3kidsnojob

Pigeon holed in one

2009-06-19T06:51:00.000-07:00

Since the swine flu episode, there are tell-tale signs that my popularity, never high with those at the top, has waned even further.

My pigeon hole has been moved. It's now right next to the inward opening door.

It's also so low down that anyone entering the staff room in a hurry stands a real chance not just of decapitating me but, with a little effort, favourable draught and suitably placed receptacle, achieving a hole in one.

Then there are the memos. Hate mail I could deal with. For one thing, I could mark it out of ten, write 'Next time, don't forget to include your name,' and then blu tack it to the notice board, in the sure knowledge that the offender would be pathologically unable to resist writing out any spelling mistakes three times and thus be unmasked.

But anonymous hints and tips on report writing is another thing altogether.

'"Sings well unaccompanied." "Enjoys performing to an audience."' I read out to the deputy head. 'Am I really that incompetent?'

'No.....' she says, though with her eyes cast firmly downwards as if hoping to find her next cue woven into the heavy duty carpet fibres along with the biscuit crumbs and tea stains. 'Though I do think you might consider checking that all the children you do actually write reports for are still at the school.'

This is in reference to my glowing tribute to a pupil praising his inate musicality, impressive vocal range and prodigious recorder skills. It was written at speed just as the second bottle was taking effect and despatched to the relevant class teacher with a glowing sense of a job well done. As, indeed it would have been, if only the child hadn't turned out to have left after only one term.

I look through the latest sheet of photocopied comments again, and a pattern seems to emerge.

'Oh, my God,' I say. 'Listen. "Needs to spend more time practising to improve performance skills. Needs to develop sustained listening skills" I don't think these are about the children at all. They're about me.'

The deputy head stares down at the list. 'I think you could be right,' she says. 'Especially this one. "Needs to listen more carefully to instructions and respond more positively."'

'What rubbish,' I snort. 'What did you say, anyway?'

Breakfast coarse

2009-06-19T01:06:00.001-07:00

'Had a good time at the sleepover?' I ask Deborah, as I collect her from Vicky's house.
'It was great,' she says. 'We stole all the DVDs with sex and violence, pretended we were asleep, then watched them till 3.15 am. Actually, we didn't need to pretend because Vicky had gone to sleep on the kitchen floor. And guess what we had for breakfast?'
Chez Vicky, it's anyone's guess.
White wine and nachos?' I venture. 'Vodka smoothies? Coco Pop crudites?'
'Breast pancakes, of course,' says Deborah brightly.
'Well, of course,' I say, looking back down the street to see if a social services SWAT team is even now breaking down Vicky's door.
Not that much later, I call Vicky to ask when exactly it was that she decided on anatomically correct portion control as the way forward in children's catering.
'It's a special mould,' she says, sounding, for her, a tad shamefaced. 'Lindy gave it to me ages ago and I'd shoved it in a drawer and forgotten about it. Little buggers nicked it. Still, it could have been worse,' she says.
'Why?'
'They didn't look in the other drawer. If they had, it would have been penis on toast, instead.'

Swine fever - the musical!

2009-04-28T15:16:00.000-07:00

I arrive at school in a wave of hysteria. Actually, I arrive everywhere in a wave of hysteria. It's just more obvious in a school, where at least half the staff seem to have been recruited for their ability to exist in a state of ordered calm that borders on the unnatural.

Like everyone else, I've been calculating the odds of staying in employment with or without a pension. Thanks to swine fever, the good news is that none of us will need to worry about being jobless - or reaching pensionable age.

The bad news is that because of swine fever, this is because we'll all be dead.

But there's one silver lining to it all. Our fabulous new pandemic coincides with planning for the summer plays. Asked to consider animal-based themes for reception, I've had some corking ideas.

There's the semi-staged version of 'Old Macdonald's Farm,' whose climax coincides with the line 'and on that farm he had some pigs,' which is follows by mass hysteria and a stampede for the exit.

Or we could do 'Three little pigs,' with the three hastily crossed out and replaced, successively by 'two,' 'one' and, 'Oh my God, I've got the sniffles,' followed by mass hysteria and so on.

Chortling heartily at my own wit, I pull open the staff room door and by way of greeting shout, 'We're all going to die!'

Half a dozen unnaturally serene faces stare back at me. Half a dozen faces of unbridled serenity - and Sasha's.

'Ah, Mrs Philistine,' she says. 'Had you met the chair of governors? We'd arranged he'd be attending the staff meeting today to get to know you all a little better.'

At this point, it's hard to know what to do for the best. Whipping out a fetching little blue face mask, as seen in Mexico, but with the logo 'Get off me, you swine,' and then tap-dancing backwards out through the door again and into the street would be the best option if, as unfortunately isn't the case, I possessed a) a mask and b) the ability to tap dance.

But thank heavens for quick-thinking colleagues.

'That's one of the songs for the summer play, isn't it, Mrs Philistine,' asks the deputy head. 'Surely I remember you saying that you had a really good idea for a gripping adventure yarn. Didn't you....?'

For once quick-witted enough not just to recognise but act on a cue, I nod in violent agreement.

'How clever of you to remember,' I say, gratefully. 'And I think I've just remembered where the music for it is. Excuse me. I must see if it's there.'

Later on, I thank her.

'Do you think Sasha was fooled?' I ask.

'Pigs might fly,' she says. 'And if they do, let's pray they sneeze on her as they whistle past.'

Ancient notes from my wall calendar.

2009-04-21T10:22:00.000-07:00

This breaks two rules. Well, one really, but so important they wrote it out twice, or should have done.

Never indulge in cute kids' quotes.

And here I am doing it. Soon I'll be reduced to eyeballing babies in prams (I always find I look away first) and nodding benevolently as the recorders shrill the note of death into my brain.

These are things that Beth and Leo said during 2000 that I noted on our wall calendar as being memorable in some way. My mother had died recently (30th December 1999 - honestly some people are just so selfish). I assume that's why death crops up a bit in their conversations. Or maybe they just like talking about it.

At the start of the year, Beth was six; Leo nearly four and Deborah not yet born.

January.
No quotes. Everyone too sad.

February:
Beth (playing the same bit of music over and over again until I could have screamed - and may well have done): 'I'm greedy with my favourite songs.'

March:
Me, to Beth: 'Where's Dad?'
Beth. 'Upstairs.'
Me: Can you go and get him?'
Beth: Why? - I didn't put him there.'

May:
Leo, talking about his breakfast with certain note of resignation:
'I'm preparing for boiled eggs.'

June:
Beth (to me)
'Don't get cross while I'm at school. I'm not there to control you.'

August:
Overheard from a children's cartoon:
'Subdue him, then bring him to me.'
Not a quote from my children, but felt it was an instruction that would help my parenting enormously.

September:
Overheard as children playing schools together:
'Granny could be death monitor.'

November
Beth:
'Let's play we're death.'

December
Beth, after Francis had endured particuarly horrid dental treatment and was complaining about the pain.
'At least we have my teeth.'

That's quite enough. Phew. I'm just going to go and crush a few hamsters underfoot until I'm back to normal again.

Sweet and sour

2009-04-03T09:53:00.000-07:00

"It is simply not fair to expect 115 children to sit quietly and patiently during assembly when 5 other children apparently can't be bothered," says Sasha.

"It is simply not fair to expect twelve members of staff to sit quietly and patiently during assembly while one other member of staff is allowed to monopolise the whole bloody thing," I hiss to the deputy head.

It's 25 minutes into the penultimate assembly of term and Sasha, the great orator, is in full flow. The bell for playtime tolled long ago, but not for us, apparently.

As, once again, she takes us through notable incidents from her childhood, favourite holidays and friendships, it's dawned on me that in her hands, assembly storytime is simply a form of budget therapy. Where else, after all, can you ramble on as long as you want, secure in the knowledge that your audience - like a therapist - is compelled to listen to you utter the first rubbish that comes into your head but - unlike a therapist - without the power to evict you when your time is up?

All we need now is to train the children up in synchronised supportive head-nodding gestures, install a comfy couch next to the piano and hang a note on the hall door saying, 'The doctor is IN' and Sasha's monologues can gain the medical legitimacy her subconscious has probably been crying out for for years.

'So now let's all stand and sing our special Easter song,' says Sasha, who has reached the denouement of her story and compelled the children to search for a moral. My choice: 'Persuade your parents to emigrate to a country where compulsory education starts at 8,' isn't, apparently, an option.

Our Easter-themed song is an unfortunate choice. Unfortunate, that is, because the title, frequently repeated in the many, many verses, is 'Chocolate Dreams.'

It wasn't a problem until Francis looked over my shoulder as I was typing out the words and, unasked, offered several non-infant school-friendly definitions of what exactly these might be

As the children reach the second chorus, stretching the word 'Dreams' over several long, long bars, I catch the deputy head's eye. Obviously she's been talking to Francis or, more likely, subscribes to 'Doubles Entendres weekly,' because I see reflected in her face what I know is already in mine - barely repressed hysteria.

There's nothing for it. I play a few crashing chords, then stop.

'What is it?' says Sasha.

'Er.....I thought we should do some sort of hymn,' I venture. 'As a balance.'

'Very well,' she says, with unwonted benevolence - that last therapy session must have exorcised a fair few inner demons - 'If you want.'

Blindly, I pick out the first hymn I can find. It's 'All things bright and beautiful.'

We're doing fine until we get to the line about the purple-headed mountain. There's what can only be described as a suppressed giggle from the direction of the deputy head but somehow, we reach the end.

'I would stay for longer,' says Sasha, 'but I've got some visitors to see.' Casting one suspicious look round the hall, she leaves.

You can almost hear the thwack of a thousand intensely visualised arrows thud into her departing back.

'Never play that song again,' says the deputy head to me, out of the corner of her mouth, as she leads a class of small children out to play.

And, on reflection, I don't think I ever will.

Playing your cards right

2009-04-01T13:17:00.000-07:00

'What about that one?' asks Beth.

'No. Sorry. Too .......green.'

'Well, how about this?'

'No...it's that rolling, endless landscape. It's like a peep into eternity.'

'It's not, Mum. It's just some fields and things. You're reading too much into it.'

We're in town and I'm in search of a greetings card. Beth is currently being Perfect Child and, given her behaviour in the last episode, quite right too.

The card has got to be blank, neutral yet cheering but in a restrained sort of way.

Yet another friend has been diagnosed with some grim sounding ailment and is about to be whisked into hospital for tests, more tests, surgery and no doubt a bonus dose of MRSA if she fails to express sufficient gratitude for her treatment.

So it's card time. And there's nothing like hunting for one whose picture balances empathy with a judicious amount of optimism to throw me into a kind of shop-induced coma.

I have only to see the words 'blank inside,' on a dinky piece of folded cardboard to feel exactly the same way.

'It's those pictures,' I tell Beth. 'They're all landscapes with hills. And what do you get with hills?'

'A great view? Snow? Sore legs? I dunno.'

'Valleys,' I say, with a certain bleak triumph.

'Yeah......So?'

'The Valley of Death,' I say.

She looks as blank as one of the cards.

'So what you could read into that card is an implication that they might not get better.'

'She'll just be pleased to get a card. Nobody analyses get-well cards.'

'I do,' I say. 'Somebody sent me a picture of lillies in a vase once and it took Francis two weeks to convince me it wasn't a death threat in code.'

We gaze together at the rows of stationery.

'And that's another thing,' I say. 'Have you noticed there's never anything living in those blank cards.'

'There's trees. Flowers.'

'Yes, but there's no animals. No people. Nothing apart from endless vegetation. What does that suggest to you?'

'A bunch of crap artists who couldn't draw animals.'

'No. It suggests the solitude of death.'

Beth gives up, chooses a card for me and propels me towards the checkout. She is, sadly, bigger than me, and I am powerless to resist.

Just after we've paid, Vicky sends me a text announcing the arrival of an exciting and possibly fatal new illness in one of our previously disease- free friends.

'Is there anything I can do?' I ask.

'Shouting "God's a ******* **** might help,"' she texts back. Despite myself, I laugh out loud.

Bloody hell

2009-03-26T08:02:00.000-07:00

This was going to be something a little different. Something ....ooh, even a little poetic. Warm round the edges (or am I just mixing that up with incontinence pants - it's so hard to be sure these days) and a little soft and cuddly inside (not incontinence pants, then).

I was going to write about the end of term, today. About how the school felt after the pupils had left for the hols and all the other teachers - except me - had set off to get drunk. How odd it feels to be inside a place designed exclusively for mass use, defined by noise and activity - at least some of it purposeful - when it's empty.

That was before I got home, though, and had all poetic thoughts driven out of me within a very few minutes.

I'm going to add a warning now. The following scene involves bodily emissions, a dog with degraded tastes and my darling eldest daughter's disposal of items signalled in ladies' loos with those paper bags tastefully adorned with a woman in a crinoline.

So....I arrive home. In one of my token nods in the direction of housekeeping routine, I have remembered not only to put on a wash this morning but, even more surprisingly, to take it out again on the same day. Marvel if you will.

When Beth first started her periods, you could always tell because for several days each month, the house looked as if we'd hosted a series of 'come as you are,' parties for slaughterhouse workers, or staged a no-expense spared on the effects production of Macbeth, with particular emphasis on the murders.

She's got better, no question, but only because we told her that if we had to replace the bathroom carpet again, she was paying.

But there are still gaps in her understanding. Like her inability to believe that, amazingly, there is no sanitary towel fairy who will come round each night and remove all offending items, sweep them into some fragrantly scented bag and leave some money for them.

There is, however, a dog with a cracking sense of smell and no discretion.

A dog, moreover, which, encouraged by Beth, likes lying on beds. Ideally, the biggest bed in the house...

When we leave this morning, I ask Beth, then Deborah, to make sure our bedroom door is shut. They both assure me it is. Fool that I am for failing to read the secret message concealed in their smiling, positive assurances which is undoubtedly on the lines of, 'Oh, for God's sake, who knows? Who cares? Check the door yourself if you're really that desperate. And why do you worry about everything?'

