Next project.

1. "Colin - Seven Ages of a Man" tracing the life of a man in seven loves, in the form of seven loosely linked novellas.

2. An adaptation for the screen of the classic novel by George Gissing "The Odd Women" in which he argues for the women's emancipation primarily through work rather than primarily through suffrage.

3. "My Perfect Life" a comedy for the screen about a woman who loses everything and goes to a life coach to try and start all over again.

Decisions, decisions.

Life imitating art, imitating a facsimile of life.

I've always been fascinated by the twin themes of memory and identity. It's what my book is about, the idea that you are everyone you have ever met and everything you have ever done. Not massively original, I know. Some French chaps called Sartre and de Beauvoir among others got there ahead of me about forty years ago. It was a favourite part of my French degree course and I've never grown out of Existentialism, although I do still think it's quite an elitist philosophy, in that people who have the opportunity to experience a great deal will therefore have the opportunity to 'be' more.

Anyway, I digress. My twist on it is that I think you are everything you think happened to you. Our brains work in very complex ways and I have no faith at all in the reliability of memory. Recently, to explore this a bit, I've made contact with lots of people I used once to know in previous lives. Their memory of the small period of time in which our orbits crossed is invariably different to mine, and not just in small ways. A guy I went out with when I was twenty apologises to me for having treated me badly when for years I have felt badly about my treatment of him. Another friend remembers me as being a frail thing, when I remember a bolshy, spiky person inhabiting my body. One woman whom I have always described as a former best friend from my first year of secondary school before I was sent back to boarding school, although she tried hard to cover it up, quite clearly has no recollection of me at all from that time (yes, I did suss you, Jax!)

My friends have always laughed at my habit of 'unhappening' things, and maybe I unhappened a lot of things I don't want to recall. I wonder what else I hold in my head is objectively true and what has been warped in my mind to fit some kind of desirable reality. Or maybe everyone else is wrong... It's probably a bit of both, but none of us will ever know, will we?

"The past is no longer the past" said one friend (he who apparently used me ill) when he responded to me on Facebook, and he's quite right. Ten years ago before the internet and social networking sites I would be happy with my construct of the past, would never have questioned it. People in my life would have come and gone and though I'd have wondered about them (as I do) I'd never ever see them again, or have a potted update of their lives from across the pond, across the years. I've been so shaken by this whole discovery that I think I'm going to curtail my searches and lave the past where it should be. In my head.

But I'm still left with the quandary as to how I ended up being the person I am today. Although in a way the fact that we take a more active part in constructing our own pasts means that we're all more intense versions of ourselves than we thought, because we have taken our own experiences and distilled them through a process of filtering out or adapting what we don't want to recall to create a very personal version of ourselves.

Might have to rewrite the book a bit... I think I make this idea implicit and maybe it needs to be a bit more explicit. In previous attempts at books I thought I was hitting people over the head with an idea and they haven't got it.

The slightly weird postscript to this, which I won't explore here, is that things I write about keep happening to me. Can't help feeling it's all linked with the above...

Oh dear...

I think I'm too thin-skinned to do this blog any more. Being accused of being Daily Mail-ish makes me think a) I must be shocking at framing my thoughts cogently, and b) Oh I don't know - I obviously don't know myself.

Volunteered to work with teenagers in care trying to help them practically in the transition from care-home to living independently. Not sure it's a wise idea right now.

The Joy of Old Friends and Books

Last night we had my book club's Christmas party here. A friend and I started the book club when we had both just had babies and felt as though our brains would never ever recover from the experience. It was for both of us as if at the moment when we'd delivered the baby we'd also let go of our higher-functioning brains, leaving us only with the animal capacity to feed and protect. So we decided that by getting together with friend to read and discuss one book a month we could give our minds a little exercise to keep them ticking over. So each of us invited two friends to join us and started up in June 1998. Our first book was Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt. In the years since we've expanded and contracted in numbers and my friend has left Bristol to set up a (now incredibly chic and comfortable!) hotel in Dartmouth with her husband, but we are back to six. Every month we get together and one of us cooks a meal. We eat and drink and discuss the book and bitch about our families and laugh our heads off. It's a landmark in our month. Every year we invite our partners to join us at Christmas and make a party of it.

