Education, education, education?

So the great pendulum of ‘who-to-blame-for-unruly-children’ has swung back in the direction of parents this morning. Eminent academics at Cambridge have discovered that parents are spoiling their children and as a result, said children are running riot in classrooms across the country, with poor teachers unable to control their charges.

The story is an old one, and so is the process of blame-laying. Time and time again these sorts of stories hit the headlines. One week we can blame the teachers for not having sufficient backbone to deal with the children they face across their desks (we could blame the teachers’ parents for this one, I guess, for giving them too easier a ride whilst they were growing up). Next it will be the turn of diet to take the swing of the pendulum-of-blame. It may be the diet we feed them at home (too many chocolaty breakfast cereals and not enough fruit), or the slop apparently lazy dinner ladies serve up, accompanied by turkey twizzlers and about as much nutritional content as a piece of cardboard (though that may admittedly contain more fibre than the average toddler’s diet).

Or, like today, it will be the turn of parents to take the brunt of the criticism for a nation of hyperactive, over-indulged youngsters hell-bent on destroying the education system with their selfishness.

So is it not time we found another story? One which encompasses all of the culprits, but puts them on the stage, under the spotlight, illuminated by their contextual circumstances? We have teachers, rushed through a training system following graduation from a university degree where they were awarded proportionately higher grades for a lower standard of work than their predecessors ten years ago, because the university system is under pressure to pump out ever more 1st Class degree results because students are after all paying for the privilege these days (or rather, their over-indulgent parents are paying for the privilege).

Or how about a food industry controlled by supermarket giants pushing the boundaries of mass production to ever greater extremes, in order to put the cheapest produce on their shelves as the highest possible price for the sole purpose of driving up their profit margins?

And what about one of the poor farmers who might be locked in a vicious circle, producing perfectly round apples, with no blemishes or irregularities, discarding copious amounts of perfectly acceptable fruit each week, because the supermarket will refuse to take them. Hey, next week they may even refuse to take the farmer’s produce at all if there are too many slightly too elliptical apples in the crates, and where does that leave the farmer?

A farmer who may be a parent, working ever more crazy hours to try and bring in a decent enough living to support the family. A farmer who probably has to do a weekly shop in an out-of-town supermarket giant, because all the local shops have closed down under the monopoly that is food retailing these days in Britain. A supermarket which is pumped full of sweets, processed ‘foods’ aimed at kids, toys and plastic-fantastic distractions of all descriptions to tempt their children (who they have to drag round the shop with them because they can’t shop during school hours because they are working and they can’t afford childcare after school because their income is barely keeping apace with the cost of living).

And talking of keeping a pace – what about that poor dinner lady, struggling to put nutritious meals on the table for several hundred children each day, for less cash-per-head than the average prisoner is allocated for their meals. It took Jamie Oliver to shout at the government to make a change in that system. But why should it have needed a celebrity to make them sit up and listen – why couldn’t they have taken notice of parents who had been complaining about the state of school meals for years? Or to the head teachers and dinner ladies who tried repeatedly to get across the ludicrous situation they found themselves in, only for it to fall on deaf ears? Government don’t listen to us ordinary mortals.

Let’s return to the poor teacher or even the university lecturer, struggling to make ends meet on a salary which reflects an out-dated notion of teaching being a vocation, reward enough in itself, not requiring adequate financial recompense. Struggling with ever more paper work and marking which eats into the evenings and weekends, taking them away from valuable time they could be spending with their children.

Children who pester, and pester, and pester.
Because that is what children do.
And the parent gives in and buys them a treat for being so good and letting the parent get on with their work.
And so the child is being spoilt.

Ok, so the report is highlighting super-spoiling, as in the case of a child who having broken a game-station in a fit of rage, was then bought a replacement by the parent. But what do headlines like today’s do to those of us who do occasionally give in to pester-power, because that is the only way to cope in a society where value is measured only by price-tags, and progress is assessed only in terms of profit-margins, and children are not stupid – they hear the message pumped at them constantly through the television, they see the message hidden in the glossy images seen all around them in magazines, comics, billboards and on the back of cereal packets (even the ones that don’t contain chocolate).

Consumption, consumption, consumption.

If that is the message the world is giving them, how can we blame the parents for giving in?

I blame the government, for giving in. For rolling over in submission to the supermarket giants, the advertising industry, the global brands. If the government gives in so easily to the pester power of these corporate giants, what message does that give to parents?

And they tell our children that they shouldn’t be swayed by their celebrity idols, they should listen to their teachers instead for guidance and education. What, like they listened to the teachers about school dinners? They surely didn’t listen to a celebrity instead, did they..?

Education, education, education?
Yea, whatever….