I almost feel that I don't have to supply the denouement. But here goes. Don't feel you have to read it.

So I go upstairs with the washing and hear the guilty rattle of the dog's collar from our bedroom. (The cat, naturally, is lying all over my printer downstairs looking smugger than you would have thought possible, and sporting a virtual speech bubble that says, 'I told her not to do it but she would, anyway. Disgusting, isn't it?')

On the bed is the dog. On the bed round the dog are what look like pinky-orangy shreds of material. There are 10 or 15 of them. I shout at the dog, who disappears downstairs and then wonder whose scarf she has been chewing.

Then I look a little closer at the shreds and see, in the centre of one of them, a small bit of turqoise string. It's then that the realisation dawns, especially when I notice that not all the pinky orangey markings are confined to the shreds of material. They've magically inserted themselves into what was, when I left the house that morning, a nice, white counterpane.

If I need to be more explicit, forgive me. This is as good as it gets. But I tell you now, it's all true what they say in the ads. By gum, Smith & Nephew take pride in their workmanship. And talk about value for money when it comes to the sheer volume of material they cram into those tiny little tubes.....We should all be proud of them. And as for the absorbency. Crumbs!!!!

I don't always use my blog as therapy but I am now. Because writing it down is stopping me doing what I so dearly want to do now......find the dog and beat it to a pulp, drive to Beth's school, drag her out of her classroom and beat her to a pulp, then hole up in the house and wait for the NSPCC and RSPCA to sort out which one gets the pleasure of arresting me first.

But I won't, you know....

I've done the liberal education thing. We didn't have a party to celebrate the onset of periods. And, in retrospect, that's just as well. But I'd thought that my 'this what it is, this is where it goes, and that's what you do with it afterwards,' talk was, if not definitive, one of the best of its kind.

Perhaps not. Or was I just too liberal, to the point where periods and their associated accessories are so much in the open that, what the hell, you let it all hang out? And I do mean that quite literally.

If you haven't thrown up yet, thanks for reading. And let's hope the ST fairy is up and flying tonight. And that she's balancing a large bottle of vodka on those blood-stained, fragile little wings.

Putting the sick in music(k)

2009-03-24T11:01:00.000-07:00

It's whole school singing time, the not-to-be-missed weekly singalong special that all the children love. Or so we tell them, anyway.

We start off with the rainbow song.

'Take a little bit of red.......and a little bit of orange. Add a bit of yellow...and a bit of green,' I sing, feeling grateful for the growing short-term memory problems that should ensure I remember none of this within an hour or so.

As we romp in a wholesome fashion through the colour palette, I notice that the reception child nearest the piano is obeying the song instructions all too literally. She turns first scarlet in the face and then, seconds later, sickly green.

As we enter the blue, violet and indigo phase I shout, 'Really big voices, children,' and she rises magnificently to the occasion. Waves of vomit cascade out of her mouth, drenching her and her companions, and start lapping over the lino and towards my feet.

In less time than it takes to say, 'Cripes, have you got the pot of gold down there, too?' I've leapt up from my seat and am carrying on with the song from the safety of the corridor outside while other teachers who, unlike me, seem to have suppressed their gag reflect (you probably get it surgically removed as part of today's training course) are assisting her with kind, compassionate looks and a yard-high pile of paper towels.

The rest of the children, like me, shrink away from what's fast becoming a small lake and finish the song huddled together at the furthest side of the hall.

'What about early playtime?' suggests Mary.

'Only if you're sure,' I say. 'Alternatively, I'm sure there are a couple of songs I could theme to the occasion. What about 'Way, hay and up she rises?' or 'Miss Molly had a dolly who was sick, sick, sick.'

While the hall is swabbed with sawdust, disinfectant and, for all I know, lashings of green jelly for the purposes of coordination, I escape to the staffroom.

There, Mary is eyeing a stack of milk cartons. There are eight. All are unopened and all have an expiry date of several days ago.

'Should I risk it?' she asks, possibly rhetorically.

'Why not?' I say. 'Give me a few minutes while I run off a copy of 'The Rainbow song' for you and fill a bucket with sawdust and we all could keep ourselves happily occupied for hours.'

An education in mortification

2009-03-13T10:23:00.000-07:00

As the old saying goes, 'When humiliation flies in at the window, self-esteem makes a quick, abashed departure down the fire exit.' Something like that, anyway.

And this week, it's as if some minor god, holding a giant rota - a bit like the one we have for break duty - has decided that it's my turn to experience a little soul-detoxifying mortification.

We're in the staffroom, mulling over break time topics like who ate the last chocolate biscuit or whether the child who unexpectedly pushed the door open to show us all her fabulously suppurating finger heard me shout a word unbecoming to the teaching profession as I accidentally photocopied 200 instead of 20 copies of my song sheet, when Mary suddenly quizzes me on my life.

'What do want to do when you grow up?' she asks me, quite seriously.

It's hard to know quite how to react. Should I obey my primal instincts and hit her very hard on the head with one of my ukuleles until she aplogises, or accept her question as a tribute to my inner youthfulness and answer it?

'I think I'd probably be doing the same thing, only better,' I say, equally seriously.

'Here,' she says, 'I hope I didn't offend you. I didn't really mean it the way it sounded.'

Next, towards the end of that same breaktime, I text Francis, starting with a casual endearment. Nothing too saucy, yet definitely tending towards the intimate.

Mary interrupts me to ask something about yesterday's lesson with her class and, as I press 'send', I realise that I wasn't paying attention - and that the dynamic new head of music shares Francis's initials and is next to him in my contacts list........

The phone has helpfully programmed itself to delete all sent messages after 0.0000000001 of a nanosecond, so there's no record. When I ring Francis to check, I get a recorded message.

'Help,' I say to the deputy head, explaining the situation. She laughs heartily. 'I know what to do,' she says and, without further ado, rings the dynamic head of music to tell him that if he's had a vaguely suggestive text from his older, dowdier, less dynamic colleague, he should immediately delete it.

'He thought it was hilarious,' she reports back, guffawing. 'And so did everyone else who was listening.'

'And had he got the text?' I ask.

'Do you know,' she says, laughing even louder.'After all that, I forgot to ask.'

But there's more to come. With a few minutes spare at the end of the lesson, I am overcome with the spirit of Joyce Grenfell and, playing some different styles of music to Reception, exhort them to be, successively, corn in a field, cantering horses and scarecrows.

At the end they line up and one of them puts up a hand. 'Mrs Philistine,' he says,'I know why you got us to be scarecrows.'

'Why?' I say, for once moderately interested and hoping for some penetrating insight that might enrich all our lives.

'Because you're wearing your scarecrow trousers!' he says, triumphantly.

'I'll have you know,' I feel like saying, 'That these came from Whistles.'

Instead, I smile weakly, send the giggling youngsters back to their teacher and head, once more, for the staffroom, arming myself with a ukulele on the way. The children do not know what they do, but Mary is a different story. One more crack about my Peter Pan approach to my career and she may need a bit of life coaching herself - in A&E.

Journey into fear........

2009-03-07T13:03:00.000-08:00

'So,' I say to the deputy head, 'Here's my risk assessment form for the music festival. Where do I begin?'

'It's not very complicated,' she says. 'Just time-consuming. You just have to think through all the stages of the journey, work out what might happen and what steps you'd take to prevent it.'

'And you reckon that's not complicated?' I asked.

'Oh, yes - I'd forgotten,' she says, ignoring this. 'Then you have to assign a number to indicate just how risky you think each hazard might be.'

I take the form away and study it. Ten of our six and seven year olds are performing in a concert. Their challenge, if they choose to accept it, is to leave the school, get on a coach parked right outside the school, get off again immediately opposite the doors to the theatre, go in, sing and then repeat the same journey in reverse order.

I take the form to the staff room. 'Help me,' I say. 'I can't think of enough hazards.'

'No problem,' say my lovely colleagues. 'What about tripping?'

'Surely they won't be on Class A drugs that early in the morning? They add such a nasty aftertaste to the Cocopops,'

'No - trip hazards. Consider the risks inherent in just leaving the school. You may see just an ordinary path from the front door to the coach. To a health and safety assessor, it's almost literally a minefield. Blackbirds, pebbles, slow-moving squirrels, unexpected fly tippers......at any moment a surprise object might appear and cause a child to fall over, resulting in minor injuries, possible concussion, definitely shock.'

'I had no idea it was so dangerous,' I say. 'What preventative action am I allowed to suggest? How about posting an armed guard by the front door several hours before we leave, enabling them to blast all surprise objects out of the way with machine guns and flamethrowers. Or perhaps we could just get Sasha to fix them with a level one laser glare. That'd vapourise the lot.'

'It's good,' says someone, 'but it may be too long to fit on the form. And expensive. I'd go for the budget option.'

'Which is?'

'Ensuring that one of the teachers walks ahead of the children and checks for hazards as you go.'

This agreed, I move on to the next phase of our journey into fear....the coach journey itself.

'You could accidentally leave a child behind. And there's always vomiting or accidents to fall back on,'

'So .....let me guess. I'm thinking....secure the children within a portable, neutron-generated forcefield with a breathable goretex lining that is permeable to sick, pee and poo?'

'Again, nice - but costly - and hell if you forget to dissipate the forcefield before you attempt the swing doors at the theatre.'

The solution turns out to be a small cardboard object, shaped like an inverted cowboy hat and apparently designed to slop only dribs and drabs of sick into a helping teacher's hands.

Technique number two is a bag of spare pants and trousers.

Then there's our top secret weapon. Many, many headcounts.

'Headcount, headcount and then headcount again. And don't forget to headcount the teachers, too, in case any of them try to run away.'

What nobody actually says is what happens if your headcount doesn't add up. Or if you end up with more children than you left with - something that, I'm assured, has happened several times.

Assuming we make it on to the coach - something that I'm beginning to realise may well be an impossible dream - we have to contend with the actual journey.

What if the driver collapses with a heart attack, we're attacked by aliens, the Satnav fails and we end up on a sardine trawler off the Outer Hebrides. What then.....? What then......?

'Put a paper bag over her head, someone,' says the deputy head. 'Hyperventilating again. Honestly, these music teachers. They just can't cope with the pressure.'

'You'll thank me,' I say, though now in somewhat muffled tones. 'When one of us is forced to kick the driver's body out of the way and steer the bus off the pavement and away from the crowds of nuns, toddlers and fluffy kittens that will no doubt be out for a quiet walk at that very moment, or we resist the first onslaught of the giant slugs from Planet Zog using only emergency reserves of council grit and some of the higher recorder notes we've learned, you'll realise I was right.'

'Get the second bag,' says the deputy head. 'And this time, tape it up until it's time for assembly.'

No great shakes

2009-03-02T11:59:00.000-08:00

Teaching music offers many things, but nothing in greater profusion than opportunities to wonder when it was exactly that you accidentally swapped your life with some sad, middle-aged git with an infinite capacity for self-abasement.

And, look, here's one of those opportunities right now.

I am sitting on newspaper in the school hall. In my hand is a packet of dried mung beans. By my feet are several tupperware containers and a smallish child.

We're on what these days is called a learning journey. Normally my learning journeys begin or end in a pub. Preferably both. Not today, though. Today, I am encouraging child A to meander through a landscape dominated by the creative and exciting sounds made using said beans and tupperware containers.

The idea is that I do this without in any way attempting to influence the process This is so I can observe Child A's creative play, record it and tick off another box on the form.

Ten minutes later, we're still sitting there. Child A is now holding the packet of beans in one hand, the tupperware in another and looking at them with the air of someone who would rather be somewhere else, which makes two of us.

I point to the tupperware, then the beans and, through the medium of mime, suggest that Child A attempts to unite both.

Child A eventually takes the hint. A few minutes later, beans are cascading into the tupperware and being swilled about.

"What are you doing?" I ask, brightly.

"I'm shaking. I shake it," says Child A. For truthful responses, it couldn't be bettered. With that level of accuracy, it's a witness protection programme in the future, for sure.

"And what sort of sound are you making?"

"A shaking sound."

"Does it remind you of anything?" I ask. Child A pauses. Outside, rain drums down making, to my mind, a sound remarkably similar to that of dried beans falling rapidly on to plastic.

Child A looks blank. I walk to the window and look out as the rain, heavier now, droplets strikingly mung-bean sized, cascades down the windows. I lean suggestively towards the playground.

Child A looks, if anything, blanker, but with a possible undercurrent of terror.

"OK......What about popcorn. Do you like popcorn?" I ask, desperately, abandoning all attempts to avoid leading questions. "Popcorn makes a sound when it pops, doesn't it? And I like clapping, Don't you. All those loud claps....lots of clapping."

We both lapse into silence. I sense that one of us is about to call for help. I am worried that it might be me.

"So does that sound remind you of anything?" I ask, as beans and plastic reunite in a flourish of rain, popcorn and applause-like sounds.

"Shaking," says Child A.

"That's great," I say. "Probably time to go back to the classroom, now."

Repressing a sobbing sigh, I draw a line through my notes and wonder if the next class will care, or even notice, if I'm curled up under the piano, clinging to the sustain pedal and sobbing my heart out over a spilled packet of mung beans

Me and the dried legumes

2009-02-21T13:43:00.000-08:00

It's late-ish on a Saturday evening and instead of propping up a bar somewhere, a femme fatale with nowhere to go but underneath of the nearest table, I'm fine-tuning my lesson plans.

Up till now, I've been able to teach without having to communicate much in the way of detail to my lovely colleagues.

On the whole, it's probably a safe assumption that what with Harvest Festival and Christmas plus class assemblies and summer productions filling up a lot of the year quite nicely, you can probably - without taxing your powers of imagination too much - have a fair idea of what music teachers are up to in their lessons.

But now, thanks to government regulation, that's no longer enough - especially when it comes to reception children. I have, not just to teach them, but to observe them, listen to them and write down their comments so that I can make sure that each one is developing on government lines.

