let them ring up the items on the till.  They sourced locally and organically wherever they could and were hugely knowledgeable about every product they stocked.  It was fantastic.  This was not.

We decided to be brave and soldier on.  I took my dad to Ibstock to pick up his mended watch.  Then we went to the garden centre so that he could buy some kindling for the fire.  They had a tea room.  It was lunch time.  Dad treated us to lunch.  It was evil. Truly evil.  The service was slow and Mrs. Overallish.  The home made soup tasted like cabbage water that had been boiled for a hundred years and was inedible.  Oscar had chips which were so disgusting he left most of them.  We tried them.  We didn’t blame him.  The coffee was like water with soil in it.  There was not a single thing to recommend it. 

The soup repeated on me for the whole of the rest of the day, and I only managed about four mouthfuls, so you can only imagine what it must do to someone who had the stamina to finish a whole bowl.  Urgh.

By the end of this abomination it was time to come home and pick up the children from school.  We parked up just as it began to snow. 

Tea time was early because I’d got a session with the hypnotherapist for six.  I was watching the snow falling, thinking that I might get Jason to drive me there (I was planning on going by myself), when I had a phone call from Rainbows.  I had forgotten it was a special celebratory Rainbows meeting for Thinking Day, so the meeting was at six on the other side of Glenfield instead of at six on Thursday round the corner.  Bugger.  This meant I had to go to the hypnotherapist alone so that Jason could drive Tallulah to Rainbows.

I set off at twenty to six, which is normally fine time wise.  I made it there at quarter past six.  I had not taken into account that it was the first time I was driving on my own at night, the fact that the snow was coming down hard, and that it was rush hour.   The hypnotherapist lives in the middle of nowhere, but to get there I had to go by a very popular short cut that people take when the main roads are busy.  It was chocka block with traffic, all moving very fast.  I was extremely unnerved.  So unnerved that at a crucial right hand turn I misjudged where I was and had to carry straight on because I’d got some impatient idiot driving right up my arse.  This necessitated a further ten minute detour to come round in a loop to turn down the right road.

Then I had to sit for ten minutes in the car at the side of the road before I could get out and go and ring the door bell because I was shaking rather much.  It was somewhat of a baptism of fire.

Two hours of reasonably stressful hypnotherapy later I had to do the whole thing in reverse.  The country lane I was parked on did not lend itself to me practicing a three point turn in the pitch dark and the snow, so I merely carried on in the direction in which the car was pointing in the hope that I would eventually hit somewhere I recognised, which I did, thankfully.  The snow was somewhat less fierce, the roads were quieter and the journey home was measurably less stressful, although trying to reverse park into a neat spot on the drive defeated me, and I abandoned the car half on the pavement and made Jason do the rest.

Despite all this I did manage to fit in quite a lot of studying, albeit in a peripatetic manner as I hurled myself about house and home. I also managed to have hideous nightmares and sleep really badly, which is probably why I woke up this morning dog tired, and with a crashing headache, which has annoyingly persisted all day, neither getting worse nor getting better, just lurking about on the periphery making life hard.

I guess you could say that yesterday was a very exploratory style day.  We did new things, we ventured further afield, we definitely shifted out of our comfort zones.  When I do things like that I expect some kind of reward, not a vague feeling that I have been robbed,  with the added privileges of indigestion on a previously unimagined scale and a headache.  I do not want to be an explorer any more.  I have read all of Redmond O’Hanlon’s books and he always seems an optimistic sort of man, who even in the worst situations finds time to contemplate the beauty of his surroundings and his great good fortune to be an adventuring soul.  On reflection I think you must have to be born to it.  Judging by yesterday’s little foray I would merely be irritable, hysterical and entirely unimpressed by the wonders of the natural world, particularly if there were no cakes and I got indigestion on top.

