Boys will be boys

I love boys!

Typically boys are interesting, sparky, questioning, restless, torn between arrogance and insecurity. They need to prove things to themselves, practically, actively, before they believe them. They won't just accept things because someone in authority tells them so. They won't sit quietly with their minds switched to recieve. They will smile sideways when they are reprimanded and charm the scolder, or they will pull up their shoulders and skulk off for all the world like a wounded primate.

And for all these reasons, for all the ways in which they are Not Girls, the educational establishment condemns them. Shame on the establishment!

This is from today's Times:

Girls already have a well-established educational lead over boys by the time they start school, a study claims.
The study of 15,000 UK children suggests girls are two months ahead of boys in tests of verbal, non-verbal and visual skills by the age of five.

What a pile of poo. This is the kind of nonsense you arrive at when you start measuring and testing as if it was ever going to give you anything than the most irrelevant results.

Go back to your Aesop. The Hare and the Tortoise, anyone? Is it possible, just possible, that children might make progress at different rates? Might we allow that that possibility is just strong enough to mean that making such idiotic pronouncements might be, oh, I don't know, a really, really Bad Idea? Isn't what matters where they are when they leave education and go out into the world to take over from their elders. Anything before is just a stepping stone on the way, and means nothing. Kids I teach are astonished to find that in France the first really meaningful tests the kids have to take is their Baccalaureat, the equivalent of our A levels. Are they worse off for that? I doubt it.

Boys are being taught, systematically, that they're rubbish compared with girls. Casual statements are lobbed around in the media and in conversation which enhance this effect and start from the presumption of boys' inferiority. In the media the words 'boys' and 'problem' share space in many a sentence. Whether it's their lack of educational achievement, their impregnating of girls, their violence, and God knows what else, they have journalists shaking their heads sadly. When there is a problem with girls, it's often because they are starting to be like boys; chiefly in the area of violence. I don't know when people started saying as a follow-up statement to an anecdote about some way in which a boy has failed "But then he's a boy," or "But that's boys for you." And in front of the boy. As if boyhood was some nasty condition.

Okay, so here's my analysis of the problem, illustrated with personal experience.

When my boy was three he went to pre-school for the first time. He was not ready for school; had he been living in Hannover or Bordeaux he'd have been playing at home with play dough and finger paints for another four years. He was, apparently, a source of exasperation because he couldn't sit still during circle time, and often fidgeted or even rolled over, disturbing other children. The rule in circle time was that children should sit still with their hands in their laps. Several of the boys couldn't do this and this was a problem. I'd just like to reiterate that they were three years old. Now perhaps this is a daft idea, but if none of the boys were able to sit still, and they were a) not learning and b) disturbing the girls, perhaps it might bave been worth looking again at the expectations to see if they were reasonable. It may be heresy to say it, but boys are different from girls. They tend to be more kinesthenic learners, and like to learn by exploration and trying and doing. They are, particularly at three or four years of age, not terribly good at sitting down and having somebody, however well-meaning, talk at them. So here we are: by the time they have their photo taken in their new school togs and stroll through the gates for the first time, they are disadvantaged by the school's expectations. Education has been well and truly feminised, and particularly early years education. A few years later government bodies, panicked by falling educational standards, took the decision to start formal education earlier, and children of four started being 'encouraged' (dragooned) to write letters and numbers. Talk about setting up half the class for failure!

The there's the matter of tests per se. As a massive generalisation I would say that there are about half children who see tests as an opportunity to shine, and half who either don't care what people think of them or are driven to bed-wetting by the whole idea. My boy hates being tested. He always underperforms in tests. Now that he's coming up to 11+ time, I am dealing with this problem with a technique known to psychologist, I think, as 'flooding'. Which means that I am making him do tests until they are coming out of his ears. When he sits the papers he will be so familiar with them it will mean nothing to him. I hate doing it to him and he's having a lot of choccy bars to compensate for this burden. But I'm a teacher. I'm in the know.

All through school my boy has been a problem. Because he's distractable and impulsive and wants to run around or handle things or take things apart to find out how they work, and otherwise difficult, a succession of teachers have told me what a problem he is, and barely mentioned what his achievements have been. And last year Mr Kelly came into our lives as Son's Year 5 teacher. Mr Kelly totally gets my boy; thinks he's incredibly bright, imaginative, sparky and thoughtful. (Oh, and by the way he's still rather easily distracted and his writing is a stream of consciousness with few gaps and almost no punctuation between his beautifully chosen words. But that'll come...) And Son has taken off in achievement. He gets home and can't wait to do his homework well. He does it standing and leaning on a table as his feet dance beneath. Because that's who he is.

And in all these tests he's been doing, I've discovered that his Non Verbal Reasoning score, the one that's supposed to measure raw intelligence, is extremely high. Go figure, as they say. I am totally confident that he will go out into the world as a fantastic young man with brains and a lateral approach to things and an ability to do whatever he wants to do. Unless, of course, people keep telling him that because he's a boy/adolescent/man he's not as good as the female sitting next to him.

Stephen Baldwin - rent-a-gob

"Stephen Baldwin would like to step into the ring for a boxing match with US Presidential candidate Barack Obama.The actor is a supporter of Republican nominee John McCain and has told the New York Daily Times that he will leave the country if Obama is elected next month."I'd like to knock some good sense into Barack. I wouldn't hurt him. But if he wins the election, he'll hurt me. He's a cultural terrorist," said Baldwin.Earlier this year, Baldwin attacked rock star Bono for his attempts to ease third world debt.He told WENN that it would make more sense to preach the gospel of Jesus abroad. " from Digital Spy.

What a numpty. If he has been correctly quoted, which is not for sure, is it? If he he has been correctly quoted, then this is the kind of thing which makes my head explode with rage. Everything about it is wrong - it's a sort of moronic soup of fundamentalist Christianity, brawn over brains, borderline racism and greed. Honestly, it makes my head spin. Now the only things I know about Stephen Baldwin are that a) his name is Stephen Baldwin, b) he's obviously a raging halfwit and c) for some reason someone is giving him the oxygen of publicity.