I have until the end of June to confirm that each child 'moves expressively to music. When creating music he or she explores rhythm, tempo, pitch and/or duration and shows awareness of repetition and phrases in music.'

Naturally, it has nothing to say about what happens if they don't do any of these.

To make absolutely sure you understand what's required, you're given the following example as a guideline.

'Molly wants to make a sound like the rain shaker. She spends a long time dropping beans on to the drum and talks about the sounds they make as they bounce on to it.'

How long is a long time?

Am I doomed to see precious seconds, minutes, hours or even days of my ever-diminishing lifespan being frittered away while the nation's four and five year olds do me the honour of sharing their deepest throughts to the accompaniment of dried beans cascading on to drum membrane? Is it possible I might even die, drowned in a sea of pulses and post-toddler platitudes?

But I've got off lightly. Reception class teachers have to complete, apparently, well over 100 observations during the course of the year. I ask one what she thinks.

"They're leaving the procession in droves," she says.

So as I turn to a fabbo song book, I'm struck by its title:

'Alleluya - 77 songs for thinking people.'

Clearly, too many people in education have been reading the other version - for the unthinking ones.

Government, death and the over 50s

2009-02-08T06:17:00.000-08:00

As my daughter hits 16 this year, I’ll be hitting 50. Liberation and new adult privileges are hers for the taking. But surely that’s the case for me, too…..isn’t it?

Everywhere I look there’s a plethora of information telling me how much I stand to gain from blowing out those five decades worth of candles.

Car insurers love me. All their ads say so. At last I’m officially too mature to pack my car with friends and head off to the nearest supermarket to do wheelies in the car park.

House insurers love me. Their ads say so. Yup, at 50, I'm so streetwise that I can spot a cowboy builder by his swagger; so security conscious that I’ve had the vestibule papered in Neighbourhood Watch stickers.

I’ve even stood outside the front door and attempted to hook my own keys through the letter box the way burglars do, just to make sure I’ve stashed them a safe distance away.

And I own a carriage clock – and a vintage pack of Rizlas. Good heavens, what more can anyone want as testimony that I’m at once cool, yet sensible? Matured, in fact, into the ideal citizen.

So as I sashay, virtually speaking, on to the Over 50s section of the government’s own website, DirectGov, I’m feeling pretty confident about how the outside world views me and my fellow (though mature) coolsters?

Then I start to read and am struck by a growing sense of bewilderment. Surely this is some hideous mistake? I check again.

And, yes, it’s definitely is where the two score and ten mob come in. It’s just that our beloved government’s notion of how my post-50 life is going to be lived is distinctly at odds with mine.

Take work. I have every intention of doing some. Lots, actually – and not in noticeably different way to how I do it now. And everyone else I know feels the same, economic climate permitting.

You’d never guess it, though. Work appears to be largely off the radar of the civil service drone who put this section together, presumably on the assumption that the over 50s are doing well just to move about a bit, let alone make it into a paying job.

There are just two headings, ‘Looking for work,’ and ‘Working to suit you.’

These are followed, immediately and ominously with the third and final section, cheerily entitled ‘Losing your job’ - employers, presumably, preferring their gorgeous, pouting oldsters to work to suit them instead.

Perhaps on the assumption that readers like me will now be plunged into terminal melancholy, the website devotes what to my mind is a disproportionate amount of space to what should obviously now become my major preoccupations: illness and death.

Above all, the government is worried that I might be cold and keen that I should, above all, wrap up warm.

Cold? That’s the last thing they should worry about. After reading this, I’m boiling – with fury.

With work, health and death safely covered off, it’s time to see what the future holds as far as sex is concerned.

I turn to NHS Live Well ‘Sex as you get older’ section. Much of it appears to be penned in that intensely irritating format of rhetorical questions, beloved of beaurocrats and parents of small children (‘How dare you behave like that?’) and much loathed by everyone else, especially me.

‘Why [should over 50s] wear a condom?’ the NHS wants to ask me. Well riddle me ree to you, too. Clearly, in view of their own depressing take on the area, the answer must be, ‘So you can pretend you’re still fertile and defy your own mortality.’

Needless to say, that’s not what required. You’re never too old to outwit STDs is, of course, the correct answer. Ain’t it good to know that those dear little bacteria still love us, no matter how old we get?

‘Your sex life needn’t disappear once you hit 50,’ it adds. What’s with that ‘needn’t’ word? And, sorry, but did I say I thought it did? And as for disappearance - well, at least I can be reasonably confident that no burglar is going to hook it out of the letterbox with a fishing rod.

As far as the government’s concerned, you can forget 50 being the new 40. Instead, it appears to be the new 60 and counting (up). Fifty five is the new 70. And God forbid that I even contemplate stretching my palsied limbs in the direction of my 60th birthday cake. Try to cut it and they’ll probably arrest me for knife crime.

And as for congratulations for having hit my semi-centenary…..well, it wouldn’t surprise me to find a link to a fold-it-yourself origami coffin. But look on the bright side. At least the exercise will keep me warm.

My life in second hand quotes

2009-02-02T23:21:00.000-08:00

Christmas:
"Watcha doing?" texts Vicky.
"Making soup for the school Advent Fair," I text back.
"C***."
"Am also weaving Xmas wreath to sell for starving children with my teeth while knitting hats for the poor with feet."
"Self-righteous c***," she texts, and refuses to speak to me at all for three days.

New Year's Eve - should old acquaintance's kids be forgot.......Oh, yes, please
"Francis and Omega Mum, could you speak to your son? He keeps asking my children why they don't know where their knobs are. It's so inappropriate."

As midnight strikes, we find ourselves hating Leo, the friend and each other in equal measure. We do not exchange New Year's Eve kisses.

Snow
"I'm the only one who hasn't turned up for work," says a stricken Francis. He has taken a break from greasing the toboggan rails to listen to stories of heroism from the colleagues who have taken four hours to get to work for the privilege of being in the office for two more before struggling home again.

News from my in-box
1. Freecycle
Wanted - bike for person. Just for going to the shops and leisurely wee cycles up the river.
"We've all had those wee cycles," observes Vicky, "and it's not a bike she should be asking for."

2. Valentine's Day Spam Honesty shock
'Just order online your ideal Valentine's day present!You falter whether you should get our replica watch for Valentine's day present and you are frightened that its material will lighten away pretty soon?'
Well, yes, since you ask. Well spotted.

A hall new experience

2008-11-26T11:00:00.000-08:00

Every Tuesday afternoon for, oh, years now, I have arrived to teach Year 1 in the hall after lunch. The pudding is invariably jelly, the children invariably messy and health and safety rules unyielding.

This means that the floor has to remain unmopped until the cleaners arrive in the evening. Untrained operatives, like me, are banned. I assume this is because over-energic scrubbing might break through the patina of dirt and A-list germs that have lain undisturbed through the centuries and release anthrax spores and the plague back into the community.

"I don't see why the children have to sit in patches of old jelly," I say to one of the teachers, one afternoon.

"Look on the bright side," she says. "If it's really sticky they can't fidget as much."

"There must be something I could do," I say.

"Why don't you ask the catering manager if they have to have jelly on Tuesdays?"

There's another unspoken question behind this one. Suspecting it to be, "And when did you last see your lovely brain?" I disappear, leaving it forever (I hope) unanswered.

The catering manager is sporting an attractive hygiene hat in blue nylon netting. Too small to cover more than a smallish proportion of his head, it balances precariously on the crown, leaving almost all his hair free to shed dirt, shampoo droppings and small change straight into the custard. It's a mystery as to what exactly it's supposed to convey to the on-looker, apart from a profound sense of pity for the unhappy wearer.

"Do you think it might be possible for the Year 1 children not to have jelly on Tuesdays?" I ask. "It makes the floor really sticky and they have to sit there for music in the afternoon."

He gives me a long look and his face fills with sorrow.

"I just don't know," he says. "It's harder than it looks. We'll have to see how the menu goes."

He speaks in hushed tones. It's clear that to him, the menu is a sacred thing, eternal, unchanging and possibly handed down on stone tablets like the 10 commandments.

"I'm just an amateur in menu management," I say, "but wouldn't it just be a question of swapping one pudding for another?"

He opens his mouth again and I expect him to say either,

"Come midnight on the longest night, I will sacrifice the lasagne and read the runic kidney beans to see what the future holds for The Menu,"

or

"Jelly has been on the Tuesday lunch menu since 1635. We still keep the head of the last teacher who asked for its removal on show in one of the trophy cabinets,"

But he doesn't. Instead, he sucks his teeth, possibly wondering if they'd be an interesting addition to the normal condiments range, turns on his heel and disappears, to wrestle with the Mystery that is the Great Menu, a living, breathing organism with a brain of bright green jelly, whose internal construction is so complex that no mere mortal can tamper with it.

Sighing, I return to my piano and attempt to play the loud pedal. There's a loud squelching sound underfoot and a sudden burst of lime fragrance as a spatter of jelly rushes up my leg. The Menu has heard. The Menu is angry.........

Light my piano, baby

2008-11-19T12:41:00.001-08:00

It's Wednesday morning and Sasha is in full flow. The bell for playtime tolled long ago, but not for us, apparently.

We've had the prayer, the song, the presentation of birthday certificates and now it's time for what's laughingly known as 'the story'. Indeed, it's even promoted to the children as a desirable event, something worth several extra decibels of fake enthusiasm as the staff try to hype the unhypeable.

"Behave well," they say, "And Mrs Fear might tell you a story. If you're good."

(I read somewhere that Beyonce has an alternative name for herself - Sasha Fear - that she uses on stage to give her extra courage. It seems appropriate).

We all pray for them to be bad. Or at least, badder. They never are. Until about now, 15 minutes in, when Sasha, treating the morning as usual like an ad hoc therapy session, wanders through pretty much any topic that pops into her head. A programme she saw on TV last night; her time as an English teacher in countries with a gross national product too small to raise the tanks, armed forces and missiles necessary to resist her presence; interesting things she has seen, said and done (limitless, sadly - though by subjective definition only).

Then she sees a few children, shuffling closer to the glass window to stare at the empty climbing frames and grass with a totally understandable longing.

"It is simply not fair to expect 95 children to sit quietly and patiently during assembly when 5 other children apparently can't be bothered," she says to them.

"It is simply not fair to expect twelve members of staff to sit quietly and patiently during assembly while one teacher is allowed to monopolise the whole bloody thing," I hiss to the deputy head.

"Well, what can we do?" she hisses back.

"I've got an idea. It's risky but it just might work."

"What is it?"

"Another five minutes and I'm going to set fire to the piano."

"You wouldn't dare."

"Probably not," I say. "However, I do have a secret weapon."

Just within reach is the small electric lighter we use for the birthday candles. I pick it up and press the trigger. A small flame appears. Sasha sees it out of the corner of her eye and turns. I extinguish it.

We play this game for several minutes until she gives up, dismisses the school and everyone exits with a good deal more enthusiam than they showed coming in.

"Do you know the new head of music wants to conduct a wholesale review of the way the subject's taught?" asks Sasha, as she stalks out.

"No," I say, "But if you hum it, I'm sure I'll pick it up........"

UKfamily

2008-11-14T05:56:00.000-08:00

As my three lovely children, relaxed husband and I carve a path with our machetes through Lala land, it's not hard to imagine why the lovely Rachael asked me to review UKFamily, a new parenting website, owned by Walt Disney. It's clearly a natural match.

Stop sniggering at the back.

Not only that, but Rachael is even offering a small payment - and asks for honesty.

Put that smile away now.

So here goes.

The one thing the UK isn't short of is websites for families. For anarchic humour, there's the Bad Mother's Club. For the reassurance that whatever experience you've had, somebody else has had it worse (or better, or in a funnier way) there's Mumsnet.

So UKfamily.co.uk is going to have to work hard, especially for a battle-scarred old witch like me.

I could have done with a user-friendly version of a mission statement. What was I supposed to get out of this? A bit of a laugh, advice, reduced entrance tickets to Euro Disney? All three?

In fairness, this site, as you'd expect, seems aimed at parents with younger children than mine whose cynicism is still at a larveal stage in their brains.

You can tell, because everyone is smiling. You can choose to click on a smiley couple, smiley baby, child or 'tween'.

Everyone is clean and lovely. I amused myself for a few minutes moving the mouse so the baby assumed giant proportions, looming over the mother - a much more accurate reflection of what it feels like, in my mind - and then realised that this was silly and immature and moved onto the advice sections.

The emphasis is on bite-sized, quick to read advice and then readers' feedback. It's good as an introduction, perhaps a little perfunctory. There are pieces from people like Linda Blair - a well regarded expert in the field.

Some of it feels a little glib. One expert believes passionately that 'relaxed, well informed parents produce happy, carefree kids.' Well, who'd a thunk it? And what happens to the unrelaxed ones, like me? Perhaps we're all doomed. Still, it's nothing a few rousing choruses of 'It's a small world after all,' won't sort out.

But it does attempt to cover the darker issues, too. Depression, tantrums. I'm heartened to read in one piece about tweens about 'the enormous physical and neuro-chemical (brain) changes that ... put your tweens under considerable stress...' until I realise that it's tween hormones under discussion, not mine.

Oh, try for yourselves. Just don't say I sent you. I've got my reputation to consider.

Can I have my money now, Rachael?

Sardines and martyrs

2008-11-14T04:53:00.000-08:00

"You can't go to work like that."

"I've got to," says Francis, struggling out of bed.

"Surely they can function without you, especially when you're being sick every 20 minutes."

"Ten minutes, now," he says. "'scuse me." He marches, rather hastily, off in the direction of the loo.

"Why does Daddy have to go to the office when he's ill?" asks Deborah.

"He's a martyr to his job," I say.

"What's a martyr?"

"Somebody who suffers greatly, often for a cause they believe in," I say.

"Do sardines count as a cause?" says Beth, who has wandered in and is now leaning against one of the kitchen units, looking on while I unpack the dishwasher.