Verily, Let the Edumacayshun Beginneth Prithee

It has been a long time since I dusted off my quill and continued your edumacayshun in the fine art of decoding Shakespeare.  To start the 2010 season I thought we would get our teeth into a frothy little romp called Measure for Measure, but I feel that we are probably a bit rusty and a recap on the basic formula for understanding Shakespeare might not go amiss here:

Tragedy = everything starts badly and ends terribly. In the middle there is usually a light dusting of woe, some misery and quite a lot of confusion.  Stabbing, gouging and poisoning are popular themes in the tragedies.  The subject of gardening sometimes crops up.  This just goes to prove how evil gardening can be, which if you have ever tried to get vetch out of your potato patch in under a fortnight will be self-evident.

History = see above but with the added bonus of more crowns, blingin’ robes and lots of people with the same name. i.e. Gloucester son of Gloucester, brother of Gloucester, known as Gloucester to avoid confusion.  Being rude to the French before drubbing them soundly and sending them to the pyre with no supper is a motif in the histories.  When histories are not set in merry olde England they are set in rabid old Rome.  The main way you can tell between the two sub-genres is the amount of draping involved.

Comedy = Most of the above elements in random combination, but with extra puns, more knob jokes and a light smattering of bosom.  Comedy can be distinguished from tragedy and history because occasionally it ends with a wedding, and there is invariably dancing.  The dancing is crucial, and indeed may be your only clue that what you have spent the last three hours watching in arse numbing agony was in fact hilarious.  You are allowed to laugh uproariously after the fact.

Problem Plays = Any play which falls into one of the above three genres, but which we, as terribly modern and enlightened people wince about in shame. Subjects on which we currently get worked up include torturing Jews, raping nuns, raping innocent virgins before cutting their tongues out and poking their eyes out with a sharp stick and cannibalism.  Oddly we still don’t have a problem with sending Frenchmen to their untimely deaths.

Pesky Grandparents

Overheard on the baby monitor as Jason was getting Oscar ready for bed:

Oscar: ‘Dada. I have an itchy bottom.’

Jason: ‘Oh. Do you? That’s unfortunate.’

Oscar: ‘Yes. I think there is a bunch of hair in it.’

Jason: ‘Errr. Right. Are you sure?’

Oscar: ‘Yes.’ (huge pause) ‘And I think Grandad put it there on purpose to trick me.’

The rest is stunned silence

I am going back to school – I hope

I am waiting for the Ocado man to come with some impatience.  We have nothing for tea, and I know that when he arrives bringing his bounteous harvest, this problem will be solved. Not necessarily to the satisfaction of all parties involved, due to the fact that all parties include a fierce triumvirate of picky eaters who will be devastated to find that there are no hordes of frozen chicken nuggets  making their sure and steady way towards us.  But there will be food.  It will not be out of date. It will not smell ‘funny’.  It will not be lying in a pool of its own decaying juices.  It will not be sprouting nodules.  All this is good.

The children are back at school.  This is good.  I fitted in a driving lesson, a trip to the post office, a phone  call to Roehampton University, a trip to my mother’s and some shuffling of paperwork.  All of these things have been hanging over my head for the last week, waiting, waiting for me to have a spare moment to think straight.

The most satisfying moment of the day was the long overdue call to Roehampton.  You may recall that I had carpe diemed and decided I would go back to school properly as of September to do an M.A. in Children’s Literature.  Then you may recall that I read all the paperwork wrong and was plunged into deepest gloom thinking that this foray would cost way more than I was prepared for.  This gloom was lifted by the ever organised Mrs. Jones, who I may employ as my chief artisan, chef and all round organisational guru when I win the lottery, who pointed me to the right bit of the page about fees and suddenly brought everything back into my grasp again.  I have had it on my to do list to ring Roehampton ever since just to check a few crucial details before I take the plunge.

Today was the day.  I spoke to a really lovely man who totally put up with my ineptitude and noodling around, and my obsession with how much everything was going to cost, and was very patient and explained everything to me very slowly and in VERY BIG LETTERS, so that I actually came away understanding what he meant.  This is an important breakthrough and has given me hope that they will deal with me like this through the duration of the course should I finally stop arsing about and sign up for it.  Who knows, with help like that I might even pass.