What in heaven's name...?

I walked in to the living room this morning to find my kids at each other’s throats as usual. Not an uncommon start to the day, but there did seem to be a heightened sense of tension on this occasion. As I arrived on the scene legs and arms were disentangled, small fists full of hair were released, and a whirlwind of small bodied appeared at my feet desperate to get their version of the story out first. A lot was clearly at stake.

Poppy it seems had gone to the window and staring out at the bleak rain-drenched scene requested that God intervene to stop the downpour so we could all get to school without the need for umbrellas (her Tweenie one is broken, so she had a vested interest in God turning in a positive result).

Sadly, as is so often the case, God’s intervention did not appear instantaneously and Poppy therefore turned her back on the window, stomped back to the settee and promptly declared God does not exist. Now her theory is of course nothing new, indeed very eminent social theorists have staked their reputations on making precisely the same pronouncement – I’m thinking here particularly of Steve Bruce’s scholarly best seller ‘God Is Dead’. But he didn’t have 7 year old Lily to contend with.

So I had walked into a scene which has been repeated in different guises for centuries past, and will no doubt continue to be so repeated for many centuries to come. Lily tearfully defending her right to believe in God, Poppy declaring God was defunct. In our case it ended in the youngest administering a kick to the eldest and all hell breaking out…

…and so began many of the wars we currently see raging across the world I guess...

Growing old with Gere..?

We had rather a late night last night. One of those rare occasions when the kids are packed off to my mother-in-law’s for a sleepover. A few years ago an evening to ourselves might have been spent down the pub, a few games of pool, many pints of beer, followed by a night of passion and a late lie-in with bacon butties and copious amounts of tea.

But age is catching up with us. We went for a sedate meal, drank a couple of bottles of wine and were in bed fast asleep before midnight – desperate really to make the most of a night of uninterrupted sleep.

For poor Bill however it was not to be an uninterrupted night of sleep. Eating rich food and drinking too much sauvignon blanc so close to bedtime left him tossing and turning and resorting to sitting in front of the cricket at four in the morning, lamenting the slow rate at which his aging body now digests food and drink which his younger body could have brushed off without so much as a belch.

So this is what the future holds – even those nights when we are footloose and kiddie-free we will have to indulge in measured moderation for fear of the repercussions on our aging bodies.

This morning I dragged my own aging body, creaking at the knees and woozy in the head to the kitchen to make that life-restoring first brew of the day. Bending down to get the milk from the fridge I had to do a double take. For on the bottom shelf of the fridge, sandwiched between a wooden board and some cling-film was Bill’s Silver Spoon. Now I’m not talking teaspoons here, this wasn’t some absent minded placing of the spoon in the fridge with the milk. But The Silver Spoon – ‘the most influential and successful cook book in Italy’ according to Amazon (my Italian ex-brother-in-law apparently disputes this claim, but my good friend from Naples, a keen chef, would side with Amazon).

Anyway, we are digressing from the point (another sign of an aging and rambling mind?). There it was on the bottom shelf, chilling nicely next to the cheese and crème fraiche, and I decided that this must definitely be the first sign of dementia. Putting your cookbooks in the fridge is surely up there with using denture glue to clean your teeth? (Which is what I saw my Grandmother do once during the onset of her Alzheimer’s).

Of course not all signs of aging are necessarily problematic. Bill visited the hairdressers this week and was told by the hairdresser that he had a lovely thick head of hair and it was unlikely he was ever going to go bald.
‘That’s as maybe,’ he replied, ‘but my wife’s waiting for me to go grey’.
(There’s something about grey hair, don’t you think?)
‘Ah!’ replied the knowledgeable hairdresser, ‘the Richard Gere look. Yes, a lot of women want their men to go grey like Richard Gere.’
‘I guess so,’ he replied.

There was a pause.

She snipped around the nape of his neck then progressed the conversation with another observation: ‘Only not many of them actually do, do they?’
‘What?’
‘End up looking like Richard Gere?’ she said.
‘I guess not.’

Very wise that hairdresser, clearly not losing her marbles yet. Unlike me and my sweet William.

The cookbook by the way was to flatten some pork belly. Gordon Ramsay’s idea apparently. Now there’s a man bordering on madness, and those wrinkles…

Scarred for life?

I think I've mentioned that we are a little bit Potter-tastic in our house right now. Bill is still Professor Snape and the girls roam around in homemade Hermione Granger outfits, spooking ghosts out of cupboards, casting spells on unsuspecting shoes, playing quidditch in the garden on fishing nets and turning every mealtime into a feast in the great hall. And when they aren't doing this, the Potter video is on. Now I've heard of too much TV being bad for the kids. Children, we are told, see incredible acts of violence and stupidity acted out on their screens and mindlessly recreate them at home without a thought for the consequences or an ounce of understanding about the difference between fantasy and reality. Alternatively, the argument goes, sitting in front of a screen all day weakens their capacity for imaginative play and stints their social skills. Well this is how it works in the May household...