"In Daddy's case, I think so," I say. "And WHY AREN'T YOU HELPING ME? WHY AM I DOING ALL THIS ON MY OWN AGAIN. YOU'RE NEARLY FIFTEEN!"

Such is the volume of my screaming that the cat and dog both fight to be the first to exit through the pet flap. There's the crack of glasses fracturing in the cupboards while, outside, ancient trees crash to the ground. In the distance, I think I can hear a plane's engines cut out and restart again.

"Why are you so cross?" says Beth. "You know I never notice things that need doing so if you want help you'll have to remind me. I keep telling you but you just don't listen."

She saunters over to the dishwasher and from the assorted plates, pans, crockery removes a very small teaspoon. Holding this carefully between the ends of two just nail polished fingers, she takes it over to the cutlery drawer and puts it in.

Francis, still white about the gills, reappears.

"What's all the shouting?" he says. "It's not going to help Leo's behaviour at school?"

I take a deep breath.

"IT'S BETH!" I shout just as Beth, equally loudly yells, "MUM JUST - "

"Must go," says Francis. "I'd have a nice cup of tea."

"If you're really throwing up every ten minutes I calculate it's going to take you six hours to get to work," I say.

"Better get going then," says Francis and leaves.

From my private Spam collection

2008-11-04T08:12:00.000-08:00

"Come quick," I shout to Francis. "All our worries are over."

He hurries - in as much as a man crushed by disappointment whose perfect T-shirt would read, 'I lived and all I got was this lousy family and a broken car,' can hurry.

"Look," I say. "At last, a spam letter than makes perfect sense."

He peers over my shoulder to read the following:

'Dear Canadian On-Line,

'I cannot inform you how happy I am I found you. My drugs are so expensive
here in the USA that I had a choice of going without my medicinal treats or
living on inexpensive soup.

'Thanks, I love your firm.

'Carol J.'

"There we are," I say. "All we have to do is order pills from them and we'll never have to eat inexpensive soup again."

"There's just one problem," says Francis.

"What?"

"We don't eat soup."

We ponder this together for a second.

"I've got it," I say.

"If you have, I'm sure they've got the medication for it..."

"Let's start eating inexpensive soup, order some medicine and then we can stop again."

"You know," says Francis, thoughtfully, "I can't help feeling there's a flaw in there somewhere, but for the life of me I can't work out what it is."

"Good," I say. "Then I'll start chopping the onions, shall I?"

Quantum of B*******

2008-11-01T02:04:00.000-07:00

Writing off one car a year is unlucky. Writing off two borders on the psychotic. But that's where we seem to be as of today.

To mark the end of half term, the whole family goes to see 'Quantum of Solace.' Francis, who loves James Bond and, as a result, is able to stay awake for almost the entire film, mutters favourite lines from other Fleming classics.

I don't even have to hear to know that, as his lips move, they are issuing the words, "The loitering drumbeat of the two-inch exhaust," like a benediction.

Naturally, my interests are far more down to earth. I am permanently riveted by the apparently non-ironic contrast between the glossy foyer, so intent on transporting you to a different world, and the cinema bogs, which are equally committed to making quite sure you stay firmly rooted in this one.

The loos come in three varieties. The first lack seats; the second seats and door handles; the third have no seats, handles or, indeed doors. During the few days of hot weather, management attempted to make up for this by adding a) the unflushed detritus of the previous few occupants and/or b) a promotional bluebottle in each cubicle; a ploy that I would have to mark down as a dismal failure, as few flies stuck (pun intended) to their designated bogs but tended to swarm off to the most interesting and hold a meeting.

But, amazingly, the onset of the recession has brought a change of heart. There are no flies and every cubicle now has its full complement of floor, door and porcelain furniture though there is one in-joke - a wobby hook on the inside of the door which, amusingly, ensures that your coat or handbag has a very real chance of falling straight down into the complementary puddle of urine provided by the previous client/customer or - judging by the ominous colour and quantity of the pool I come across - possibly patient.

We file out. Francis' head and heart are filled with thoughts of Aston Martins, speedboats, jet planes. The garage, where the family car is in for its service and MOT, chooses this moment to ring tell him that the car has developed a fault that they are unable to fix, and may need to be written off. To add insult to injury, they have spent a good many hours, 'Five,' confirms Francis, gloomily, nobly and expensively labouring on the car before coming to this conclusion.

"Quantum of Bollocks," I hear him mutter sadly, as we begin the journey home.

Scarier without masks

2008-10-31T14:14:00.000-07:00

It's Hallowe'en. The 'phone rings. It's Vicky.

"Bloody hell. Bloody Hallowe'en. I hate it all. Oh, hang on - it's the doorbell."

I hear her voice, fainter now, as she opens the door.

"Hi, there! How're you doing? There you are, darling. Have a sweet....Off you go. Byeeee!"

The door shuts. She picks up the phone.

"I just wanted a chat. I hate them all. Take my eldest. When I wouldn't give her the money to buy the Hallowe'en outfit she wanted she told me she was thinking about killing herself. I was so cross I told her I thought it was a damn good idea - we'd have enough bedrooms then. Oh, God, there's another lot. Just wait a minute.....

"Hallo. What a lovely outfit. You look gorgeous! See you! -"

She's back.

"I am just so sick of being nice all c***ing night. Oh, God. There's more of the f*****s. And the pumpkin soup's boiling over."

"You know what?" I say. "With minimal effort, it could be Hallowe’en all year round. And we never need to fuss about costumes, just come as we are. Because round here, everyone is a hell of a lot scarier without a mask."

Vicky laughs and hangs up. For a second, I could swear I see a fine, green mist swirl out from the 'phone before disappearing into the ether.

My daughter the writer

2008-10-30T03:24:00.000-07:00

Looking at the small spider in the sealed wineglass, I glance up at my Mum.
‘Mum, it’s an ordinary house spider, nothing dangerous about it.’
I give the glass a tap to prove my point.

My Mum has always been a worrier – to say she’s a bit overcautious is like saying that the Queen is only a bit royal. She sees danger everywhere; it would be no surprise to find her scanning the sky for asteroids on collision course with earth, and her policy is quite simply, ‘If it moves, insure it.’

So when Mum found a spider nestling in the grapes, we all laughed when she claimed it was poisonous. It was just your average spider - small, brown and shiny. But Mum insisted it had an unusual mark on its back, like a double arrow.

But Mum was not going to be persuaded. “I’m not going to kill it, that would be cruel, and I’m not going to let it go either, just in case it is poisonous.”

Instead, she got in touch with the Natural History Museum. We waited around, expecting them to give her a polite brush off, but instead, Mum informed us that they wanted to see the spider. She sent it off in an old spice bottle, padded with damp tissue paper and waited excitedly for the results.

A few days later, she got a letter back from the museum.
“I’m right!” she called as she waved the piece of paper proudly. “It’s a poisonous False Widow Spider.”

Our over cautious Mum really was right – her spider belonged was officially known as a Steatoda paykullianus, apparently regular stowaways in grapes from Southern Europe. Although their bites are not fatal, they can inflict a lot of pain and swelling.

Mum was thrilled. Although she is still over cautious, we’ve learnt that sometimes, her worries aren’t always completely over the top.

Beth. Aged 14

Mothers, daughters and colour coding

2008-10-29T12:52:00.000-07:00

"This really isn't what I call a mother and daughter shopping trip," says Beth, staring round the packed shelves.

"What's wrong with it?" I say. "There's more things than you can shake a stick at. And that's what it's all about. Things. Looking at them. Trying them on. Laughing at ourselves. A rare moment of inter-generational togetherness."

"No offence," she says, "but somehow, when you said 'let's hit the shops,' I wasn't thinking Oxfam."

"You're striking a blow againsy rampant materialism," I say. "Be proud. This is the first of many sub prime shopping trips. And it's my treat. I've got two pounds in small change in my pocket, and I'm not afraid to dig deep into it."

"Too kind," says Beth. "Well, I suppose I could look at the books."

She wanders off.

Meanwhile, as I run my eyes up and down the shelves, not letting them settle for two long lest somebody sticks a price tag to the iris and tries to flog them, I can't help overhearing the conversation between two other customers.

Their conversation sounds completely normal. But it is also extraordinary because it is completely lacking in inflection; so flat, so unaccented that it is as if they have learnt their words by heart before they came out and are now acting their lines in public but without any real feeling for the words.

"Isn't that nice? It's not too tight on my bottom, is it?"

"I think we might nearly have spent our money..."

"That would look nice, wouldn't it, on a hot summer's day?"

The smaller of the two women has a neat bob of black hair surrounding the tiniest of faces, a downturned mouth. She utters her lines in a vaguely nasal voice that is lacking all conviction. I listen, avidly.

"What does this look like?"

"You could wear it in the winter...."

"It's a bit big. I'd have to put poppers on it. What do you think?"

There's no sequence, no conclusion, no continuity. I am surrounded by their words, pushing my way through them like somebody in a snowstorm when Beth, fortunately, reappears.

"Come and see the books," she hisses and drags me to the back of the shop.

The books look - odd, somehow but, like the conversation I've just overheard, it's hard to pinpoint exactly why that should be.

Then - "Do you see?" says Beth. "Look at the way they've been arranged."

I look again and see that she's right. The books haven't been arranged by topic - Crime, Fiction, Biography; nor by author, alphabetically. Instead, somebody has painstakingly organised them by colour.

There are five shelves of books with white spines. Another three or four with dark blue or black spines. Other colours take their place in a rainbow like display between them. It's magnificent. It's striking. And, unless you happen to know exactly which colour your favourite authors are published in, it's almost completely hopeless.

We admire it for a while, then leave, empty handed.

"You see," I say. "That was very good for us both. What about Princess Alice next time. I hear they do a great line in almost matching lampshades?"

Waiting for God (oh!)

2008-10-29T12:09:00.001-07:00

Another year, another school harvest festival in the local church. There's just one difference. We've managed to lose the vicar.

In my quaint old-fashioned or possibly just pig ignorant way, I'd always assumed that a vicar was central to a happy and harmonious communication with God. But apparently not.

"So where's he gone?" I ask the deputy head. "Is it down to my piano playing? He never was keen on the way I transposed 'We plough the fields and scatter," into C major and removed all the other chords."

She sighs, slightly.

"He's retired. Apparently, a nice little cottage by the seaside came up and he felt he had to grab it now or the chance might never come again."

Obviously he wasn't given to premonitions. If so, assorted financial events since then would have allowed him to get his hands on any number of nice little repossessed seaside cottages, assuming he didn't require a nice little mortgage to go with it.

"So who's going to take the service?" I ask.

"I am."

"You?" I say. "Excuse me, bishop, but I had no idea."

"I'm just going to announce the songs and do some kind of story," she says.

"If I play specially well, would you consider blessing the piano?"

"Play all the songs in the key they were written in and I'll get it fast-tracked as the next Archbishop of Canterbury."

"Do that and I'll crochet you a dog collar," I say. "And things are looking up. At least it's you taking the service and not -"

"Not who?" says an icy voice from behind me. Naturally it's Sasha.

"Not me," I say, with quite astonishing presence of mind. "I know God moves in mysterious ways, but even he's unlikely to choose a part Jewish atheist as the Sat Nav approved quickest route to Jesus ."

"Quite," says Sasha. "I'm sure it will be a great success."

She stalks off.

"Mind you," I say to the deputy head, watching her retreating back. "If she goes anywhere near a church I'd have thought they'd have to do some sort of superstrength exorcism afterwards. That's assuming that she doesn't turn to smoke when she looks at the cross."

"I'm packing a clove or two of garlic," says the deputy head. "Apperently there's a very nice smoked variety you can buy these days. Once you've ousted the vampire, it adds a really subtle quality to casserole dishes."

"Now that's what I call credit crunch thinking," I say admiringly and go off to put on some suitably stirring music while the school files in for assembly.

A guide to credit crunch etiquette

2008-09-06T13:24:00.000-07:00

"I'd love to be unemployed. It would be such a wonderful opportunity to improve my golf," booms a neighbour to my newly jobless husband.

It takes a friend to remove my kitchen knife and remind me that he isn’t just a tactless arse but that decades of full employment have atrophied his ability to empathise.

And he’s not alone. Until recently, consumer consumption was so conspicuous it was all but visible from outer space, while redundancy was considered about as much of a threat as Po running amok in Teletubbyland and taking out the Noo-noo with anthrax spores.

But now, as the nation’s collective rainy day savings dwindle to 6p and a used toffee stuffed inside one of Alistair Darling’s socks, it’s a social minefield out there.

But never fear. Whether you’re cash rich, compassion free and aiming to stay that way, or a nouveau pauvre able to laugh in the face of bad karma only because you’ve had your IQ cosmetically shrunk to single figures, our guide to credit crunch etiquette will help you through with the minimum of public humiliation.

Dos and Don’ts

…For the jobless

DO remember that redundancy meetings take place in hotel foyers for a reason. Not because the boss thinks you might enjoy tea and a macaroon with your P45 but because he’s terrified you will run amok with a meat cleaver and is counting on your fear of looking silly in public to hold you back

So pat your sides, give a sigh of relief as if encountering the welcome shape of a sharp, metallic object and cultivate an unblinking stare and small but perfectly formed tic. You’ll double your leaving package in seconds.

But DON’T actually run amok. Bloodbaths rack up the dry cleaning bills and are hard to gloss over on your CV.

DON’T be wallow in self-pity. So you’re suffering? So what? Just imagine what friends and family are going through. Yesterday, you were a solvent member of their community. Today, you’re an emissary from a doomed land. Naturally, they’re in shock and need help. So if your dismissal package includes counselling, DO cut them in on the action. They’ll feel all the better for it.

DO learn to love headhunters. Tipped to replace estate agents as the new national hate figures, they come in three varieties: posh, scary and useless, though these are interchangeable. All have enviable jargon-stretching abilities and will treat you as their new best friend one day, then cut you dead the next when you flunk an interview. DO remember that they’re not actually human but, like Pixel Chix, pre-programmed hominoids who simply can’t help themselves. In time, you’ll even become quite fond of them.