I'm rather assuming that he's an actor and related to that other well-known man of moderate manners, Alec Baldwin, you know, the one who left an answerphone message calling his eleven year-old daughter a pig because of some lapse of phone etiquette. I'm assuming this because they look almost interchangeable.

I have absolutely no idea why actors feel entitled to pontificate about politics to the rest of us, nor why journalists with half a brain feel the need to pass it on. (But then why do I read it and feel as though my head is going to explode?)

This election campaign started off with me, for once, thinking that either of the candidates would be good for the US and the wider world. But then McCain plumped for Ms Palin, a woman who think the epithet 'pitbull in lipstick' is a compliment, and now a long line of simian celebrity supporters have been queuing up to drag their knuckles along the ground to some virtual podium and voice their wholehearted support for the Republican candidate. And he looks more and more bewildered as time goes by. How the Hell did he find himself tangled up in this circus of freaks? He's a moderate man, one who doesn't sling mud or rely on homespun and ghastly faith in some God exclusive to the white and conservative voters of America. (Why is God right-wing in the US and left-wing over here? Discuss. Ed) He's no dummy either, and yet now he looks out of his depth, an apologist for the extremism of his cohorts. It's a weird, weird spectacle.

Obama has stuck to his guns and looks increasingly presidential. He's got his share of nutter support too, but he manages to sidestep it and emerge unsullied. And for that political nous more than for anything else, I think I'd like to see him at the helm of the (so-called) civilised world.

And I'd quite like Stephen Baldwin to get back into his cave and shut the f*** up.

"The supreme vice is shallowness"

I read De Profundis by Oscar Wilde over the weekend. It's had quite a disproportionate effect on me. I don't suppose I'm the only person who didn't know beforehand that it is in effect a long, long letter of reproach and admonishment from Wilde, imprisoned in Reading Gaol, to Lord Alfred Douglas, known forever to anyone who knows anything about Wilde as Bosie. Bosie would have been unknown after his death were in not for his tragic love affair with one of literature's great geniuses (or should that be genii?)

"The supreme vice is shallowness" Wilde says on more than one occasion, as he lambasts Bosie for behaviour which, when one reads it, makes one wonder how he can ever have loved him. Tempers, sulks, cruelty, neglect seem to be according to this account, what characterised Bosie's behaviour towards his older lover. Wilde quotes Bosie as saying to him in a letter "When you are not on your pedestal you cease to be interesting." This is a young man enjoying the fruits of another's genius. Wilde repeatedly refers to his own genius, and to his own Life and Art with capital letters. It is a resolutely unfunny manuscript, devoid of bons mots or witticism, and comes from the heart of a desperately disappointed and confused man.

Shallowness is what the unenlightened might say is what lies at the heart of Wilde's brilliant writing. But it is shallowness as a thin layer on the surface of fanged social satire and comedies of manners. It is a shallowness that characterises the poetry of a less talented poet than himself as shallow. Were Wilde to see the shallowness which we observe now he ould spin in his grave.

Shallowness is what characterises quite a hefty slice of what passes for modern society. It derives from an almost vituperative refusal to consider things in any depth at all. It is a shallowness that tells schools that they must teach that Bullying Is Wrong; that they Shouldn't take Drugs, that Shakespeare is not so important to study and that perhaps other reading materials, like comics, should have their place on the English curriculum. It is shallowness as quite mind-exploding intellectual laziness which says that anything difficult should be dropped from the National Curriculum, and that fails to link the stepping away from intellectual rigour to the pettiness and ignorance of practically everyone in public life, from our top politicians to the appalling woman at passport control who thinks she has achieved something by putting on a uniform and being gioven tiny, unimportant powers.

It is demonstrated by smooth language which, on close analysis, either takes complex concepts and scientifically reduces them to a sheer gloss with an obvious right answer and wrong answer (Drugs are Wrong, Mums working is Right), or elevates the simplistic to something grandiose (Losing weight - eat less, move more, for God's sake. Practically every work of modern art which fetches large amounts at auction.). Look at the whole of the American election campaign. Never has so little been said by so few to so many,and never have so few swallowed it without challenge. I read today that the Republican campaign managers are salivating at the prospect of Sarah Palin's pregnant teenage daughter marrying her self-proclaimed redneck boyfriend, so sure are they that this grubby union will put them ahead in the polls for a week.

I coud go on for weeks, but I am today so sad at the lack of thought in most people's life. Thinking sets you free - the ability to disagree and debate with one another without taking offence or killing each other characterise us as sentient beings separate from our aniumal friends. Reason is what makes us human, and reason is being systematically whittled away to the point where if you diasagree with me you feel quite entitled to stab me, or insult me or lob a bomb into my home.

As some readers know, I think that if we taught kids to think for themselves we would have less violence, and fewer teenage mums, we woud have young people facing the future and embrace challenge and we would have a better educated workforce and a more civilised nation.

Rant over. I am sick at heart.

Matching the dogs.

Someone asked me yesterday if I'd bought my dogs to match my hair. I had to tell them that no, I'd changed my hair colour to match the dogs.

Not quite true, but probably there's something in it subliminally. I'll post a picture of me to compare and contrast if I can get someone to take a decent one.

Language is power

People underestimate the effect of our use of language. Where the meanings of words shift subtly so that our view of the world is warped, the effect is insidious.

There have been ludicrous attempts in some areas of life, notably the military and business, to take unpleasant concepts and attempt to soften their effects by wrapping them up in pleasant sounding phraseology, but these are not successful because they are so obvious. "Collateral damage" and "friendly fire" are brash, outrageous and ultimately unsuccessful attempts to make "people being killed because they are near your target" or "accidentally killing your allies" less appallingly offensive. A problem is still a problem, even if you rechristen it an "issue" or an "opportunity".

But some subtler shifts in the way we use language actually pervert the way we see life over time. There are some words which enrage me when I hear them especially in the news.