I was engaged in a rare moment of domesticity the other afternoon, doing something dreadfully dull like washing up, or emptying the laundry basket, or something equally mind-numbing, when I heard a little squeal from the living room, where the wonderful babysitter had been keeping a watchful eye over the kids for me for half an hour. (We call the babysitter 'TV'. And I know that is evil, neglectful parenting, and I should be ashamed of myself, but that's life).

A moment later Lily appeared, dressed from head to toe like a mini Hermione Granger, and sporting a brand new pink scar to the left of her nose.

'How on earth did you do that?' I asked.

'The TV did it,' came the reply.

Now I don't know about you, but as a general rule I'm somewhat suspicious when children try to blame someone or something else for their own mishaps and misdemeanours. Especially when that something else is tucked away in a corner and really quite difficult to get your face within range of, especially if you want to come out of it with a physical lesion.

Bill's immediate reaction was of course to laugh.

'What were you trying to do?' he roared, 'kiss Harry Potter?' (needless to say The Philosopher's Stone video had been on at the time of the unfortunate event. Babysitter-TV seems to have a limited range of interests at the moment - Harry Potter and the Night Garden. We're happy with both in our neglectful-parent kind of way).

'No, she was trying to get onto platform nine and three-quarters' pipped up Poppy (quite funny for a four year old I thought!).

'Perhaps one of Harry's spells backfired and hit you from out of the television?' Bill queried.

'Lily's been marked with the curse of Voldemort!' I couldn't resist throwing my bit in by this stage as Lily's face had turned the same beautiful shade of pink as the now throbbing scar on her nose. She skulked from the room and went back to decorating a set of Harry Potter snap cards she is making.

So what was it, do you think? A stray spell rebounding round our front room? A poorly engineered attempt to join Harry on Platform 9 and three-quarters? Or is the Dark Lord really back and amongst us?

One thing I am sure of though, when Lily came to me later that evening and admitted in a very small voice that she had indeed been trying to get to Hogwarts, even though she knew it wasn't really the best way to go about it, I was proud that her vivid imagination could carry her far enough to even attempt the impossible.

Lily is having tea at a friend's house tonight and has taken her Harry Potter wand with her to show him, and I have every confidence she will have turned their house into Hogwarts by the time I get there to collect her, just like she has at home. I just hope he has the imagination to keep up with her... and their television doesn't have any sharp corners.

So despite Lily's latest escapade, I will continue to let my kids watch TV. As long as they continue to show me that their imagination can build it into (usually harmless) imaginative play.

Where's a gay husband when you need one...?

Stuck for anything to watch last night on TV, and too apathetic to do anything more constructive, Bill and I half-heartedly watched half of Kylie Minogue's White Diamond.

Kylie, beautiful and petite as ever, was revealed in all her, for want of a better word, 'niceness' - no star-studded tantrums, no footage of her making unreasonable demands of her gigantic hard working crew. In fact no 'warts' at all. Just sequins.

Perhaps this reflects the fact that the film was made by Kylie's very own 'gay husband', close friend and companion, who would understandably want to portray his close buddy in the best possible light as she makes her comeback after a difficult interruption by cancer. Perhaps it simply reflects that she is just a thoroughly nice girl.

But having said that, I should imagine it is much easier being a thoroughly nice girl when you have an entourage of assistants and a sprinkling of gay husbands to help you out. Exhausted after the first night of her comeback, Kylie flops, face down, onto a luxurious fluffy sheepskin. Her voice over says she was too exhausted to do anything, couldn't even open her eyes or make conversation. He darling gay husband is on hand to witness the moment for us all from behind the camera. And nobody disturbs her. It is a truly serene moment.

What joy it must be to have such undisturbed moments of peace. Ok, so she lives her life in the peculiar bubble-world that is showbiz - unable to do her own shopping or order a round at the local pub for fear of being spotted and crushed in a clammer of well-meaning and not-so-well-meaning people eager to get close. And she is recovering from a serious, horrific and life-threatening illness. But to be able to literally stop the world by just closing you eyes and lying face down in a rug commands a control over the everyday that is beyond the reach of most ordinary mortals whatever our circumstances.