DO use psychometric testing as a form of self help. There are only a handful of these jumped up personality tests on the market. Memorise them, and you can be anyone you want to be. More to the point, you can be anybody a future employer wants you to be.

One moment, you’re a team player with an almost insanely consensual way of working, the next a borderline psychopath, whipping your team into delivering the impossibly unrealistic sales targets plucked at random by senior managers so out of touch with the business they appear to be based on Mars.

For partners and family…..

DON’T ever say, 'Worse things happen at sea,' and 'at least we still have our health,' as a new EU cliché overload ruling requires compulsory transfer to a leaking barge midway across the Channel, where you will instantly contract bird flu and sink.

SAVE, SAVE SAVE……

DO say ‘no’ to expensive winged pets, especially second hand albatrosses and single magpies trained to squawk ‘You’re doomed,’ down the chimney of a wet, misery-laden evening. The novelty value wears off surprisingly quickly.

Instead, borrow a copy of the best-selling book, ‘Fly-whispering for beginners’. Soon you’ll have swarms of tiny invertebrates scampering playfully round your feet, providing hours of fun and enchantment, not to mention several million maggots, all for the cost of a few scraps of putrid meat.

DO economise by hunting out cheaper cuts of meat. DON’T share too much information about it. So while serving roadkill is acceptable, asking who’s got the piece with the lucky tyre marks on it isn’t. And while supermarket bin-dipping, Freegan style can be a real money spinner, DON’T invite guests to guess which course has the oldest sell date using smell alone.

DO restrain children from doing a ‘Jude the Obscure’ and hanging each other as a money-saving ploy: tea, cakes and sympathy cannot make up for the devastating loss of your tax credit and child benefit

DON’T overdo the stoicism. If the children greet your partner on his return after a hard day’s job-hunting, clinging to his knees and sobbing, “Daddy, there’s nothing but lawn-clippings to eat for supper,” DON’T say, brightly, “Don’t worry, darling, I’m sure Martha Stewart does a splendid little grass casserole – we can marinade it in the old vegetable oil we were going to refine into bio-fuel.” Unless, that is, you mind him suggesting that you use your stiff upper lip as the basis of the stock.

For the (still) gainfully employed….

DON’T rake the recently unemployed with a quick up and down glance as if hoping for a sign that marks the out as natural candidates for misfortune, like the words ‘one of life’s victims’ tattooed in inch high letters across the forehead.

DON’T Put your head on one side and adopt a special low-pitched voice as a way of expressing heartfelt sympathy.

DO think twice before offering charity. Wine, meals and anonymous cash donations rarely go amiss but scraps can be problematic, while second hand sofas covered in cat wee are a definite no no.

And, finally:

NEVER use the phrases, “One day, you’ll look back on this and laugh,” “Adversity brings you closer together" or “I believe things happen for a reason”. You won't, it doesn't and they don't.

Mission impossible

2008-08-01T09:27:00.000-07:00

"95% of our patients see a smile as a valuable social asset," says the dentist's flyer that's just popped through the letterbox .

For the rest of the day, I mull over the 5% who don't. Are they so generously supplied with assets that teeth come a long way down the list or have they simply given up trying?

"The things you fuss about," says Lindy who, thanks to her outsize personality and embonpoint, probably accounts for at least four of those missing percentage points all on her own.

Unlikely though it sounds, we're cycling to the supermarket, not because Lindy has suddenly developed a taste for exercise but because she's just had the latest cosmetic treatment on a few almost imperceptible thread veins and wants to display the results to an admiring public. I can only hope the public has been adequately schooled in its response.

Lindy, who has no truck with lycra shirts and padded shorts is, in its loosest sense, wearing a skirt so short it is actually a fringe. She pauses at the traffic light to admire her reflection in a shop window. Several drivers, doing the same thing, swerve violently.

"Like my mount?"she yells at me. She is in command of a man's bike that she describes as a 'trophy'. I'd like to ask what happened to its previous owner, but with Bad Lindy, ignorance is almost invariably bliss - or at the very least, a necessity if nightmares full of graphic text-fuelled images are to be avoided.

"Blimey - dropped my sunglasses," says Lindy. "I'll just get off and pick them up."

As she dismounts, she is compelled to essay a sort of high kick to avoid the bike frame. At the apex of the manoeuvre, I hear what I can only descibe as a collective gasp and the scene suddenly resembles one of those freeze frame panoramic ads, where all movement is suddenly stilled.

Except, that is, for Lindy, who repeats her high kick and re-mounts, apparently oblivious to the reaction she's caused.

"Lindy," I say, not having to raise my voice at all, as it is the only thing audible in an otherwise completely silent street.

"Yes?"

"Everyone's looking."

"So? What's new?"

She follows my gaze and is greeted with expressions that range from total shock to utter delight.

"Bloody hell," she says. "Good thing I've didn't go commando today."

She pauses, evidently trying to remember something.

"Whoops!" she says, and guffaws. "Who says a smile's a girl's best social asset now?"

She cycles on ahead, still laughing. "Remind me to keep my glasses on, on the way home," she calls back to me.

Fashion on the mind; hurricane lamps on the chest

2008-07-26T07:09:00.000-07:00

"Honestly, it's getting worse," says Vicky. "Look at this magazine."

She thrusts it across the table at me, open at the fashion pages. I leaf through them.

"Nope," I say. "Can't find anything out of the ordinary."

"Just read the headings. Slowly," says Vicky.

"'How to make the latest looks work at any age'," I read, out loud. "20s, 30s, 40s -"

"Exactly. That's it. That's what I mean. It's age apartheid. Look at the pictures that go with it."

As I concentrate a little more closely, I begin to see what she means. Each spread is lavishly illustrated with photographs of luscious models. At least, that's the theory. Because, come the relentless march of advancing years, it gets harder to make out the women. As the decades tick pass, the flesh on show declines and the clothes take over.

Check out the double page spread on clothes for 20 to 30 year olds and there are body parts on show, and then some. It's a skinorama special.

Hit the section on 30s to 40s and while, at first glance, it all looks very much the same, close inspection reveals that knees and elbows are conspicous by their absence. The volume of material used in the outfits mounts like a rising tide. Cleavages are suggested but never seen. Uncompromising sun-kissed backgrounds fade into crepuscular gloom. There's so much vaseline on the lens you could annoint the bottoms of a thousand infants.

And, as for 40s to 50s -

"- I haven't dared turn the page," says Vicky. "It's the future, Spock, and horribly as we know it. Go on - you look at it. It wouldn't surprise me if all the models are wearing Millett's family size tents with optional groundsheet accessories."

I take a quick look, then close the magazine again, wincing.

"Look on the bright side," I say. "Remember Millett's teamed up with Cath Kidston? At least you can look sweetly floral while being completely rain-free, as long as you spray yourself with waterproof coating once a year."

"Yeah, right," says Vicky. "Play my cards right and I'll probably find they've included a hook for a hurricane lamp just below my right tit."

Schrodinger's clothes

2008-07-24T04:11:00.000-07:00

We've embarked on the long, slow cruise of the summer holidays. No, not a cruise. More like a spell on a desert island and endless repetition - Robinson Crusoe crossed with Groundhog Day.

Every so often, as if in a dream, I pick up armfuls of dumped possessions, convey them to another room for sorting, then redistribute them. There are shoes (always single, never in pairs); discarded exercise books, small plastic toys, nail polish, invariably missing the lid.

But worst of all are the clothes.

Schrodinger's cat was a theoretical beast locked, unseen, in its box, awaiting a randomly administered blast of strychnine. Because unseen, to the observer it was both simultaneously alive and dead.

But that was just the beginning. My, children, whose undoubted talents as theoretical scientists have yet to be fully appreciated, have evolved this principle into a modus vivendi that is providing endless family entertainment.

I am surrounded by Shrodinger's clothes. We have Shrodinger's hoodies, shirts and trousers. All are simultaneously both clean and dirty. They curl up on chairs like sleeping cats. They lurk behind curtains like burglars. They coil on stairs like pre-diet serpents.

The nub of the matter is that they are too clean to be added to the dirty laundry baskets that I have provided in such liberal quantities that they adorn every corner of the house like art installations. But they are also too dirty to be put away.

Of course, there are exceptions. You can't have Shrodinger's socks - or pants - at least in our house. Their status - always fully dead, often for some time - proclaims itself a mile off.

But with the rest it's science, experimental bloody science all the way.

And my maternal treat is to enjoy those few moments of their unique dual-natured, clean and dirty state before I pick them up and yell, like a fishwife, for my darling little physicists to get down the stairs, now!, and come and clear them away. Or else. And what that 'else' is, only Shrodinger knows.

Ou sont les eyebrows d'autan?

2008-07-21T08:16:00.000-07:00

"It's happened again," moans Vicky, on the phone. "You've got to help me."

I know where my priorities lie so, pausing only to advise the children on ad hoc chemical castration techniques should any Big, Bad Paedophiles knock on the door while I'm out, I head for her house.

When I arrive, she's staring into her mirror with a look of bitter resentment.

"What's happened?" I ask. "Did it tell you you're no longer the fairest of them all and, if so, can I go halves on the evil woodcutter after he's polished off Snow White in the forest?"

"The mirror's beyond speech," says Vicky. "And no wonder."

She gestures to her face.

"I just don't know what's happening. One moment I'm gorgeous, vibrant and sexy. The next, something has stolen all my body parts away and replaced them with someone else's. It's like Frankenstein in installments. Take my eyebrows. They're straight off Dennis Healey. There's one, right in the middle that's growing so fast I've had to repot it twice this week. I tried to use tweezers on it and it was like a thrush wrestling with a worm on steroids. I haven't seen them since. I think it ate them.

"And there's my lips. They're so thin that they're losing the power of expression. I'm having to hold up a card to show when I'm smiling. And as for pouting....."

She turns an anguished face towards me. At least, I think it's anguished. After what she's just said, I'm afraid to ask.

Music and movement

2008-07-18T09:00:00.000-07:00

"- so I hope you'll all take great care of it as it's a very special instrument that's been in my family for a very long time," says Sasha. "Don't you agree, Mrs Philistine?"

There's a pause as one of the teaching assistants, under instructions, prods me with the business end of a yellow and black HB school pencil, jolting me abruptly out of my sun-drenched, Sasha-less reverie and back to the grim reality of assembly.

I nod, dumbly, while the word 'instrument' - the only one to have reached me, conjures up visions of Sasha admiring her heirloom collection of various torture devices, all mellow wood and gleaming metal, buffed up with nowhere to go.

"What instrument?" I hiss.

"The piano, silly. Haven't you noticed it's different? Sasha's donated it to the school," the teaching assistant hisses back. Given a heavy drinking session with Vicky and Bad Lindy last night, causing every object in my line of vision to splinter agonisingly into zig zag lines - something that, in Sasha's case, can only be a blessing - it's as much as I can bear to open my eyes at all, let alone get them to focus.

"And now, let's have our hymn," says Sasha. "Something really uplifting. I think 'Morning has broken,' would be nice. Sorry - what was that, Mrs Philistine?'

"Just a bit of dry retching, Sasha. Nothing to worry about," I think of saying, but instead stifle my groans as I shuffle cautiously and agonisingly over to the piano.

It's during the opening verse that I begin to suspect that it's not just the morning that's having problems.

The piano normally cowers against the wall as if terrified, though, given the treatment it receives at my hands, who can blame it?

As my right foot aims, optimistically, for the loud pedal and, as usual, misses, thumping the wooden base instead, there's a juddering, creaking sound as if the piano is attempting to join in. Suddenly it's pressed up close against both my knees, like an attention-seeking labrador. "Down, Spot," I mutter - but it has no effect. Blackbird may indeed have spoken, like the first bird - but he's clearly not the only one.

And it's only just started. At 'Praise for the springing, fresh from the word,' I pump up the volume and the piano shifts a foot to the left. I follow it, lagging two beats and several keys behind.

'Sprung in completeness where His feet pass,' and there's a jolt to the right. I lunge again, hitting a random, though nicely arranged, bunch of black notes.

'Born of the one light, Eden saw play.' I can only be glad Eden isn't around now, as the piano hits the back wall again, though only temporarily and I fall on top of it.
I'm just getting the hang of what's coming to resemble a slightly unusual take on 'Simon Says,' when the hymn ends, after a third verse that sounds as if the Musique Concrete movement, acting en masse, has taken out Christina Rosetti with a length of lead piping and then fired the various body parts from a series of cannons.

"You seem to be struggling," says Sasha, after the school has filed out.

"Not at all," I say, wondering if there's a way of luring the piano back to the wall by using a particularly attractive little glockenspiel as bait. "It's just that the piano's particularly lively today. It's got a fine range, hasn't it. I'd say it could be as much as 20 feet."

There's a pause, during which I wonder whether I can get away with asking her to sign a request form to fit 360 degree castors to the piano stool together with sat nav.

"I see the problem," announces Sasha, inspecting the piano base. "The lock hasn't been applied to the moving wheels. I'll call the site manager and we'll get it sorted out within the hour. Obviously you'd worked that out."

"Obviously," I echo. "Mind you, leave it like this and it could add a whole new dimension to music and movement."

Chariots of belch

2008-07-17T07:16:00.000-07:00

"Why weren't you at my choir concert/prize-giving/form assembly?" Deborah now asks me every day at home time, while I scuff my shoes along the ground and look guilty.

It's the time of year when so much is going on at the children's schools that, with minimal effort, I have only to blink to turn myself into the sort of unreliable mother who elicits much tutting in the staffroom.

"It's my brain," I say. "I think it's stopped working. If you put your ear to the side of my head all you can hear is the 'snap, crackle, pop' of synapses giving way. I'm thinking of calling in the builders and having the whole lot demolished as an unsafe structure."

There's a pause.

"Anyway, I did come to sports day," I venture.