Have you noticed that the verb "to attribute" and the perfectly serviceable, and emotionally neutral, adjective "attributable" have all but disappeared from our language, replaced by the much blunter and more loaded "blame"? Years ago when job losses were reported on the news, we were told that the need for redundancies was attributable to the economic climate, or cheap imports from abroad, or poor sales, or whatever. Now we are told that the economy/cheap imports/poor sales are blamed. It may seem a moot point, but I would suggest not. We live in a world where anything that happens is somebody's fault. Nothing is ever an accident. If anything goes wrong, wew all look around to find someone to blame. If a child falls off a climbing frame, instead of dusting him off and advising him to be more careful next time, we insist that the climbing frame is dangerous and must be closed off to ensure that no other child incurs an injury. We may consider calling one of the "accident helplines" (ambulance chasing lawyers) who advertise shrilly on day-time TV, appealing blatantly to the dispossessed and unemployed, and bring a suit against the council/school/leisure centre. Accidents, or the matter of blame associated with accidents, has become a way for the desperate to make money and to feel important.

Because if you bring a suit, you are a "victim". And that's my second loaded and dangerous word. Recently I notified the police that I had had my car wing mirror knocked off. I had to in order to claim on my insurace. I received a sympathetic letter from the Victim Support Unit, offering me comfort because I had been the victim of a crime. I wasn't the victim of a crime. My car was. Sometimes you just have to accept that shit happens. If every time something unwelcome happened to me I was told that I was a victim, I would be completely disempowered. I have control of my life because I have personal responsibility. My wing mirror got knocked off because I parked badly. Not long ago I read a statistic which told me that (and I'm being approximate as to the actual figure here) something like 1 in 5 women in Britain had been victims of sexual assault. Appalling, I'm sure you'll agree. Except that further enquiry revealed that a bottom grope was included in this. By that token, yes, I have been sexually assaulted. Now how ludicrous does that seem? To lump someone on a crowded tube squeezing my bum with the ordeal of my friend who was a true victim, pinned to the ground and raped in her own home? It is an isult to those who have been rendered powerless and diverts resources which should be targeted for their use. I am not a victim. Many, many bad things have happened to me, but I am not a victim. What is the point of making us all feel scared and powerless by labelling us as victims? The only possible outcome is that gradually we learn to accept that we have to entrust to others our lives and our futures. Because we are all victims we can do nothing for ourselves.

My third pet hate is "deserve". Because you deserve it, trills the spokeswoman for L'Oreal. How do you know I deserve it? What do you think I have done to deserve it? Have I done something really great to deserve it? We're told a lot about what we deserve, but we hear very little about what we should to to get our desserts. Again, we are disempowered. We are pampered like babies and told we are all special and we all deserve all that is good in this life, and we don't need to do anything to get it for ourselves. We can't all be special. If everyone is special then no one is special. As was so brilliantly illustrated in 'The Incredibles'. The only exception to this is babies: all babies are special to their parents. And so we ARE babies. And babies are powerless. If you've seen Wall-E and seen the baby-adults drifting around in their TV chairs on tramlines, well, that's where I believe the trilogy of 'blame', 'victim' and 'deserve' are taking us.

Of course there are victims with people to blame. But they are in a small minority and they must be cared for by those of us who are able to look after ourselves. We are the majority.

I was brought up with a firm belief in the power of personal responsibility. I believe that if I work very, very hard I can have whatever I want. I deserve nothing, unless I work for it. I have no entitlement, and I have no one to blame for my future but myself. I am no victim. And I think I'm very happy for that reason. Aldous Huxley said "Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities." I'm with him on that - the clue is in the word 'activities'. Take control, grab responsibilty and you will find yourself empowered. And then you'll be happy.

The times, they are a-changing.

It's been a funny old year. Daughter is twelve today and the world is a different place to what it was the day she hit eleven.

New terms have entered the vocabulary; hopefully they will die away very soon because they are ugly, annoying and imprecise terms. Credit crunch is used to mean the fact that everyone's a bit poorer. The term staycation means not going away as soon as school breaks up and holidaying at home - hardly a novel concept except perhaps for the mega-rich. Food costs more. Vegetables don't cost a lot more yet but they will, because it's rained for the last eight weeks. Meat already costs more and we can all afford just a dribble of petrol because the price is rising at a rate which would be reasonable only in Zimbabwe. Power executives are giving themselves mammoth pay rises and bonuses (boni?) funded by 30% hikes in the bills of their customers. Nice work if you can get it - I wonder how you sleep at night.

No one is flying because the price of aviation fuel has increased so fast, so budget airlines are going under. We all holidayed in Britain this year and we were repaid for our forced patriotism with the biblical floods we all enjoyed all over Europe. A few thousand who gave up and went abroad for fear that their feet would rot in the wet got stranded when their carrier went bust.

Pubs are finding it hard to keep going, especially in the countryside. The smoking ban brought in in 2007 has made it tricky to keep that convivial manly smoky atmosphere that we all either loved, or which stopped us darkening the door of a pub. In addition supermarkets sell beer so cheaply that people are staying at home to get legless and smoke themselves to oblivion in the comfort of their own front room. And they don't need to worry about getting home.

Some eejit has decided that children in this country should be taught creationism alongside evolution. This suggestion in being treated with some seriousness because the eejit in question is a science professor of some ilk. Not a very eminent one, I would venture to assume.

I am being forced off the computer because Daughter wants to use the computer and is playing the birthday card. (No pun intended...) Suffice it to say that I don't think any of these changes are making life particularly better. Shame, because I think so much could be taken from our situation and used to community advantage. I'll bore you with that later.

Sarah Palin. OMG.

I don't know where to start.

When I first saw the anouncement of Sarah Palin as John McCain's running mate I thought, in my knee jerk reaction way, "Oh good. A woman. That makes a change. Nice balance for John McCain." I'm a woman. I like to see the advancement of women. It goes with the ovaries.