So the deal is that the course costs £4002 in its entirety (it’s that extra two pounds that makes all the difference apparently), regardless of whether I do it full or part time.  If you do it part time the only difference is that you pay pro rata.  They calculate this by the number of credits you work through.  An entire M.A. is 180 credits.  If I achieve them all in one year I pay the entire four grand (and £2) in that year.  If I do 90 credits in the first year I pay £2000 (and £1) etc.  So I can take up to six years to do it, and spread the credits however I like.  Furthermore I can spread the payments throughout the year if I want, so it’s not too much of a shock to the system.  And I can decide how long I think it’s going to take as I go along, so that I can edit my time/study axis depending on what kind of home crises I plan to fit in along the way.  I think this is brilliant.

Not only that, but it works exactly like the Open University, so it really is entirely distance learning and there are no hidden summer schools or classes that I have to take.  I think there will be opportunities to visit, and take classes if I want, but it is not compulsory.  Everything can be handed in via the power of the interwebs and done online.

I am now really enthused about it again.  I spent last week thinking about ringing up and then putting it off.  Last night I was thinking about whether I really wanted to put myself through the stress of deadlines etc, because at the moment I am studying rather hard and it is somewhat difficult.  Then I remembered that I am putting this punishing schedule on myself, so that I can go off and have a wonderful holiday, and with the flexible structure of the M.A. it won’t be like this.  Plus, even though I am working very hard, I am actually enjoying what I am doing again and I do like stretching my brain.   I know that if I don’t sign up for the M.A. this September I will faff about and then sign up for another OU course, because I need to keep my brain working like other people need to go to the gym.  So my mind is made up.

I’m going to talk to Jason tonight, to double check that he’s alright about me taking it on, and still happy to pay for it, and then I’m going to fill the form in and take the plunge.

Wish me luck.

Form Schmorm

Grit has written a swingeing rant about forms here.

I too hate forms.

I don’t really know why I say this as if it’s somehow earth shattering news.  Everyone hates forms don’t they?

And the tiny minority of people who don’t hate forms must surely have something wrong with them anyway. Right?

My pet hate on the forms front, are the ones sent to me by the school.  This is because:

a) there are so many of them

b) so many of the so many demand money/help/raffle prizes/costumes/lifeblood from me with a nanosecond of notice

c) all of them without doubt are spectacularly stupid, and written in an ingratiatingly insufferable and usually patronising tone, which has the same effect on me as say listening to fingernails scraping down a blackboard, or hearing Celine Dion sing.

Recently I have had to fill in holiday forms.  This is because, as you know, we are going to Canada for a month very shortly.  This month long trip does not fit neatly into the holiday which has been allocated us by the government, and therefore we are required to justify why we wish to take our children out of school during term time.

It is not quite as bad as it sounds, as our holiday does overlap with the two weeks of Easter holiday.  We are only being naughty for seventeen days instead of twenty seven days.  Of those seventeen days, the school is sort of obliged to let us take ten of them on an ‘ooh, you are awful, but we just might let you get away with it,’ basis.  The remaining seven days are just plain evil, wrong, bad and in league with the forces of Beelzebub.

The form asks us for reasons why we are not behaving nicely and conforming.  I find this really irritating.  I’m hardly likely to write: ‘Because I’m trying to undermine the state school system from within.  Death to the petit bourgeoisie and all it stands for,’ now am I?  Much like those ludicrous forms you have to fill in on the plane when you fly to the States: ‘Have you ever or will you ever become a terrorist plotting the downfall of the Western World/built a bomb out of mascara and Gummi Bears/shared a jug of sangria with Osama Bin Laden?’ tick YES or NO.  Anyone who ticks YES really does deserve to be carted off to Guantanamo Bay and hung by their toe nails for sheer stupidity alone.  I’d love to know the success rates for catching terrorists using the old ‘fill out this innocent old form’ ruse.