"Huh! Only because I reminded you," says Deborah, grimly, "And you refused to do the mother's race."

"God - that mother's race," says Vicky, who has caught us up. "Dontcha hate it? And talk about pressure to do it. I only just padlocked myself to the car steering wheel in time, and even then I had to fight off that class rep with the blowtorch."

"It wouldn't be so bad if they didn't have that new teacher pirouetting round the place like a jack in the box on steroids."

"Miss Carter," says Deborah, a look of hero worship lighting up her eyes. "She's very young."

"Young?" says Vicky. "She's about 12. If that."

Miss Carter is the newest teacher at Deborah's school, apparently recruited in an effort to boost levels of suicide and anorexia amongst the mothers. She is so petite that if she curled up on a sofa, you could easily mistake her for a smallish yet perfectly formed scatter cushion and squash her. Not that she'd stay still long enough to give you the chance because in addition to her looks, she also has a pre-teaching career behind her as a top level gymnast.

"I don't think she broke sweat when she won the teacher's race - or anything else, come to that," says Vicky.

"And when she won, she turned that cartwheel," says Deborah, dreamily.

"Cartwheels, schmartwheels," says Vicky. "But can she burp the alphabet? Now there's a true test of sporting ability, not to mention literacy."

We look at Deborah, triumphantly.

"You're pathetic," she says, and marches off ahead.

Moo loud

2008-05-13T13:53:00.001-07:00

"What's different, children?" asks Sasha, who, having run out of underlings to crush, proposals to reject and objectives to fulfil, is re-energising her batteries by sucking the lifeforce out of the rest of us in assembly.

The children look baffled, as well they might, and stare around them in the vain hope, shared, I suspect, by the other teachers, that somewhere around them is a great big speech bubble proclaiming, "Look at me! I'm different!"

No such luck.

"Little boy at the front," says Sasha, gesturing vaguely at the half dozen or so children who amply fulfil the description. Now they look at each other. Then one, braver than the others
, speaks up.

"That mole on your face is a bit bigger," he says, pointing.

There's a sharp intake of breath.

"I'll ignore that," says Sasha. "No. It's something outside."

Perhaps she's persuaded God to turn up to do the prayer at the end.

"It's the sun, sillies," says Sasha, with a smile that seems to include all of us, as well as the pupils. "And do you know what I think? I think it's because all you children have been behaving so well that you've made the weather pleased with you."

I can't help wondering how, on this basis, she'd rate the 10-year drought in parts of Australia. Logically speaking, you'd be praying for Satan and all his hosts of cloven-hoofed friends and relations to drop in for a long visit.

"But it's not always like that, is it, children?" she says. "Last week, there was lots and lots of rain, and I think the teachers must have been very unhappy indeed. So what I've done to make sure your behaviour is wonderful every day is to turn every day into a special day."

She calls up five children and presents each of them with a coloured chart.

"There's Manners Monday, Tidy Tuesday, Well-behaved Wednesday, Thoughtful Thursday and Fab Friday. Now, as it's Tuesday, that means that today we're all going to try our hardest to put everything away whenever we've finished with it."

It's unfortunate that at this moment, her eye alights on the piano, which I tend to treat as a useful alternative desk. Right now, the top houses a miscellany of objects, including three tambourines, a small ball, a cuddly toy, my handbag, cycling helmet and some 'I ate a good lunch' stickers that have been there for months and show every sign of having settled in for life.

"I'm sure teachers will be wanting to sign up to Tidy Tuesday, won't they, Mrs Philistine?"

I dip my head, as if in thoughtful agreement.

The next day, Sasha happens to come in as I'm taking reception through the song I've just written for their summer play, which is themed to farmyard animals.

"'Moo loud, if you're proud, to be a cow,'" is the opening line, repeated fortissimo three times.

"Is that one of yours?" asks Sasha.

"It is," I say. "Bizarrely, it came to me in a flash just as I'd finished clearing up the piano. Tidiness clearly can be inspirational," I beam at her.

She gives me a long, long look and disappears.

Notes home

2008-05-13T13:51:00.000-07:00

"'The best way of learning is to make learning a life experience,'" I say to Francis.

"It is?"

"Yes. It says so right here in the booklet from Deborah's school all about how to help with maths, so it must be true."

"So what are we supposed to do?" he asks, with all the enthusiasm of a Burmese general invited to display an 'I love democracy' sticker on his armoured car bumper.

"Take pocket money, for example," I say. "Guess what. It can be 'worked out in relation to saving for a particular item or in relation to change given'"

"What a fun idea," he says. "Can you imagine just how that'll make Deborah's little face light up on Saturday mornings when I perform the ceremonial unlocking of the wallet."

"And we can apparently transform dreary old shopping expeditions by 'searching for packaging in different 3-D shapes (e.g prisms).'"

"I can hardly wait."

"But best of all, there's bills. We've been so selfish, keeping those fun brown envelope moments to ourselves. From now on, what we'll be doing is involving every one in the excitement by 'discussing how they are laid out and calculated, asking children to check them and discuss methods of payment.'"

"Is begging one of the options Deborah's allowed to consider?"

I consult the booklet.

"Sadly, no. They assume that cash, cheque and direct debit will see us right."

"Sending children up Aga flues to remove noxious gas residues? Benefit cake sale?"

"No, again."

To cheer us both up, I show him the next letter, this time from Leo and Beth's school:

"The school now plans to tackle some sex education, covering a variety of sex-related issues including puberty-related topics, menstruation and menarche, conception, contraception, AIDS and safe sex, masturbation, homosexuality and any relevant queries raised by pupils. We will follow a loose pattern of topics."

"How loose?" asks Francis.

"Doesn't say. Elasticated waist, I'd imagine."

"But they really ought to pool their resources," says Francis. "I bet Beth and Leo's school could come up with lots of interesting ideas for 3-D shapes."

"Prisms might be tough," I say. "Perhaps I should call Bad LIndy and ask for ideas."

Sorry, Sweet Irene

2008-04-22T08:17:00.000-07:00

I've been a bit pushed and haven't thanked you properly for my awards. And I think there's one from Crazy Cath, too. How useless of me. Please accept my apologies. It's all been a bit busy what with the holidays, sardine issues (did you realise fish could count?) and the cat lying with its back feet along 'QWERTY', its head resting on the printer and its body blocking the monitor and then biting me whenever I attempt to move. It's rough out here. Don't ever forget it.

The hair straightener solution

2008-04-22T08:08:00.000-07:00

I'm waiting to collect Beth from sports training. She's late, no doubt because she's trying to straighten her hair: currently her answer to all problems, big and small, and no doubt something that would form a cornerstone of her considered approach to global warming, food shortages and the ethics of bio-crops.

Two boys, who are about her age, saunter past, deep in conversation:

"Mine knows how much homework I've got but she's still on at me, all the time. 'Get up.' 'You need to need to help.' 'I can't do this on my own.' She just doesn't realise how tired I am after a full day at school."

"Mine does it all. No stopping her. But her timing! She waits until I've finished my homework and I'm watching something really good on TV and then it starts. BZZZZZZZZ...And if it's football, you can guarantee she'll be vacuuming right in front of the screen just when they score the vital goal. I ask her to move but of course she doesn't take any notice."

"Mothers," the boys agree, shaking their heads in disbelief. "Why do they do it to us?"

And at that moment, they have no idea how lucky they are. Because if I had access to rope, a power source and Beth's hair straightener, I can pretty much guarantee that I could really help them change their minds about mothers - permanently.

Notes from the edge

2008-04-22T08:06:00.000-07:00

"I don't want to go back to school. I don't like the children, I don't like the teachers. I hate the school lunches."

"So do I."

"But you're the teacher, Mum. You're not allowed to feel like that."

"Oh, yeah? And what are they going to do? Dock five minutes of my playtime for being rude?"

Deborah giggles.

She's back at her school today. Mine starts tomorrow. And, as is usual, the mood is a cross between endless shaggy dog story and mourning for the time I could have spent in places that don't smell of cabbage and echo with screams. And that's only our house. School is 100 times worse.

"I'm just too old to be in a classroom," I whinge, overcome with sadness for myself and the parallel life I know was out there for me once, before thick blue veins started pulsing across my hands and I developed not so much a mono- but multi-brow that heads off down the side of my face in so many directions at once that I'm convinced somebody's given it a dodgy plan of escape that leads straight into my ear.

But the real problem is that, in my customary 'ignore the problem and there's just a chance that some superior being will magic it away' fashion, I haven't yet put together my lesson plans. Admittedly, these are short at the best of times, but even the most unobservant of heads of department can probably tell the difference between four paragraphs of lucidly constructed objectives and a blank piece of paper - though, given a severe enough hangover, it's certainly something capable of foxing me.

I'm waiting to collect Deborah from her first day at school when Cultured Mum's brother greets me. He is also a music teacher, though one who, bizarrely, appears to enjoy what he does. He also has boundless energy, enthusiasm and an encyclopaedic knowledge of techniques and instruments I've never heard of. I feel my heart sink.

"Are you using the Kodaly method?" he asks.

"How reliable is it?" I ask. "With three children already, I don't want to take any chances."

He looks confused. "You know, that marvellous Hungarian system of getting children to sing on their own, limiting the range of notes and encouraging them to listen as they sing. You get the most amazing purity of sound."

"You do? I mean, you do, yes, absolutely. Couldn't agree more. Good old Hungary. I'll certainly be rooting for them come the next Eurovision."

"Anyway," he says. "I'm working through the instruments of the orchestra with mine. It's the Cor Anglais this week, and then a Bass Oboe. If I can get hold of one."

I nod, dumbly. I've come to the reluctant conclusion that being a crap music teacher isn't just a case of playing the wrong chords consistently.

Later on, I ring Cultured Mum and ask her what a Bass Oboe is. "You mean, you don't know?" she says, laughing, and hangs up.

Socialising - the freecycle way

2008-04-15T01:24:00.000-07:00

Socially inadequate? Worried that, come springtime, the occasional appearance of the sun might trigger long-buried 'getting together' instincts in friends and relations?

Terrified that they might demand to see you and, even worse, require food, drink, conversation?

Neurotic about the possibility of being forced to lend them valuable DIY equipment or, even worse, being asked to help out?

Your worries are over. Because with Freecycle's bumper crop of seasonal freebies, it's a virtual certainty that you need never be bothered by other people ever again:

Begin by solving communications difficulties at a stroke by trying not to talk to people. This 'top of the range mobile phone battery' is bound to make life easier as it doesn't hold a charge, making silence a round the clock everyday communication option once again.

And if people do get through and ask for DIY help, Freecycle has just the backup you'll need. Choose from the '3 step aluminium ladder - very useful round the house. Bottom rung must not be stood on,' and just watch the faces of elderly or infirm relations as they work this one out for themselves. Then there's what we call procastination in a box - a 'non-working Black and Decker Firestorm drill.' - perfect for those jobs you know you'll never get round to. Even better, why not get both.

And if, despite all your efforts, unwanted guests do turn up at your door, there's only one thing to do. March them out into the garden during a heavy spring shower and sit them under your special, no expense incurred, Teak garden umbrella frame & iron base.' As it's 'sadly missing all its fabric' there's no question that they'll soon get the message.

Enjoy!!!

A friend e-mails

2008-04-09T01:36:00.001-07:00

'We are doing well. If it is any consolation to you, another friend, who works in the mental health arena, (a little visual here of a white lab coat, in a coliseum trying to reason with schizophrenic lions) told me that the worst a woman will ever feel is when she is 44 years old; her parents are old and sick, her kids are teenagers and hate her, she has come to the realisation that her success and ambitions are limited (and more than likely over) and her body and hormones are conspiring against her.

So remember - you cannot be held accountable for any of your actions.

That's probably just as well. We move house on May 2nd. I may notify you of our new address/phone number in a few weeks but seeing as you are still sending Christmas cards to the place we left five years ago, it might all be a bit pointless....

Honour his name

2008-04-07T15:35:00.000-07:00

It's almost exactly a year to the day since Francis was made redundant. Rather than let the occasion go by unnoticed, his former employers have decided to mark the anniversary in a moving and novel way.

Instead, of going for those tired, stale gestures - say, by calling him and asking how he's getting on in his new job, or putting up a commemorative plaque next to his favourite cubicle in the gents (the one with the shelf rest where he could prop up an elbow while reading the paper on company time) they've decided to honour his name by making the rest of his team redundant, too. Clearly, they do care after all.

Trevor, the man who took over from Francis, calls to tell him the news. "They've sent out a memo saying that they're reviewing the headcount, and for people not to bother talking to their line managers because 'they won't be able to give you any reassurance.'"

"Succinctly worded, if brutal," comments Francis.

"I've been called into a meeting at 2.30 tomorrow afternoon," continues Trevor. "And my second in command has been called in half an hour later. Apparently it's to talk about management issues. Do you think my job's safe?"

"Er - " says Francis.

"The thing is, I think I'll be OK, because only last week, the chairman told me that I was a greatly valued member of the team and that he'd always be proud to think of me as a friend. That shows I must have some standing, mustn't it?"

"Well, it must," I agree, when Francis recounts the conversation to me later.

"I'd go along with that - except that this time last year, the chairman said exactly the same thing to me. And look what happened next," says Francis. "That invisible menders round the corner still hasn't managed to remove the knife marks from the back of my jacket."

He whistles to the dog.

"Has that animal been adequately rewarded, food-wise?" he asks.

"Francis," I say. "You've been in too many meetings again. Speak normally or I'll have to set fire to your briefcase. And you know how annoyed it made you last time."

Forward planning

2008-04-06T14:41:00.000-07:00

Perhaps it's the way I keep forgetting where I live, recently ending up over the road spending three years in the wrong house until evicted for complaining that nobody seemed capable of remembering which brand of conditioner I preferred, but Francis has taken it into his head to start explaining things to me.