The I saw her billing as "mother of five" and thought, "Well, yes, but if she's reached this stage in her political career then I'm guessing that the children have not been uppermost in her considerations over the past seventeen years." It'd be like calling George Bush "golfer". He does play golf, but frankly there are other important things about him. Like the fact that he's a congenital idiot. But I digress. I overlooked the fact that she's burdened her children with stupid names. Maybe they don't seem as stupid in Alaska. But someone ought to have told her (preparing for office as she obviously has been from the cradle) that in English English Bristol is slang for breast, as in 'Look at the Bristols on that.' I've no idea why that should be.

The I read that John McCain has only met her once for a half an hour and the whole illusion started unravelling in my mind. She's not a brave choice of running mate - she's a walking lure for the feminist Hillary-ites who might not go for Barack Obama.

Then I keep seeing pictures of her clad in fur with something dead at her side; sometimes she has her kids with her (alive). A little off-putting. I know Alaska is cold, but not even polar explorers drape themselves in dead animals these days. I mean, come on!! The photograph of her parents watching her nomination in their Alaskan home was remarkable for me because of the skins festooning the walls as much as for the total lack of expression in her father's face.

Then I start reading her credentials; pro-life, anti-gay marriage, pro-hunting [and how, pray can you be pro-life and pro-hunting? Make your mind up.] , in favour of creationist teaching and the tinciest bit sceptical about evolution. Hold on!! What??? Creationism?? And I bet she fulminates against the mad excesses of fundamentalist Islam without any sense that there might be some irony in her position...

And if you look at her eyes behind the glasses (which according to her she had to take to to tone down her attractiveness - I paraphrase, but that's kind of what she was saying...) there's this mad emptiness in there. A massive well of ambition and mad emptiness. Is it just me, or does she look slightly startled in those toothy staged family portraits, as if she's wondering who these other people are?

So so far, getting pretty dreadful. And then this morning I read that her daughter is pregnant. But the Republican party reassures us that we should not worry - Bristol will be keeping the baby and she will be marrying the young man who is the father.

Pro-life? Give me a break! What about poor Bristol's life? First of all they saddle her with a name that means tit, then she is brought up the oldest daughter, forever lugging younger siblings around and, one might suppose, instructing nannies on how to bring her up while Mum is chasing office. She is occasionally dragged outside to pose in blood-stained snow alongside some furry corpse. By accident (presumably) she finds herself pregnant, and one can only imagine the scenes inside the Palin household at that little nugget. As they are evangelical Christians, it is possible to believe that she feels that she has made her bed and must now lie in it by keeping the baby; just possible. But I cannot and will not believe that a child of seventeen decides voluntarily to enter into a marriage as an inevitable consequence of such a mistake. And where does this rumour stem from that the youngest and most ridiculously named Palin child, Trig, is not Sarah's but actually Bristol's? Why is Trig shoved into Bristol's arms for public appearances? Is Mr Palin so underendowed in the muscle department that he can't hold his own child?

So because they are 'pro-life', which means that they value the life of a mess of cells more highly than the person they have lived with for seventeen years, and because Sarah is on a mission to the history books, they consign their child to a miserable adolescence of duty-mothering and duty-wifing, and an early, miserable and widely publicised divorce.

I have immense and overwhelming distaste for a woman who foists her own dubious ethics on a child. And contempt. You should under no circumstances be allowed to bill Sarah Palin as a mother. It's as ludicrous as calling Dubya a golfer

Talent

It's been an interesting few months. There was a lot of uncertainty over my job, and it looked as if I would have to look elsewhere, and then the threat went away. But there's nothing like such a prospect looming to make you evaluate what you want out of life. And I realised that i really do love my job - I really love the company of children, especially teenagers, and I think I get quite as much from them as I am able to give them. I wasted many years of my life trying to shove my round psyche into a square career and it wasn't until my 30s that I realised that what I would be really good at, and what would therefore really fulfil me, was teaching. Like my mother and at one point my father. And like my grandmother. You can run but you can't hide.

It wasn't long before that that I also discovered that I love to write. I wrote stories as soon as I could write, and continued for practically all of my life but regarded it as something I did for fun, without working too hard at it. I am unfocussed about my writing, and I wasted too much time trying to write for the screen before finally giving in and admitting to myself that I am not good at forcing myself to write to someone else's rules. 22 steps and 3 acts and inciting incidents and avoiding the present continuous and all that - with the greatest respect, it's bollocks and akin to voluntarily going around in a straitjacket. So I'm indulging myself with prose at the moment and it feels very liberating and good. But now I really, really want to be published. And I think I'm good enough. This despite the fact that all I have to show for my endeavour so far aare a couple of letters saying 'nearly but not quite', a short story published in an anthology and a script in pre-pre-production.

Son has discovered, at ten, that he loves the stage. He's been going to a Saturday drama school for about two years but hasn't taken it very seriously. But last month he took part in three shows, one a school production of Bugsy Malone, one a drama school production of Oliver and one, after the first audition of his life, a professional Bill Kenwright production of Evita. And now it all makes sense! In Evita he didn't have that much to do, but he did it with aplomb and has now seriously got the bug. He loved everything about it from going in at the stage door to the quick costume changes to sitting in the dressing room with the other kids playing Nintendo games between scenes. He can't wait for the next auditions to come up. How fantastic to discover something you love at his age! It probably won't last but he should enjoy it. And now that we've spent two wet weeks in a cottage in Wales, he's also discovered that he is a book worm. In the last year he has read all the Alex Ryder books, all the Harry Potter books and sundry other series, but in the last fortnight he has read all seven of the Narnia books. That's the proper CS Lewis, and none of your abridged rubbish. I wasn't sure if he was old enough, but he devoured them at the rate of one a day. And as a result of all his reading he has started to write beautiful, complex stories.