So. Back to the holiday form, on which I wrote: ‘There are five of us in this family.  For all of us to take our holidays during the times you have deemed acceptable, would bankrupt us.  My husband is also required to work to contract terms, terms which do not fit in with holiday times you deem acceptable.  It seems therefore that if we wish to take our holidays together as a family we must take them outside of official school holiday dates.  If you have any problems with this, please contact me.’

To take the holiday we want to take at a holiday time to suit them would more than double the price of our holiday.  I don’t see them stepping up to pay the extra. 

What’s more, I always tag an addendum to the forms to say that we would be delighted to take academic work with us for the kids so that they are not behind in their work when they return to school.

Interestingly, the schools never ask questions about how we will expect the children to catch up with their work on these forms.  Even though, in my humble opinion, this should be their primary concern.  Because you know what? It isn’t.  They don’t give a rat’s ass if my kids are two, three or four weeks behind academically.  They care about the number of days absence the school racks up, because that’s one of main criteria on which schools are measured for success or failure.  Your child might be Mozart, but if they have a dodgy attendance record, the school authorities will be round like a shot, whereas the kid who can’t count to ten without taking his shoes and socks off will be left to struggle on manfully, as long as he turns up for school every day at the right time.  Ludicrous but true.

So I won’t play.  As long as my children are at a level of academic achievement I am happy with, it’s all good.  If that doesn’t tally with what the school wants, tough shit.

I am feeling particularly anarchic about this sort of thing after digging through the children’s book bags this afternoon to come across a pointless waste of paper,  school letter, which fills two pages.  It basically informs me that the government are spying, looking after us again, by asking our school to take part in the National Childhood Measurement Programme, in which they are going to weigh and measure our children and feed it all into their giant database of Big Brother style information.  Our headmistress says in reasonably bad English: ‘I feel it is important to support the NHS to gather the information they require so that the best possible health services can be provided to support our children to stay healthy.’  Because of course, knowing how tall they are is going to help them not to catch swine flu this week, and not actually just be used in fifty years time on some random government pie chart to say that in 2010 we were all pygmies compared to the giant race of superheroes we have been breeding ever since.  Good oh!

She then goes on to say that in addition to the height and weight measurement they may also want to know the child’s sex, address, postcode, ethnicity and date of birth.  Because knowing which road in Glenfield your child lives on will help them to protect your child against MRSA and possible infections of the water supply by cholera germs at the village pumps right?

We must rest easy because the results will be ‘confidential’.  Just like all the other information that has been  collected and then randomly given to dustmen, terrorists, left on park benches and sold to Sheila’s Wheels insurance mongers.  Phew.  Not only that but ‘No child’s height or weight will be given to school staff or other children.’  Double phew.  Just think what insane amounts of damage could be done by a rogue teacher who knows that Matilda is five feet tall.  Gah! I’ve just given it away now.  Will we never be safe in our beds again?  Especially if they break in and replace our beds with beds that are shorter than our children to make us paranoid, just like Mr. and Mrs. Twit.  OH MY GOD! It could like so happen, y’know?

Luckily we can opt out.  All we have to do is fill out the extensive form on page two, giving our child’s name, address, postcode, ethnicity, parentage, blood group, height and weight, and no more intrusive questions will be asked.

Thank you baby Cheezus.

But, should we decide to opt into the scheme and let them take these measurements the headmistress says: ‘We encourage you to request your child’s measurements from the PCT.’  It will take a month because these kinds of data are not just easily found using simple methods like a pair of scales and a tape measure.  Good God no.  We will have to put the data through big machines with spools and whirring things and buttons.  And should we wish to wait a month to find out such vitally important information we will, unsurprisingly have to fill out another form, which is attached for our ease and enjoyment. 

Hooray.  Because obviously I will not, as a parent, actually have any clue as to how tall or heavy my children are because I do not feed, dress or pay attention to them in any way in all the years I have been their primary carer.

A tree died for this by the way.  No wonder the environment is up the bloody swannee.