Once I'd got the food out onto the table , I sat and looked out over my fantastically festive table and reflected on how much I'm enjoying the process of getting older with these old friends. I know so much about them because I've read books and discussed with them - it's amazing how much you reveal about yourself by revealing your reactions to literature. I know that Catherine responds almost exactly as I do to most literature and have to examine myself and my reactions when we differ from each other. Jackie, who was born twelve hours and about twenty miles from me, is the least likely to share my opinions. I know that Penny needs to love the characters to enjoy a book and always wants to know our opinions before she gives her own and that quiet Gill is the most adventurous of us and the most likely to embrace an unlikely proposition. Helen has the most unexpected opinions which she voices unexpectedly quietly...

In our time together we've read about 125 books, ranging from classics (Bleak House, To Kill a Mockingbird, Frankenstein) to poetry (Ted Hughes, Wendy Cope) to thrillers (Robert Harris, and a book about a contract killer which gloried in the wonderful first clause "After the man was dead..." ). We've read quirky books like The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall, which defies description, and whose target audience is definitely young men but which most of us enjoyed - I'd advise you to read it, and also The Motel Life by Willy Vlautin, possibly one of the most thought-provoking novels I've read. Then there's the plain mad, like The Wild Sheep Chase by Murakami. We also had a book written by a Somalian model about female circumcision which I couldn't take, not because of the subject matter but because it was so shockingly written. And Down Among the Donkeys about a donkey sactuary - why, Gill??? I picked a book once based on an interview I heard on Radio 4 which was a sort of Chandleresque mystery set in Aberystwyth, and yes, it was as dreadful as that sounds. Someone picked up a book which she thought her partner had recommended but got it wrong and handed out copies of a book he'd actually thought was utter tripe (and was!). There was a book by an American woman who thought going on a coach to Yurrup constitued the limit in daring travel... the intrepid traveller in our midst, Jackie, was outraged by it. Our favourite author is Ian McEwan; we've read three of his. And we've discovered and discussed Rose Tremaine, Iris Murdoch, Yann Martell, Bernhard Schlink, JOhn Simpson, Laurie Graham, Toni Morrison (my favourite!), Amitav Ghosh, Marina Lewycka, JM Coetzee, Monica Ali and many, many more.

I'd advise anyone to get together with a few friends and start reading. It's the most wonderful thing you can do with a group of friends. And pour the wine when you discuss - it makes the words flow.

After our January meeting I'll come back and tell you what we all made of Barack Obama's "Dreams of my Father", which I gave out to everyone last night. Topical, eh?

Etre et Avoir

I showed this wonderful film to my Year 10 class today.

It's a documentary about an amazing teacher in rural France who runs a tiny schoolroom with local kids ranging from the age of 5 to about 12 and it spans a year. It follows the children through their school life and occasionally delves into their home lives and it's utterly charming.

Monsieur never shouts. He handles everything with calm sensitivity and firm good humour. He's an absolute model of how to be in a classroom.

Even the boys were charmed by this slow, gentle study of life and people.

Breaking the cycle

There have been complaints, some from victims of child abuse, that the latest in a series of Barnardos advertisements is too shocking, and should be pulled. The ASA has ruled that the shocking images are justified.

Too right.

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=yFOcrZeMRUU

On their website Barnardos warn that children under 13 should not watch this without their parents' consent. It does appear on terrestrial TV though, although maybe it's only after the watershed. Anyway I don't stop my kids from watching things which disturb them. At 12 and 10 I don't think they're too young to know that they are very lucky to have the lives they have, and to start thinking of themselves as people who should at least want to make a difference in the lives of others who haven't had the same chances in life.

On the other hand, I have to confess to a slight worry that I don't know how worthy organisatins like Barnardos can help. I'm always tempted to hit the Donate button, but I wonder whether that's just me kidding myself I'm doing something useful, rather than getting involved at the business end and following through.