Daughter has been named as a language scholar at her academy after taking some aptitude tests. (She's never knowingly learned languages, although whenever we've been abroad anywhere I insist that the kids learn to say at least 'Hello', 'How are you?', 'Please', 'Thank you' and 'Goodbye', and use them for our stay. Apart from anything, making an effort means that people are more willing to help you. There's nothing more depressing than seeing a Brit at the front of a queue with that fearful look in their eye saying, rather too loudly 'Do you speak English?'. Get a damn phrasebook.) I'm really pleased that someone has divined this talent in her, given that I'm a languages teacher. I sometimes feel that everything I have is going to die with me. I've also been told that she has a talent for mathematics and is a natural mathematician who should achieve an A* at GCSE. I was told this when she was eight. No pressure there, then. Curiously now that she's starting secondary school, she's discovering that the things she had a real talent for are not the things which other people think she's good at. She thinks of herself as a sportswoman, but while she's okay at sport and learns quickly it looks unlikely that she will ever excel in it. She learns violin, and I've now been told that she has a real talent for that, and if she works at it she could be quite special. But she wants to give it up. So what I intend to do is have word with her teacher and try to make violin playing more like sport - make her do grades quite quickly. Nothing motivates her like a challenge and then a piece of paper telling her she's done well!

Also while we were on holiday in Wales, the kids rigged up a ramp on the road and then launched themselves down a hill on their fronts on a skateboard, seeing how far and how fast they could travel. The one who wasn't skating ran alongside making sure that the other didn't get run over. Son decided to have a go while daughter was inside nursing a wound, and nearly did get run over, but threw himself off in an act of self-preservation. Both of them are covered in cuts and bruises but very happy. I looked on and wondered if that was how someone would discover that they had a talent for, say, the luge?

Anyone who's read me much will know that one of the thing I'm frustrated by is the amount of talent in our people which must go undiscovered. How many people are wandering around towns and countryside of our nation, slaving away at dull jobs, unaware that they might be a champion synchronised swimmer, or a world-class percussionist, or a peculiarly sensitive dog-trainer... or anything else? We can't test people for aptitude in everything. Middle-class families with a bit of spare money can introduce their children to a huge range of activities and therefore their children have much better chance of finding things which they love to do and which they are great at doing, but how tragic that for the majority of families this is simply not possible. What a waste of potential, and we don't even know how much potential.

Girls, girls, girls.

Girls fight a lot these days, apparently. They abuse alcohol and drugs practically from the cradle and shag slack-jawed youth and fight each other and film each other fighting each other on their mobiles. They might not have been given any moral scruples or aspirations by their parents but they've all been given mobiles.

Life's tough in some parts of our land. I read somewhere that nowadays chief executives ern about 17 times what their workers earn. Apparently not that much earlier in the 20th century the ration was 5:1. And yet what we're wanting from women is that they get themselves out into the workplace. Never mind if you have to rip your nipple from the squalling mouth of your tiny infant and stick in a dummy instead - the important thing is to take your rightful place as a paid up member of the Almighty Workforce. Doesn't matter what you do with that kid - get yourself out there.

So you have low-paid families who don't see each other, eat together, or have more than the haziest idea about what each other are doing; parents who probably hate their lot and drink too much themselves. Excellent. Then we send the kids off to primary schools which will coach them to pass exams at ages 7 and 11, and not bother about the rest of what the world has to offer, so that they can gain entrance to secondary schools which will teach them the subjects which are the easiest to gain 'good' GCSEs in, so that they can get 'good' ratings in the League Tables. And of course if children are particularly difficult, and aren't doing well, we can quietly not put them in for said GCSEs. So you have bored, alienated, under-educated children. Better and better. Then you spread the heinous and unforgivable dogma that teaching children from a working class background about high culture or high thought is elitist, and that what they need is to learn things that are relevant. By which they mean relevant to a life as a wage slave.

Then you make alcohol universally and copiously available to children and throw in a few drugs for good measure. You know what Marx said about religion being the opiate of the masses? Well, no. Opiates and alcohol are the opiates of the masses, except they are not dulled by these drugs, but enraged and filled with loathing at their miserable, meaningless lives.

And all they have is football and celebs and boozing and shagging and fighting. And then there are weird low-browed men who think that women fighting is sexy. Probably in the same way that they think girls who booze so hard that they're sick and have lost the ability to say no to them are sexy. So stigma is gone.

Then you light the touchpaper and retire and hope that they just all kill each other and don't get out into the light where the rest of us live.

The neglect and waste of generations disgusts me, as does the attitude that says that it cannot be otherwise.

Don't listen to me

People have a skewed idea of what democracy is. They think it boils down to the ascendancy of the majority view, but that was never the plan. In ancient Greece not everyone had the vote.

The essence of parliamentary democracy is where we accept that we don't know how to run things ourselves / don't have time or resources to run things ourselves / can't be arsed to run things ourselves and therefore we employ professional politicians to do the job for us, on a fixed term contract to be renewed if they're doing well, paying them out of the public purse and firing them when they step out of line. Our job is to do the hiring and firing. Our job is not to do the thinking for them - why keep a dog and bark yourself?

I looked forward to Gordon Brown coming in. I thought he'd do the sensible thing - come in, sdtand for election, win hands down and thereby give himself 5 years to make all the difficult decisions, accept the howls of opposition at PMQ and reassure himself that he was doing the right thing, and that by the time he came up for reelection, his record would be his election campaign. Thank God! I thought. Here is a man who won't be America's poodle! Here is a man who is not telegenic, who will not be charismatic, who will be rubbish on TV and is practically incapable of cracking a smile. Because he is a serious man. He is an intelligent politician. He is an intelligent man. He is the kind of man who can do great things for this country. Unfortunately he is also a massive wimp. Because he didn't stand for electuionm when he should have done, because he was worried to an unseemly and indecorous degree. And he's not making the tough decisions because he knows they are unpopular.

He keeps telling me he's listening to me. I don't want you to listen to me. I want you to lead me. I want you to tell me how it should be done. I want you to be better equipped than I am to run the country because, to be frank, if you're counting on the numbnuts in this country to tell you what to do, we're all f***ed. And we might as well be anarchists. It'd be cheaper.

That's Plato up there, by the way. About as keen on democracy as I am. And he didn't have to contend with what passes for it now.