"And that's the villa we always stayed in," he said, today, showing me some old photographs. "Every year we'd get there by - "

"- catching the BOAC bus that had the little trailer and went from where they've built the Sainsbury's in the Cromwell Road," I say. "I know, Francis, I know."

"That's all of us, right outside the front door on the first day," he says, a few minutes later. "Dad would always say - "

" ' - room for a litte one in the back?'" I fiinish, for him.

During lunch, he explains where his parents live now, virtually including postcode and directions, then moves on to what a sardine is, and seems on the point of reminding me of the children's names, ages and shoe size when I interrupt him.

"Francis," I say. "Against all the odds, I have succeeded in retaining a few facts about us all, and I intend to hang on to them."

"I'm practising for when you lose your memory," he says, cheerfully. "Since I'm obviously going to be spending half my life telling you who you are, I thought it would be worthwhile practising now. Then it won't seem so odd when it happens."

I can't tell you how delighted I am by his solicitude and forward planning.

"Darling," I say, "Look at this long, pointy, sharp object. It's called a kitchen knife. And if you insist on telling me anything that I haven't specifically asked to have explained to me, I'll be using it. And I'm counting on my memory to tell me exactly where to cut."

Truly, marriage is a wonderful thing, even if, in our case, it's not exactly the meeting of minds because his is right here and mine, I greatly fear, is in Lalaland. Or, possibly, in Terminal 5 at Heathrow, along with 28,000 other old bags.

That sort of a week

2008-04-05T07:09:00.001-07:00

It's been the sort of week when complete strangers very nearly pause and ask if I'm all right before hastily remembering not to care - after all, this is Britain - and pushing past me, a shudder of disbelief vibrating in their slipstream.

Cars accelerate towards me, apparently motivated by a genuine and well-intentioned desire to put me out of my misery instead instead of merely seeking to experience the thrill of reaching the next red light slightly faster than everyone else.

And, as I load the shopping into the trolley one afternoon, it seems only appropriate that, as I pay, I notice that I'm standing opposite a bright red sign that could have been made especially for me.

"Pull your bag here," it says. I wait for 15 minutes, but nobody comes. As I say, it's been that sort of a week.

Over exposed

2008-04-04T01:58:00.000-07:00

In the few days we've been away, my in-box has, as usual, been filled with messages from well wishers, all of them from Megadik.

"Things to tell a naked woman," is the title of one typically well meant, though unecessary piece of advice. In my case, "Stop it, Lindy," or "Did you realise you were doing the school run without on your clothes on?" do the trick every time.

There are also many, many photographs, all, according to the caption, on loan from satisfied customers.

They have an initial shock value but once I've pressed the delete key and held it down, retrieved my toast and marmite fingers from the keyboard and mopped up the spilled tea, it starts to wear off.

Given the attention paid to the composition (none); the focus (excitably blurred) and the central feature (elaboration unnecessary) it is obvious that they are the work of a recent though unlikely to be award-winning graduate from the Bad Lindy School of Giblet Photography (slogan 'No pictures knowingly taken above the waist')

I forward the picture on to her. "Were you responsible for this?" I ask, somewhat ambiguously.

"No," comes the reply, a few minutes later. "But pass me his phone number and I'd be more than happy to take him in hand."

Death has to be more interesting

2008-04-02T01:48:00.000-07:00

"Hello!"

"Oh, hello - I didn't see you there at the back of the queue."

"How are you?"

"Very well, thank you; and you?"

"Struggling to remember things. Honestly, look at me. I have to keep my shopping list in my purse all the time with a little pencil or I simply forget to bring it out with me."

"But doesn't that mean that every time you want to add something to it you have to get your bag, open it, find your purse, find the list, find the pencil, write it down and then do the whole thing in reverse."

"Well, yes. It's very time-consuming and rather boring. But at least I don't lose the list. Anyway, I'm at the front, now. Better get on. Bye, Pat.......It is Pat, isn't it?"

"Pam. It's Pam."

"So sorry."

"But I only live next door. And you've known me for twenty years."

"I do aplogise. I'm not very good with names either."

The dark side

2008-03-31T16:20:00.000-07:00

At least Euro Disney is predictably horrible - cynical commercialism wearing a giant pair of mouse ears, down to its oft-repeated slogan: "Where dreams become reality."

It's a bitterly cold Easter Sunday - snow is forecast but not yet - and Disney, in all its corporate glory, has made the decision to keep Jesus out of Wonderland, sensibly concluding, perhaps, that a giant effigy of the Crucifixion on the side of Cinderalla's pretty pink palace might put the punters off their hot dogs.

By the time we reach the first ride - a steam train that runs round the park - we've already had a crash course in queuing; first for the shuttle bus, then for security, then for the tickets, and finally behind a man who seemed at first to be queuing for something but turns out simply to have stopped dead and is staring in disbelief at the till receipt, stunned at the cost.

That queueing practice comes in handy straight away because the first train is cancelled and for every three announcements in an American voice attempting to recreate the laid-back feeling of the Wild West we have a cool French one cutting across it and announcing with evident enjoyment that the wait time has just increased yet again.

By the time the train finally arrives, it might just as well have been promoted it as an authentic recreation of rush-hour UK commuterland, because that's exactly what it resembles and its appearance is greeted with the sort of hysterical joy you'd associate with the last chopper out of Saigon

We head back to the coast. The weather worsens the further north we travel, snow falls heavily and the drifts pile up while Deborah, to add to the fun, begins running a temperature. Simultaneously, Francis and I both remember the Calpol, sitting on the table in the kitchen, waiting patiently to be packed. We end the journey at a crawl, following two lorries that are snowploughing at one end and salting at the other.

Francis' company has recently treated him to a satnav - though given his sardine inclinations, I can't help feeling sonar would have been more appropriate, and he has selected the voice of Yoda from Star Wars as his guide.

"At the roundabout, straight across you must go," says Yoda.

"The sign says the tunnel is the other way," I say.

"Never doubt the power of a Jedi warrier," says Francis, wagging a finger at me, as we speed off in the opposite direction.

"The motorway you must join, then the first exit you must take," says Yoda.

"Why are we surrounded by lorries?" I ask.

"Ssssh," say the others, Yoda included.

Two minutes later, we're in the freight terminal with just one other car for company, which I assume is also navigating by Jedi knight that day.

I get extremely stroppy and unpleasant ("Never doubt the power of a pre-menopausal woman") and compel Francis to switch Yoda off before I trample him underfood and we finally reach the terminal using those quaint, out-moded sign posts. Though we've missed our train, we are lucky enough to be put on the next one.

"So, what did you think of Euro Disney?" I ask the children, as we leave.

"Well, I won't be taking MY children there," says Beth.

"Remind me to avoid any trains with the words 'Thunder' and 'Runaway' in them," says Deborah, recovering slightly. "But I still can't believe I've been there."

"Judging by the satnav, nor can Yoda," I say, nastily.

"Honestly, you can't expect him to be an expert on navigation when he's having to take on the Evil Empire the whole time," says Francis.

"Hah," I spit. "And where does he say we are now?"

"Tuscany," says Francis, tapping the screen like a faulty barometer.

"Dream on," I say to Yoda, as, snowflakes swirling round the car, we join the back of yet another, brand spanking new queue.

Under the sea

2008-03-30T12:28:00.000-07:00

We're in Folkestone, having arrived at the bit of the holiday when, in what turns out to be a dress rehearsal for the Terminal 5 opening at Heathrow, you've just been told that your Euro Shuttle is stuck in the tunnel, they've no idea when it will be unblocked and you're checking your travel insurance documents for clauses that specify how long you have to be trapped in a car with your three fighting children to file a successful claim for mental torture.

I'm stunned, as always, by the docility of the travelling public. The numerous embarcation lanes are all jammed with cars and, by now, I'd be expecting at least some tangible signs of suppressed rage - at the very least, a few graphic *&&!!@ speech bubbles rising up into the sky, the way they do in cartoons, but there's nothing - just silence. Apart, that is from Leo and Deborah, who mop and mow fit to bust until we push them out of the door to play, quite literally, in the traffic - which for now, at least, is at a standstill.

Meanwhile, with nothing else to do, I'm reading Beth's celeb magazine and she's deep into Leo's copy of 'Match' magazine.

"I must remember to drive on the left when we get to France," says Francis.

"The right," I say.

"No, we drive on the right in the UK," says Francis

"The left," I say. "Perhaps you're getting confused with the steering wheel - that's on the right."

"A detail, I'm sure," says Francis. A detail, maybe, but one I'm very glad we've sorted out now rather than just after we've created our very own contraflow on the Autoroute.

When they finally clear the train (a process that I imagine involves a giant corkscrew and an enormous 'pop' when success is finally achieved) initial relief gives way to more frustration when Beth and Leo realise that the brief exhilaration of movement has been replaced with inactivity, at least from their perspective, as the train slides into darkness.

There are two other cars in the carriage with us. In one, an enormous man is asleep behind the wheel with a tiny terrier curled up on the summit of his vast stomach, like a decoration on a cupcake.

An 8-year old boy called Tom comes over from the other car for a chat. He, of course, has eyes only for Leo who is older and therefore, incredibly glamourous, but, to his evident discomfort he is instantly annexed by Deborah. Within seconds, she is perched next to him by one of the windows, making enormous sideways eyes at him as she combs her hair with one hand and gestures in an animated way with the other, apparently having made the decision to confide her entire life history to him during his enforced 35 minutes of captivity. I can make out only the occasional phrase but "It was SO unfair," and "And then he did it again but they blamed ME," both seem to loom large in her chat up lines.

But it is all in vain. "Where's your brother?" he asks, wistfully, as the train comes out of the tunnel, then swings down from his perch and leaves her looking mournfully after him, hairbrush still poised for action. She catches sight of me and a terrific scowl crosses her features. "Were you watching me?" she says indignantly, then bursts into tears of chagrin and rage.

Holiday romance is certainly a potent thing, even when you're only 7.

..everybody loves good neighbours.....

2008-03-29T15:50:00.000-07:00

"So, what's the deal with paper rounds?" asks Beth. "Like, how do they work?"

"Well, as I understand it, you do it for about three months, forget to buy new batteries for your cycle lights and are crushed under the wheels of a large lorry, leaving the the rest of us to mourn you every day of our lives," I say.

"So...you're not keen."

"I think that's a fair assumption," I say.

I'm probably being mean, but then I'm feeling guilty, and what is your family there for if not to provide a a safe discharge for emotions that can never really be unleashed in public?

I'm not bad at keeping up to date with what's going on in the world, and could give you a reasonable account of what's happening in Iraq, Tibet and in the Zimbabwe elections. And yet it took me a week and a half to find out that the old man two doors down had died, leaving a space in the bright yellow ambulance that brought him home from the day care centre every other day, a widow and an unmowed lawn.

Time to get off the blog and back into the local community?

Well, well, well

2008-03-28T13:14:00.001-07:00

"So what did you do today?" I ask Francis.

Prelimary welcome home bickering is over and done with and we're enjoying a temporary lull before child, cat, dog or Martha the sardine problems raise their ugly, furry and scaly little heads respectively and usher in the next round of fights.

"I've been talking to potential suppliers," says Francis. "At least, I think so. Here, read this." He hands me a printed out e-mail:

'Anyways, back to business as mentioned to you we distribute ecommerce packages/pick and pack them through our various distribution contracts throughout the UK/Europe and World Wide, including Air/Sea operations.

'Also do direct marketing mailing campaigns as well fulfilment but if you can provide me some scope of what you may need I will certainly be happy to assist.'

"What's 'well fulfilment'?" I ask.

"I was rather hoping you'd know," he says.

"I don't know what they've told you about my life here when you're in the office, but, as a music teacher, I encounter fewer boreholes than you might suppose."

"Discontented artesian wells?"

"Not so far. Though it could just be that I'm incredibly unobservant and I've simply overlooked the fact that the cupboard under the stairs is crawling with dowsers and Jack and Jill lookalikes."

I take another look at the e-mail.

"Can't you just ask him?"

"I did," says Francis, grimly, "and I couldn't make out a world he said."

Chick lit

2008-03-27T14:11:00.000-07:00

We're in the hall, which is awash with so much seasonal goodwill that you can practically feel the warm fuzzies breaking against your skin like a warm, sticky tide, a sensation that has caused me to slump over the piano stool in an attitude that requires only a half-smoked rollup glued to my lower lip and a used syringe propping open 'Junior Come and Praise' to complete the general air of dissolution that I can't help feeling hangs over me like a cloud.

The children are parading round in their Easter bonnets while the teachers attempt to judge them, something that requires a keen eye to work out the degree of parental involvement that has gone into each hat.

There are three types: those made exclusively by parents - amazing confections of feathers, woven branch nests and papier mache chicks - those still made by parents but in a faux-naif style - cardboard daffodils, shredded tissue grass - designed to add a child-made authenticity, and the real thing - genuinely naif soft toy birds, chocolate eggs and badly cut out flowers inadequately stuck to the hats with vast quantities of sellotape, all apt to shed profusely and continuously in every possible direction.

"It wasn't always like this," says the deputy head, when the judging is complete and the whole school has been rewarded for its efforts with an extra-long playtime and newly hatched warm fuzzies for all, complete with a seasonal beak.

"It wasn't? Why what did you do - name and shame the pushiest parents?"

"Nothing like that," she says. "We used to have an incubator. Each year, one of the teachers would bring in a load of fertilised eggs to hatch and make the children and staff take it in turns to rotate them."

"Was it fun?" I ask, utterly bemused by this idiosyncratic approach to classroom pets.

"Fun?" she says. "It was a nightmare. He had a stepladder and made the children climb up and watch as he cracked open the eggs. If the chicks hadn't made it - and lots of them didn't, he'd make the children work out what stage they'd reached when they died, and then get them to help with the post-mortem. We'd either be trying to find homes for the ones that had hatched, sterilising the scalpels, or trying to square the concept of the Resurrection with the chick corpses."

"He sounds very hands on," I venture.