Off to investigate the possibilities...

When is exposure not exposure?

John Barrowman got into hot water when he exposed his genitals on the BBC. Complaints poured into the Beeb when he exposed himself during an interview on Radio 1. Yes, that's right. On RADIO 1.

Is it just me, or do you have to paint graphic pictures in your own mind to get over-excited about an actor saying that he's exposing himself? I haven't heard whether or not the interviewers were offended. If they weren't I shouldn't think that John's got much to feel remorseful about.

And yet he's solemnly made a statement abasing himself and apologising profusely for this offensive behaviour. If that's all that people have got to worry about...

Lessons in being happy

Apparently an overhaul of primary education in this country proposes changing the curriculum so that learning is done in six 'themed areas'. History and Geography will be sucked up into 'Human, Social and Environmental Understanding'.

Pupils should have the "personal, social and emotional qualities essential to their health, well-being and life as a responsible citizen in the 21st Century". This is being paraphrased as 'lessons in happiness'. I tend to the view that it would be beneficial rather to teach children the skills which equip them to get good jobs after school and that will make them happy. But then I like Aldous Huxley's view on this, which I have quoted before: Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7770469.stm

I'd be interested to know how much money has been spent on this 'root and branch' review. I'd be interested to know if its authors really think that their recommendations will improve the life chances of the children who pass through the schools of the future.

And I'm very glad that at the end of this year my children will be finished at primary school, because I think it's an absolute pig's ear of a proposal. When did reorganising a curriculum and renaming subjects result in an improvement of education? No, this is another example of change for change's sake, and addressing symptoms rather than looking at causes so that things appear to be better and nothing, absolutely nothing, changes.

It takes generations...

It takes generations to produce a Karen Matthews or a mother of Baby P. It takes generations of feckless mothers who somewhere along the line lose a grip on the fine thread which binds mothers and their children together. It takes generations of absent or voiolent or drug or drink-addled fathers. It takes poverty and the disintegration of society and community and the disappearance of any moral or ethical stop to an individual's feeling that all they have to do is to look after their own needs, whatever they may be, and whether or not the fulfilment of those needs means that the welfare and happiness of others is destroyed.

"Learning to love yourself is the greatest love of all." Er, no. It's not. That's the greatest lie of all. And a horribly popular one at the moment.

Ask a talent show contestant why they should win and they'll say "Because I really want it. This is the only thing I've ever wanted. I was born for this." As if that means that a lack of talent should be swept aside. Never mind what other people think, no matter if I have no aptitude for this, no talent, not enough talent; if I want it, I should have it. I believe in myself, therefore you should too. People are applauded for self-belief and admonished for lack of confidence. A lack of confidence sometimes stems from the ability to reflect - not always a bad thing.

Every time we tell a child how well they're doing when they're not really, every time we give them something they haven't earned, every time we gloss over errors and omissions we reinforce this idea that everyone is special, everyone is entitled to everything they desire. And if in years to come that means pizza and beer and 60 a day and taping a carrier bag to your baby's backside so that you don't have to change a nappy then, well, that's the extreme end of self-fuflfilment, but so be it.

Apparently the social service psychological profile commissioned on Karen Matthews worried about her "inability to prioritise the needs of her children over her own". No kidding. Despite this, though, they took the children off the at-risk register.

I once knew a woman very much like Karen Matthews. She had lots of children by different men. One of her children was fourteen and pregnant by a boy who was in jail. She was shacked up with a nineteen year old with whom she partied as her children shambled around the house making their own arrangements and trying to sleep through the heavy rock music which shuddered through the home all day and night. The kids were dirty and unkempt and on the at-risk register. They never had breakfast because Mum was in bed sleeping it off when they left for school on their own, making their own way in. Teachers were asked to 'keep an eye' on them. Apparently now there's a 47 page dossier issued to schools advising them what to 'keep an eye' out for (which of course all teachers have the time to read and inwardly digest). Back then we had to rely on common sense. One of her children was in my class and used to come in at 7.30, when I arrived, to sit with me and help prepare my resources for the day. He looked very proud when I said to the class as I used my flashcards "and Billy helped me with these". When his mother came in for a parents evening and sat opposite me, her hand clenched on the inner thigh of her unlovely toyboy, she gurned at me and said "He fancies you, does Billy." She couldn't imagine any other attachment between a female and a male, even a teacher and a child.