Get out the red pen for th statute book

I like to fantasise on dog walks about what I would so if I were, even briefly, in charge of the country. If I have an opinion, I must test it and try to think about ramifications.

My latest idea is that upon entry to number 10, my first priority would be to rebuild a healthy idea of community, to rescue it from the nightmarish Thatcherite 'community of one' inhabited by the poor benighted youth of some hellish quarters of this land.

My first act in this regard, and it would not be quick, would be to go through the statute book with a thick red pen and get rid of anachronistic, outdated or superceded laws and then enforce the relevant and effective laws which remain.

Let's take the rash of drunken assaults which have seen such tragic, brutal, bestial murders committed by young people recently.

Under the Licensing Act of 1872, you can be done for drunkenness in a public place Let's enforce that, (but we could lose the extra penalties which apply if you're drunk in charge of a bicycle, pigs, sheep, cattle and/or a steam engine). The same act stipulates that you should not be drunk in a Public House; it would be nice to see bar staff refusing to sell drinks to drunks. It used to happen. When I was serving in a bar in the 80s we'd routinely refuse to serve drunks. Forfeiting profits, sure, but also preventing violence and a really bad reputation. (Martin was recently in the US and was impressed to see a barman refusing to serve some drunk people in a bar; impressed by the attitude of the barman, but also of the drunks, who after trying a couple of times to get friends to appear sober and buy drinks, acceped the ban and went away. Here barmen would be frightened of violence.)

The threat of violence could be dealt with under the same act with the charge of 'Drunkenness with aggravation': If you're drunk and threatening you can be charged for drunkenness with aggravation by refusing to leave a licensed premises when requested, and for being drunk and disorderly - a broad term and a useful one. The moment a drunk lout yells at an old lady or a lady in a burqa or whoever else they could be picked up on a drunk and disorderly charge. Or one of public drunkenness, or if they're under 18 then their alcohol should be confiscated and their parents troubled as stipulated under the 1997 Confiscation of Alcohol (Young Persons) Act.

And come down like a ton of bricks on shops which sell alcohol to kids, and come down like an equally large ton of bricks on gangs of kids who intimidate shopkeepers into selling them booze. And make sure that police are alert to emergency calls from shopkeepers. If you can't stop illegal supply of booze through legal outlets, then you must expect that the ramifications will be a widespread disregard for minor laws, and, by extension, major laws and the law itself.

So much more to say but I have to go to work...

Shits happen.

A friend of mine lost her husband 6 years ago yesterday. Yesterday also she received a text from a man she had been seeing for several months confirming that their relationship was over and there's no way back.

She had a great relationship with her husband, the father of her children, and for several years after his death licked her wounds and tended to her children. But then she decided that she was lonely and wanted to find love again. And in the time since then she has met a number of men who have dumped on her in a big way from a great height.

There has been a weirdo who checked her mail and her texts and God what else and who frightened the bejaysus out of her, a lothario who visited her but found excuses not to have her visit him and was probably married, and a couple of cowards who fizzled out with pathetic excuses.

Then lately came this weakling who crowded her, squeezing out all the oxygen around her, integrating himself into her family's life so that he occupied a central place, ingratiating himself with her kids. He came to take her out to lunch from work. If she had a night out without him he was often there to take her home. If she went away he might collect her from the station or the airport. He came around to cook for them, or brought goodies. The children enjoyed having him around. My friend felt spoiled. But the deal was that she was not allowed to ask to share his life; her access to him and his time was rationed. Lord knows that their short relationship would have been much shorter had she behaved as he did, because one night they had an argument about an arrangement he'd made and lied, or at least flim-flammed about, and he decided that he felt crowded and dumped her. After a few days silence, mealy-mouthed texts and emails arrived about how it wasn't her, it was him; how he needed to be on his own; how he hadn't had time since his divorce to sort himself out. How he needed to find himself. He's nearly 50 for crying out loud! Don't men realise what a laughing stock when they talk like that, especially when such a statement is going to make the hearer unpick the facts of the case and that will always, ALWAYS, make them look bad.

The lack of imagination of this man as exhibited by what he has done is breathtaking. He probably coungratulated himself on how well he was getting on with the kids. He thought he was doing a really good job. His ego was masturbated.

A message to all those divorces out there: if you need to find yourself, do it on your own before you involve some poor woman in your self-indulgent navel-gazing. If you feel you must indulge yourself and avail yourself of the attentions of some attractive and engaging woman, but you suspect that there might be some possibility in the future that you might feel the need to find yourself, then choose a woman without commitment. Don't sink yourself wholeheartedly into the life of a family and do all you can to put yourslef at the heart of it. And if you can't avoid that simple rule, avoid at all costs choosing a woman and children who have lost the most important thing round about the anniversary of that loss.

Decide if you need to find yourself before you do these things. Because it is not honourable to do so. It is not respectable and it makes you less of a man.

Now if anyone in the Bristol area would like to meet an engaging, lively, slightly crushed woman and her lovely family, see me, because I'd like to vet you first.

Andrew was right

I started to think about Andrew's comment that I was more effective when I wrote about personal experiences, rather than my 'big ideas' and it rather shut me down. I think he's probably right. And in real life I'm probably more effective when I just tell anecdotes rather than preaching at everyone. Certainly my kids think so. It's been a tough upbringing for them with Mum overstating the case at every turn.

So I think now that I'm restarting this thing I'm going to try and keep my comments on what's happening in the world a little more pithy. It'll be a useful discipline for me because pithy isn't generally what I do well.

I've been away busy with work and wasting time on Facebook, that most uiseless of 'social utilities'. This is going to be my open blog. I'm going to start a more scurrilous one where I can vent anonymously though. I think I need it...

Daisy Waugh - I think you're talking rubbish.

Every now and then I am heartily irritated by something I read in the paper. This is one of those times.