So I've decided the solution to all my problems would be a gay husband - or perhaps a small collection of them. I will have a gay husband in the kitchen to prepare fantastically exciting meals for me and do the washing up afterwards (ok, so I have a straight husband who does this, but he does tend to expect me to do it occassionally). I will have a gay husband in the bedroom who will be on hand to bring me my morning cuppa and always respect my unquestionable need to wrap myself in the duvet like a swiss roll (he will bring his own duvet). I will have a general gay man-about-the-house husband, who will keep the place looking lovely and give me encouraging smiles and hugs whenever we meet. I will have a gay husband at work to keep all those troublesome problems at bay without me ever having to know about them.

And most importantly I will have a bubble-gay-husband. It will be the important job of my bubble-gay-husband to allow me to collapse at the end of a busy day, face down into my not so fluffy rug and ignore the world completely. He will act as a barrier between me and the kids, between me and my real husband, and between me and my other gay husbands who may be flocking around trying to do helpful things for me. He will siphon off unwanted interruptions from telephones, email, door-to-door canvassers and work. And he will do all this whilst gazing adoringly at me from a safe distance.

Yes, I think with the help of my band of gay husbands, the world might look a much more manageable place.

And Bill, well he agrees too and can't wait for them to start work. Says they'll make his life a lot easier too.

I should be so lucky, lucky, lucky, lucky...

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Precious parcels

So they've managed to lose the details of 25 million child benefit claims in the postal system. The big questions now seem to be should we change our bank accounts, or just the passwords? Should Alistair Darling go or is the resignation of Paul Gray sufficient?

But the big question in my mind is what about our children? Somewhere out there are all of their details - their names, their dates of birth, addresses and National Insurance numbers. My children are far more precious to me than the non-existent contents of my bank account, and the thought of anybody other than doctors, their school and my family having those details feels more invasive than the possible threat of bank account details being at large.

But talking of precious packages, I must tell you the priceless thing one of my precious little parcels came out with the other day. Bill was driving them back from ballet one morning. Lily had won the Ballet Bear for trying extra hard at the box splits, and he was squashed in between her and Poppy on the back seat.

Stuck in the perpetual roadworks that seem to be dotted around our town at the moment, Lily stared vacantly out of the window and fiddled with Ballet Bear's paw:
'Daddy?' she started...
'Yes?'
'What's a fraggle?'
'A fraggle?' Bill's mind working overtime as he tried to make sense of this latest in a never ending list of bizarre questions that emanate from our two.
'Yes. A fraggle.'
'Well, it's sort of like a muppet.'
'A muppet? What's a muppet?'
'Well a kind of puppet.'
'So a fraggle is like a muppet which is a sort of puppet?'
'That's right.'

Pause.

Why's it called a fraggle?'
'Well, it was a TV show in the 'eighties. It was based on the muppets and they were called fraggles.'
'Oh.'

Silence for a little while as Bill inched his way forwards in the traffic and remembered fondly the days of Fraggle Rock when children's popular culture seemed somehow more innocent.

'Why do you ask?'
'Well, whatever they are, there's one on the side of that lorry. Look - F-R-A-G-I-L-E. Fraggle.'

Even Ballet Bear looked confused...

Perhaps the muppets at HM Revenue and Customs could do with going back to basics and asking someone what 'data protection' means, and why it is an important part of our contemporary information-driven culture. It's just a thought...

Master of the Dark oops...!

As the rain and wind have been battering the windows all day, Bill, Lily, Poppy and I have hidden ourselves away in the front room with the fire on and the curtains drawn. The real world safely hidden away, we have entered our own little magical wonderland. Our well-worn copy of The Philosopher's Stone has been on the video about six times in a row, and the afternoon has been spent re-enacting various aspects of life at Hogwarts.

Lily usually takes charge as Hermione, Poppy variously bringing up the rear as Harry, Ron, or some imaginary character they have added. I am usually Professor McGonagall - unless my mother is with us - when she takes this part and I am relegated to Madam Hooch (I personally find her much more fun anyway; I've always had a penchant for broomstick flying). Bill invariably ends up as Professor Snape. He likes nothing more than striding round the house shouting instructions at the children in a booming dramatic voice, so the part suits him down to the ground.




Introducing a new plot to the game, in a cunning attempt to get Lily to close the dining room curtains for me, I said: 'Quick! Miss Granger, close those curtains before the Master of the Dark Arts catches us!' Lily dutifully sped over to the curtains and used her plastic 'Hermione wand' to drag the curtains together.


Then she looked at Poppy - at this moment playing Ron;

she looked at me - busy in the part of Professor McGonagall;

she looked towards the kitchen where she could hear Professor Snape conjuring up some magic potions for tea....

'Mummy,' she asked, her mind trying to work our where the extra actor was coming from 'who is the Master of the Dark Arse?'


I think I'll have to check with JK Rowling about that one...