I've looked up that boy on social networking sites. He'd be in his late twenties by now. I doubt he'd have much of a chance of living a normal life. I doubt that if he's had children that he's a model Dad. But then I don't suppose she had the model Mum. I don't suppose she went home to a house redolent with the smells of childhood; no cakes baking, no fresh laundry, no sausages on the stove. Things don't go that awry in a generation.

So what do you do about it? That's the thorny one. In my teacher training I learned that whereas the link between any particular race and achievement has largely been broken, as has the link betwen gender and achievement (actually that one's reversed, but that's another issue), the most stubborn statistic in education is that your educational results result depend more than anything upon what your Dad does for a living. And if your parents do nothing, if they see no value whatsoever in education, well, basically, you're f***ed. (But God help you as a teacher if you suggest that loafing around all day smoking weed and watching daytime TV may not be the parental role model to end all parental role models, because you are stepping over the line.)

It's an interesting situation we find ourselves in right now. For decades professional wisdom has had it that a child is always best off with its mother, even if that mother is dependent upon drink or hard drugs, in an abusive relationship which she puts above the wellbeing of her child, feckless or helpless and unable to care for a child because of mental frailty. Almost regardless of anything social workers have bent over backwards to keep the child with the mother. Because there is a perception that because this adult person bore and gave birth to this small person they therefore always, always, have the child's best interests at heart.

And now the media is howling because the authorities have failed to remove children from mothers who lack this central mechanism, this instinct which entitles them to special regard. So now they bleat and the public bays for the removal of children from such mothers. There will be soon be an outcry in the other direction when women go to the papers with stories of children taken away from them with no reason.

Well I'm a hard woman, and I'm afraid that I think this rot has to stop. I'm really glad I don't have to come up with a solution and justify it and that I can just say something inflammatory and back away.

So here's an idea. If a woman "fails to successfully prioritise her children's needs over her own" why not leave her to her own priorities, whether that be her heroin habit, her toyboy with an extensive collection of child pornography, her violent partner, her drink or her idleness and greed? If we think that a mother is respected as a mother because she guards her child against all dangers, a lioness baring her teeth against an unfriendly world, then if she is not, why don't we stop thinking that her children's needs are best served by being with her? Give her help, give her guidance, try to see her do the right thing, but if she doesn't, change tack and look out for the child. Why not actually follow through on the assertion that a child's needs are paramount, and if they are not paramount to the mother, then the mother should relinquish her role as mother?

Let's divert some of the resources which are ploughed into keeping useless families limping along and put them into building up a really good care system, where care actually means what it says, and cares for children, rather than corralling them until they're sixteen and turning them out into an uncaring world unsocialised, institutionalised and unrecovered from their tragic beginnings. Let's spend money on turning all children's homes into places where children thrive and get over the horror and neglect which they were rescued from. Let's build up the bank of loving foster homes and adopters. Let's value people who love children and want to ensure that they have a launch pad into a happy adulthood over those who give birth to children and then carry on with their own selfish lives. Let's break the chain.

Luck + 10,000 hours = Genius

So it's official then. If you have a modicum of talent and you work really really hard, then you will get very good at your chosen field.

Who knew?

Well, practically everyone with a functioning brain, I would suggest.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/books/article-1088303/Luck--hard-graft--Genius-OUTLIERS-Malcolm-Gladwell.html

We had post parents' evening chats with both kids. In both cases this resulted in red faces and sobbing. In one case it resulted in a terse text frommy daughter saying"Bullies!" .