Daisy Waugh has written a piece in the Sunday Time New Review section about how she moved to the country, found it 'sterile' and came back with relief to London. She ends her article with this hilarious assertion:

"Go anywhere beyond the M25, where the houses are pretty and large enough to have their own utility rooms – and I get the feeling that lady-talk is pretty much all you’ll ever get.”

Well that’s settled then. Daisy Waugh, She Who Has Been There And Knows, has informed us that if you remain within the bounds of the M25, then you can hope to remain half-way cultured and potentially interesting enough to engage her in lively discussions of, I don’t know, the European Community, the war in Iraq, the merits of the Turner Prize show this year and all manner of other stimulating topics. Turn your car in the wrong direction off the Yellow Brick Road and your brain atrophies.

Daisy, Daisy, Daisy! Get out your atlas and have a teeny-weeny look at a map of the British Isles. There is London and then there other cities as well as the country. In fact there are even other capitals. I watched Kirsty and Phil trumpet the benefits of Edinburgh as the best place to live in Britain in 2007. Cardiff was up there too. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there were women in both places who not only knew where to source good slate, but could also discuss the state of the British film industry and the best methods of teaching your child to spell. (Not that I’m thinking of last night’s conversation or anything.) I don’t think they’re all obsessing about fairy cakes.

When we were first married we used to live in London, where I couldn’t bear the smug, boring, middle-class dinner conversation, mainly centred around what people either owned now, or were planning to own at some point in the future. Or how brilliant their children were and how much effort they’d made to get them into the frankly fabulous schools to which they had, against the odds, gained entry. It’s a particularly London phenomenon, that one, as you Londoners might recognise if you’ve noticed the look of puzzlement on non-Londoners’ faces as you warm to that particular theme (and trust me, an awful lot of you do.) But then it’s fair to say that I didn’t see my real friends often because I lived in Putney and they lived all over London. I now live in Bristol, where I socialise much more, with a much wider range of people. I drink too much, but that’s rather a function of having more fun than is probably appropriate for a woman of my age.

I went back to teaching a little while back after spending nine years working as a full-time mother and trying to write screenplays. My best friends, also full-time mothers, were a TV producer and a graphic artist on career breaks (and both, now that I think of it, refugees from London life.) The TV producer wrote a book in her time out, the graphic artist had a third child. Our wider circle included doctors, lawyers, teachers, a dentist, a speech therapist, a publisher as well as hairdressers, writers, nurses and all kinds of other people. We were, it is true, short on angsty, neurotic upper middles, but I don’t think any of us felt deprived. The reason we spent so much time together is that we were colleagues in the sense that we were doing the same job, and we would therefore share information.

We now don’t spend so much time together because in most cases we’ve drifted back to work and don’t have the same need to talk to one another about mothering related issues. And we’re all a bit more chilled about the business of parenting. Although I’d guess that many of them, like me, do fret about proper food, and make sure that homework is properly punctuated.

The reason I am constantly with my two best friends is that they are life-enhancing, challenging, knowledgeable, fascinating people. And feminists. And do you now what? We do sometimes discuss Farrow and Ball and slate. And I quite enjoy it, but it won’t take up a whole evening, or even a whole hour.

At this point I don’t want to sound like the large-breasted well-upholstered elderly correspondent to the Telegraph seated at her escritoire, but I’m going to. I’m sure that Daisy is a talented writer, but I’d suggest that authorship of what you yourself describe as ‘chick-lit’ doesn’t entitle you to a flag-waving place in the vanguard of the feminist battalion. I don’t even get much of an idea of what she thinks constitutes feminism. Many women (and some very right-on men) bandy the word around, pinning it to their chest like some badge which makes you, in some indefinable way, a Good Person. I know what I think it means, and I’m sure she knows what she thinks it means, but I doubt we’d agree.

Daisy, in summary, I’d suggest that you rethink the people you mix with. It sounds as if you headed out into the wild green yonder… and spent all your time with desperate refugees from London. What a pointless waste of effort. That’s as bad as my Polish cleaner who can’t speak much more English than she did when she arrived here eight years ago because she spends all her time with Polish people. Going somewhere and not bothering with the natives is a daft thing to do.

To other people tempted to take the chance and leave the M25, take a lesson from Daisy Waugh, and don’t do as she and her friends did. Take the blinkers off and acknowledge that there is more to provincial life than lounging in the spacious homes of other people who are patting themselves on the back for their bravery in leaving civilisation. Get stuck in and recognise that we’re not all prissy pinafored throwbacks. You might even enjoy yourself.

Spring Forward; Fall Back

Somehow, despite discussing it with my friends last night, I forgot that the clocks went back last night, so here I am alone in my dressing gown, second cup of tea on the go, Sudoku complete, having a good old think.

The papers last week were full of the fact of middle-class drinking. Apparently enormous numbers of middle-class, middle-aged women are drinking at hazardous levels in the privacy of their own home. We are told that one large glass a night can adversely affect one's health.

I have to throw up my hands and say "guilty as hell" to accusations of drinking too much. I further have to say that, although the numbers go down as we all get older, I am one of very, very many I know who booze quietly at home on a more or less nightly basis. And I'm not talking a single glass of wine a night here. I am an all or nothing kind of girl myself. I can quite easily go without for days but then if I open a bottle, it'll probably end up in the recycling bin by the end of the evening. A bit alarming also is the fact that although I'll be kicking myself the next morning, I won't actually feel physically that bad.

In fact I think I solemnly announced here a few months back that Iwas giving up alcohol for good. That would be because I had made a complete arse of myself and caused myself embarrassment on a scale not experienced since my teens. As long as I don't get over-excited, I don't do that, but I don't like the thick head and the tiredness and the urge to eat a great deal of unsuitable carbohydrate and drink Coca Cola. I do really want to stop but the thing is that nothing tastes as good as wine, especially with food. And I'm such a foodie! One month when Martin and I were off the booze, as we are once a year, we went to a really top restarant and had a fantastic meal washed down with water. It simply wasn't the same.

So what I'd like to do is to limit myself to drinking wine with food. I'm not going to makle any solemn commitments here because I rather know that they don't work, but this will be the aim...

Right, I'm off for a third cup of tea and a poached egg on toast. Mmmm. I love my solitude, don't you?

Friends from Africa

It's been a while, hasn't it?

Last week we had Godfrey and Florence staying with us. Godfrey is the Head of a fantastically impressive school in Jinja, Uganda's second city (see links). He knows more people in the British educational world than I do, by a country mile. He spoke on a panel at the Head Masters Conference about international links, having fostered many with schools in this country. Florence teaches primary school children in Jinja.

They are lovely people, and I'm proud now to be able to call them my friends. And I am absolutely set on joining one of the school trips over to visit them in the hometown they talk so fascinatingly about.

Bless you, Amy Winehouse

I don't care what anyone says, Amy Winehouse off her face is better than nearly any other singer alive playing with a full deck.

I just watched a video of her performance at the MOMO awards last week. Yes, she was wasted; yes, she looked like a juvenile rabbit trapped in the headlights; no, you couldn't really make out a word she was singing, but boy, has the girl got a set of lungs and the phrasing of an angel.

We need a great British soul/jazz singer like her. She's a rarity.

At the risk of sounding like a tabloid or Perez Hilton, I hope she gets the appropriate help soon.

Happy Birthday to me!

Yes, another birthday passes by. I should mind more than I do, if what I read in the papers is to be believed. There's a whole industry of 'lifestyle journalism' which would have you believe that every woman worthy of the name starts hitting the gym when they hit forty, as well as upping the expenditure on face and body treatments. The consensus is that ageing is a problem; something to be worried about. Well, I am here to tell you that it ain't necessarily so.

I am getting older. There you are. It's that simple. No amount of pounding the treadmill and hundred quid face cream or weekly facials is going to change that. As I get older my body gets less gorgeous, my face gets more interesting, and my mind improves. It's FACT. And you know what? In acceptance is liberty. Now I am more admired for my wit and my intelligence than for my looks, although my husband still thinks I'm a hot chick (well, hen), and his opinion is the only one I care about on that front. I've always liked that people get more interested in me as they talk to me and not less. I like targeting someone who hasn't noticed me at a party, buttonholing them and trying to fascinate. Doesn't always work, but gives me a hell of a kick when it does.

Things I like about getting older:

1. I'm not dead. As Woody Allen once said, "Getting older isn't so bad when you consider the alternative."
2. I don't have to pretend to like things because they're cool. When I told a class of kids that I love grammar, one looked sympathetic and said "Do you have a sad life?" I told him I didn't think so , but he might consider my life sad. How much do I care about the opinion of a 15 year-old? How much should a grown-up care?
3. I don't have to do ANYTHING because other people will sneer at me if I don't. I don't go on fairground rides, because I don't like them. I can admit that I never liked going to clubs. I hate sport; doing and watching.
4. I don't look up to stupid people. Kate Moss, Paris Hilton, Elizabeth Hurley (especially her - stupid cow), P Diddy and their ilk. Dumb, dumb, dumb and dumb. Not even pretty because they look so stupid.
5. I don't look up to, or envy, rich people. Don't get the whole Times Rich List thing. Who cares and why? Maybe I'm happier than most.
6. I don't aspire to be anything except a better me. I don't think anyone is my better and I don't think I am anyone's better.
7. I can like Billy Joel.
8. I have interesting friends.
9. I have a historical perspective on the news and can discriminate between informed reporting and uninformed reporting.
10. I don't get alarmed by food or health scares because I know the reverse will be proven within 5 years.

Life's sweet, even if my waistline's thickening.

SBO

There was a discussion on the radio this morning about the pay gap which exists between men and women.

At one point the interviewer asked the two panellists with some puzzlement something like the following: "Why is it that men whose partners become pregnant are not treated with the same suspicion at work that pregnant women are?"

To their credit they didn't laugh in her face.

Could it possibly be because men don't have babies? Sometimes the perception that the world should be a certain way overrides the common sense and blinds people to the fact that, actually, it isn't.

Memo to self: Don't listen to bollocks about the injustice meted out to women. It just makes you cross.

Oh, SBO, for those of you who don't know, stands for Stating the Bleeding Obvious.

September

Any home with school age children considers September at least an important an annual new beginning as January. For us it's even more so, especially this year when Daughter has just started secondary school a year early in Year 6, Son is now cock of the family walk alone in his old school, and Mum starts a new year with double the timetable in a third school. I haven't been near the computer to check email, let along blog.

Two thirds into the month I can breathe, glug my Lemsip and take stock.

She is loving her new school; Japanese lessons, swimming lessons, Science in a proper lab, lunches on the field and being able to pop along and gawp at the glamorous sixth formers; it's all fantastic for her. Never mind that she's sitting down to three homeworks assignments every evening and her school day is 50 miuntes longer than it was. She's loving it.

He's doing really well, relieved of the burden of a high achieving sister in the class above carrying all before in every arena of school life. He's bringing home 'I'm a superstar' stickers and doing all his homework.

And me? I'm shattered. I'm not the world's most organised person. I'm forgetful about quotidian detail while being able to remember the most esoteric details about all sorts of interesting stuff. So three schools' agendas to remember is driving me nuts. Too many balls in the air - they keep crashing down on my head. But having said that I LOVE my new teaching timetable; the kids, the material, the atmosphere. I love being more a part of my work environment and I'm thriving. I've started a film-making club with a member of the Drama department and it's all hugely exciting.

I read at the beginning of term that young children entering into reception classes show very high levels of stress. If that has been proven, then presumably they were subjected to tests. Might the tests cause the stress? And if they are stressed, might that not be attributable to the parents' attitude to the children's starting school? Children I know are wound up with excitement by the time they enter the schoolroom for the first time. The enjoy it because they are told they will enjoy it. I suppose if you tell your child that there is something to worry about, they will worry about it. Mind you, is not anxiety closely related to excitement? I'm sure chemically it must be. There seems no end to the range of ways that parents are made to feel guilty about their children. Memo to self - don't read these things.