Because you see as parents we're only supposed to say relentlessly jolly, upbeat things. Unfortunately I'm not good at not saying what needs to be said. I'm also fairly rubbish at paraphrasing to soften the blow. I reason that if I say things very gently they won't get through. I reason this way because I have tried it and it doesn't work. What I have to say is:

"You're not working hard enough."

It's not enough to be good at something. You have to work at it if you want the top marks. Sometimes children have a rather X Factor approach to success. "I want to be an A student, and I'm good at everything, so why am I not getting top marks?"

Well, as a wild stab in the dark, probably because you do the minimum to get by, cut and paste instead of researching properly and writing out the results, and spend more time trying to get people to compliment you than actually doing the work better.

Just a guess.

The other one needs to spend more time focussed on his work and less on larking around with his mates. It's not rocket science.

But probably the fact that they witness me grafting and not getting anywhere doesn't help... But then I'm not quite at my 10,000 hours yet. But I will be soon.

Another Day, Another Hangover

I think I've been drinking too much on a regular basis for about thirty years. There are days when I can feel my liver complaining.

Recently, in the last five years or so, the amount I'm drinking has risen. I'd actually be ashamed to admit how much I put away on an average day, and how most of these evenings by the time I go to bed I don't feel drunk, but just a bit numb...

As a result I don't sleep well, often waking up early in the morning and then worrying myself awake to the alarm at six. I have something of a paunch, and I rather know that that's something to do with wine. And an awful lot of the time I just rather hate myself for my lack of control and my immoderate nature.

In the past I've announced here that I'm going to stop, and then failed to do so, because I'm weak-willed. It's all a bit tragic.

Just thought I'd share.

Off to have a vat of tea...

Angels and devils.

Apparently Haringey Children's Services find it incredibly difficult to attract social workers to its team. I wonder why. I'm guessing that this means that in order to tackle the monstrous workload which they have the caliber of staff which they do attract is not the highest. And those who are there are overworked. Government guidelines say that no social worker should have a caseload of more than twelve chidren to deal with, whereas the overstretched staff whom Haringey have managed to keep are coping with caseloads of between eighteen and twenty. After the recent storm of criticism it will be even more difficult for them to attract staff.

Perhaps when the enquiry looks at what went wrong, they might address the profile of social workers in this country. Damned if they do take children away and damned if they don't, they perform an intensely stressful and emotional function, and the only time anyone pays them any attention is when something goes horribly, tragically, appallingly wrong. Or when a woman goes to the press with a story about how mean, vindictive, heartless social workers have ripped her innocent child from her without any justification at all. And yet there must be stories where the intervention of a social worker has made infinite difference to the lives of children and families all over the country. Have you ever heard one? No, nor have I. A girl I teach wants to be a social worker. I had to suppress my look of astonishment and dread when she said this. A more distressing and thankless job it is difficult for me to imagine. I can only guess at the stress levels which must be endemic in the profession. From the recent coverage you'd think that the social worker had joined in the beatings.

Someone who knows what he's on about said something interesting to me yesterday when I talked about a case of two children , a fifteen and a sixteen year old, who had beaten a man to death. I made some disgusted comment about them and my friend pointed out that they had probably had a brutal life, one not a million miles from that of Baby P, only they survived. You don't come out of a loving, supportive happy home and get your thrills kicking the shit out of people.

And yet we look at pictures of angelic, tortured and murdered children on one side, and police mugshots of dead-faced, hate-filled teenage thugs on the other and never consider that there might be a relation between the two. Both are damaged; both probably have known much misery. The older ones are hardened. And maybe they are hardened because they are the children of brutalised or neglected children, who themselves were dragged up by inadequate parents of their own.

It's a tough one, but at some point society has to look beyond today's awful, awful headline and see what needs to change.

Without pointing fingers at scapegoats. I object to it because it doesn't help.

Love and hate

Things I love:

1. Being a mother; love like you couldn't have imagined before they came along.
2. Being a teacher; best job in the world. Everything they say in those ads? It's all true.

3. Seeing friends greet each other on the street; smiles are infectious, and it always makes me feel that's all is right with the world when people are pleased to see one another.
4. Plain digestives with Philadelphia and strawberry jam. Mini cheesecake - yum.
5. Dark evenings and lights on mean Christmas is on its way.
6. Nights out with friends - laughing til I cry.
7. When the writing goes well and seems to flow from my fingers before I've thought it....
8. Winter clothes - no one looks better in summer clothes except supermodels.
9. My Dorothy shoes; red, high heels, platform soles, sequins, bows - what's not to love?
10. A night in with a bottle of wine, a DVD and Martin.
11. Historical fiction that sends me scurrying to the reference books.

12. Silence. So difficult to find.

Things I hate

1. Chewing gum. Why?

2. Anybody texting when they are in my immediate company.

3. The fact that this country allows poverty and brutality to pass from generation to generation so that children either die at the hands of their families or grow up to brutalise others.

4. Stupid or venal politicians.

5. The Rich List. Why?

6. The prison fashion of doing up your trousers under your arse. It makes you walk like a duck and you can't run for a bus.

7. Spitting. Not sexy.

8. People who say proudly stupid smug git things like "Charity begins at home" or "too clever by half".

9. All of my family being engaged on different electronic media and not talking to each other.

10. Petty officials who think they have power because they have a uniform.

11. Guantanamo Bay.

12. Mud. The dogwalker's nemesis.

Plus ca change...

Someone told me a joke today which I remember hearing at the time of the last recession:

Q: What's the difference between a merchant banker and a pigeon?

A: A pigeon can put a deposit on a Porsche.

Back then the word yuppie replaced the word banker but that apart it was word for word the same. The papers were full of lip-smacking relish about the upcoming gloom, and everyone giddily wondered how we got here so incredibly suddenly when just a few weeks ago everyone had been high on the loadsamoney ethos of the time.

The papers warned about the terrible dangers of deflation in the same slightly reproacheful tones that they'd used weeks earlier about the dangers of inflation. They told us that it was our duty to go out and spend to stimulate the economy at the same time as gleefully predicting massive job cuts. And if anyone dared suggest that there was something slightly unseemly about the press's role in the economical vortex, then they came over all sanctimonious.

Now as then, a slightly more upbeat tone, or at least a balanced one, might be a good idea.

And then there's Haringey Children's Services. Another sickening blast from the past. My brother was an expert witness for the enquiry into the Climbie murder and the failure of the social services to prevent it. An now we have this pitiful toddler. What we've read is appalling enough, and no doubt there are details which we have been spared. It's just too dreadful. That a child should have the misfortune to be born into that parentage, and then for that woman to meet up with those men is just a catalogue of appalling events...

The insistence on lynching the social services make me uneasy though, as does the queue of professionals queuing up to say that henceforth pursuing the interests of a child will mean that social workers will need to take a more combative and challenging line with parents. Does this mean that social workers start off from the position that parents are trying to pull the wool over their eyes? Are they, because they are on the side of the child, necessarily on the opposite side to that of the parents? Because if that is the case, they will be able to do very little - sad to say, the parents will always have more power over what happens in their homes that the children or the social workers. And sure as eggs is eggs there will soon be a story where a child is removed from parents whom children's services suspect threaten its wellbeing and there will be howls of protest about heavy-handed social workers ripping innocent families apart.

I don't pretend that I have an answer. But I'm pretty sure that shouting very, very loudly and acres of newsprint vilifying social services won't help as much as taking a deep breath and a long, cold, hard look at what needs to be done. Preferably out of the public eye.

How Markets Work

Martin just sent me this. It's over a year old. Eerily prescient, I think you'll agree.

http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/187.html

So a pair of comedians could see it coming - why couldn't the sharp minds in the city join up the dots?

Hello Friends!

This will be interesting I've just put a link to this blog on my facebook profile.

At least I thin I have. Which is not to say that I actually have.

Having been ranting anonymously to no one in particular on and off for a couple of years,let's see how it goes...

Anyway, if you're stopping by, hello! Hope you read a bit.

Right. Once I've hit POST I'm off to see if it's worked!

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.