"Oh, no. That was the sum total of his involvement in the children's education. Every so often he'd come in, smoke a cigarette and catch up on daytime TV - he didn't have one of his own because he didn't believe in them."

"And his title?" I ask.

"He was the head, but he delegated everything to the parents. In September, he'd tell them what he expected the children to do during the year and then leave the rest up to them."

I can't help but sense a distinct note of nostalgia in her voice.

You, me and Martha the sardine

2008-03-16T10:03:00.001-07:00

Francis has recently returned from a solo trip to Cyprus where he has delivered a stirring speech to 1,500 delegates about the virtues of sardines.

"Were they moved?" I ask.

"The delegates - definitely. There's a wealth of emotion in Omega 3 if you know how to tap it. If you mean the sardines, I think so, but it's hard to tell what their little fishy faces are expressing. Though I'm working on it. 'Read your sardine's mind,' could be a surprise Christmas best seller if I play my cards right."

Overwhelmed, as he always and touchingly is to see his lovely family again, he says, "We never go on proper holidays as a family."

"We do," I say. "Just not together, except when we're visiting your parents."

"I think it would be good for us," he says, looking as misty-eyed as a sardine with conjunctivitis (or so I imagine - the scientific research to back this up lags way behind).

"Why don't we have lunch and think about it," I say. "Deborah, can you call the others and tell them the meal is ready."

Deborah, who is in the kitchen with us, raises her head from her drawing, yells, "Beth, Leo - FOOD," at the top of her voice and then, satisfied with this tangible contribution to family communication, lowers it again and carries on writing 'Kill, kill, kill,' next to a picture of an amiable-looking farmer.

"Deborah," I say, "I can shout, too."

"Well, why make me do it, then?" she says.

"That's not the point. I need you to go out of the room, find them, tell them it's food and make sure they've heard you."

"Oh, all right," she says, disgusted, and gets up.

Ten minutes later, Leo saunters in. We are all eating. "If you're this late again," I say, "I'm going to give your food away."

"Who are you going to give it to?" he asks, interestedly.

"The poor."

"What did the poor ever do for you?" he says.

I look at Francis. "You know," he says, pouring us both a glass of wine. "What say we try and go away together, leaving the children and homicidal thoughts at home."

"What about the sardines?" I ask.

"I've met a particuarly attractive one called Martha who I thought we could just scoop up on the way but - oh, hell, no. No sardines, either."

"Oh, all right then," I say. I'd like to blush prettily at this point but, raddled old hag that I am, simply rush upstairs, apply blusher lavishly to my cheeks, the bath, the cat and a couple of residual slugs. Sporting my new Deaths Head meets Maybelline look I rush downstairs again.

Francis looks at me, then away. "Oh, Martha, my love," I think I hear him mutter, as he fetches a second helping. But there again, perhaps not.

Sand, cement and sicked up cheques

2008-03-14T08:07:00.000-07:00

The woman next door is leaving for work as I put out the rubbish, with the half-traumatised, half world-weary expression of someone dealt the latest in a series of catastrophic blows by an unforgiving God, but who has, fortunately, always expected the worst. The first time I saw her, it was almost enough - but only almost, mark you - to send me round with a list of good psychiatrists and some Class A drugs, until I realised it was how she always looked and that she was, underneath, really quite cheerful.

Francis, on the other hand, is far from cheerful underneath, but skims over the cracks with sand and cement crinkly smiles and bonhomie, though like a cowboy builder, never spreads it quite thick enough and tends to be a little flaky round the edges.

The insurance company has finally coughed up a cheque - 'sicked up' would be a better description given the tiny amount involved - and Francis, after much ringing of small ads and phone calls to people who are all called Dave - has gone to collect the replacement car which is just like the old one only slightly older, rustier and with a higher mileage.

"It's just not fair," he says, staring crossly at it. "Why am I driving round in a rustbucket like this when everyone else we know is in some flash new sports car?"

Prepared Speech 2,006 comes straight into my head. It compares Francis' marital status with that of his young, single, mortgage-free colleagues, taking a sideways swip at the lost decade when, while his career conscious contemporaries were all dressing for success, chasing their dreams and hunting down promotion after promotion, his sole aim was to do as little work as possible, finish the day as early as possible and thus maximise drinking, smoking and staying up late time.

These unkind and unwifely thoughts are there long enough for me to eye the meat cleaver and wonder just how long it would take me to assemble the lethal cocktail of drugs that seems to be so readily available to every would-be murderer.

And then, readers, I shut my mind with a snap, extemporise some ghastly grimace that has to do duty as a smile of loyal love, and get him a beer.

Deadpan

2008-03-13T04:24:00.000-07:00

"Celebrating 100 years in business in the High Street," proclaims the enormous banner above the local undertaker's shop window.

It's good to know that every company these days has a real sense of occasion and oodles of marketing savvy (sensitivity is, surely, a hugely over-rated virtue).

It's even better to try and work out just how this particular firm is planning to spread the happiness:

People are rarely in a party mood when they visit a funeral parlour. We say, lighten up, folks! It may be a bit sad, but it's nothing a complimentary glass of bubbly, funny hat and balloon can't sort out.

And what about a loyalty card scheme: 'Build the points to claim prizes that are literally out of this world!!!'

It's nice to have a get together and reminisce so what about keeping the spirits up (literally) with a reunion seance - cheap on catering though ectoplasm is, as I understand it, the very devil to get off soft furnishings.

But what I'd most like to see would be a Corpse of the Month scheme, building up to fabulous annual, nationwide contest. After all, death is a dismal business at the best of times. A bit of slick marketing could help us all put the fun back in funerals, right where it belongs.

Good Work

2008-03-12T15:48:00.000-07:00

"And what's that noise?" asks Sasha, as the school wends it way, rather fussily, into the hall.

"It was me - I was just re-arranging the class." says Mary, the assistant, implying that with just a little work, she could transform the children into an attractive table decoration.

"The children shouldn't NEED rearranging," says Sasha. Mary looks downcast.

"I can see this is going to be a cold prickly day instead of a warm fuzzy one," adds Sasha, before launching into a lecture about the 'Good Work' sticker system which some of the children who are clearly aiming for starring roles as Heroes of the Resistance have started to subvert.

Get a good work sticker from a teacher and you get a warm fuzzy symbol stamped on your card. Get twenty warm fuzzy stamps and a giant warm fuzzy symbol bearing your name and photograph is stapled to a board in the hall. And.....er....that's it. But so keen are some of the children on reaching the hall of fame that they've taken to shortcutting the process, buying the same Good Work stickers as the school's and giving them to each other at playtime, then appearing for lessons like heavily decorated war veterans and causing the Warm Fuzzy board to fill up so quickly that a second is having to be pressed into service.

"Was that you, curled in a foetal position on top of the ukuleles in the cupboard under the stairs, suppressing a primal scream?" I ask Mary, after a long fifteen minutes in which counterfeit Good Work sticker wearers are taken outside to be stoned to death with Cold Pricklies.

"No," she says.

In that case, it must have been me. I wondered who it was.

Half measures

2008-03-10T16:38:00.000-07:00

"Have a glass of wine and tell me which bedroom design firm I should go with," says Vicky. "What would you like to drink?"

"Anything as long it's cold and you fish out the sawdust first. You don't think you're getting a bit design obsessed?"

"Of course not. Now listen to this one. "'When we come to create your dream bedroom, closet or home office, we don't start with a tape measure. We start with a cup of tea and a ginger biscuit.'"

We look at each other.

"Is that a boast or a warning? Do you think they've had complaints from customers refusing to let them across the threshhold until they show that they're fully trained to handle asbestos and shortbread selections? And what have they got against tape measures? I mean, have you ever tried to measure a bedroom with a ginger biscuit, let alone a cup of tea?" asks Vicky.

"No," I say, laughing derisively. "Far too soggy. Just the same with Gypsy Creams. Everyone knows that when precision's required, nothing beats flapjacks. Given that they set rock hard you can mark them out in centimetres - though the syrup does tend to absorb the ink after a while. And I'm told that if you weld a couple together, you can even improvise a mitre block. Believe me, Vicky,all the best bedroom designers use them. This lot are clearly massively behind the times when it comes to tool kit biscuit ware. I wouldn't touch them with a bargepole."

"I think you're right," says Vicky, shutting the catalogue with a snap and picking up the next.

"This one sounds more like it. 'We'll talk about what you love, what you hate and what your innermost dreams are for your most personal space.'" She pales and double checks the cover.

"Bloody hell," she says. "You know, for a moment there, I thought I'd got hold of Lindy's list of New Year's resolutions."

Thin end of the wedgie

2008-03-09T13:45:00.000-07:00

"You should have been there," says Vicky.

"Even if I had been, it doesn't sound as if I'd have recognised anyone," I say, "given that you were all wearing the same thing."

"How was I to know the fancy dress place had a glut of Marilyn Monroe outfits?" says Vicky. "Lindy and I left it all till the last minute and decided to go there together and when we arrived, there were only two left. The man eyed us both up and told Lindy she'd need the de luxe version, she asked what extras it came with and he said, 'an extra breast, love, and in your case I'd say it'd come in quite useful.'"

She takes a sip of wine.

"So by the time I'd told Lindy to put him down again and we'd all agreed that doing wedgies on a grown man wasn't funny or clever - though I'm still not totally sure Lindy really believes that - there wasn't really much opportunity for chit chat."

"Go on."

"We arrived at the ball and there were Marilyn Monroes everywhere. You couldn't move for them, though even without the extra breast it wasn't hard to work out where Lindy was. She was working her way round the Elvis Presleys and seeing how far she could pull down the zips on their jumpsuits without catching anything on them, so I could trace her by the yelps. And then I scored."

"You?"

"Not intentionally. I just felt really sorry for this poor old chap. He was all on his own on the dance floor and he told me how sad and lonely his life was - and then he tried to stick his tongue down my throat and another Marilyn tapped me on the shoulder and said she was his wife and would I mind awfully if she took him back and gave him his next lot of pills."

She opens another bottle.

"So we all had a few more drinks, then the taxis started arriving. I found ours but there was no sign of Lindy and I ended up borrowing a torch from the security man and shining it round the grounds until I found her behind a hedge and on top of yet another Elvis, retrieved her and tried to drop her at home but she insisted on coming in for a coffee and a gloat.

"Then she fell asleep diagonally across the kitchen floor and I couldn't shift her. I had to leave her there till morning and both the children fell over her when they came down to get breakfast. She slept all the way through Coco Pops, a full English and freshly squeezed orange juice. And then she got up for a pee and I realised she was wearing bits of an Elvis jumpsuit and almost no Marilyn. And presumably, somewhere out there there's a very confused man in a dress."

Easter without tears (or blood or crowns of thorns)

2008-03-08T09:07:00.001-08:00

"Who likes these?" asks Clara the teaching assistant, holding up a brace of hot cross buns. Hands wave. Lips are licked. Beads of saliva form at the corners of mouths. Arms stretch forward.

"Well, you're not having them," says Clara. "They're for the children. I'm using them in music."

"You're dicing with death teasing the other teachers like that," I say to her, as we head for the hall. "They ran out of chocolate biscuits yesterday and they're getting desperate. I could swear I found some sucked pigeon feathers by the kettle this morning."

"Well, we need them to explain Easter to reception," says Clara.

"If you say so," I say. "I vote we just do the hymns and let them interpret them any way they want. You could link almost all of them to current obsessions."

"'There is a green hill?'"

"Tourism,"

"'Forty days and forty nights?'"

"Faddy diets."

"'Trotting, trotting to Jerusalem,?'"

"Animal welfare. And rubbish lyric writing."

"Sasha wants the story told," says Clara, primly. "So shall I be the one to do it this year?"

"Be my guest," I say. "I'll be in the cupboard, polishing my maraccas."

Easter euphemisms have arrived even earlier at school this year. (Personally, I blame global warming for the general tendency to turn good, crisp unambiguous language into mush, though the evidence is purely circumstantial).

It's not hard to tell the Christmas story. After all, the themes - celebrity babies, royalty, exotic travel and goodie bags - tie in so well with society's major preoccupations.

Then, just as the last angel pictures come down off the Good Work board, in springs Easter - all betrayal, suffering and death. True believers would, of course, count everlasting life and redemption for one and all as a happy ending - but however great their commitment to the idea, it tends to lose a little in the retelling to 5 year olds, especially as nobody ever seems to bother explaining how, in the intervening three months, it's bye bye Baby Jesus and hello Fisher of Men.

You've got to give Clara credit for persistence, though.

"Who likes hot cross buns?" she says, wiping off what looks like a big blob of staff drool before holding one up. The arms wave.

"What's on top of them?"

"Butter." "Jam." "Honey." "Your finger."

"No," says Clara, "It's a cross. It's all about what happens at Easter. It's a little bit sad because Jesus got put on a cross. Why?"

"Because he was going to get eaten?"

"No....anyway. His friends came to look for him and he wasn't there. And on Easter Sunday, what happened. Was Jesus still dead?"

"Yes," say the children, logically enough.

"No. He came alive again. Which was good, wasn't it?"

The children look extremely doubtful. The class hamster has recently died. Having all been read tasteful books designed to promote the idea of death as a one-way rite of passage, this must all be coming as a terrible shock, especially the notion that Hammy could even now be trying to dig frantically through the shoebox and back up through the earth.

"He's not alive now, is he?" asks one child with noticeable trepidation.

"No," says Clara, "It was a very long time ago. But if you go into a church and look carefully, you may see a little Jesus on a cross."

They seem disinclined to try this out for themselves.

One thing's for sure. Clara's Easter chats can do nothing but help the spread of secularism. And if I can somehow get her to do the same thing for every other religion, too, the world is practically bound to become a better place.

Coffin fit

2008-03-07T09:20:00.000-08:00

Overheard:

'I just don't know what they're going to do this time. With Dad, my older brother suddenly said, "We're carrying his coffin." The undertakers give you training if you ask for it but of course, he decided on the day.

'Well, they're all different heights. There was lots of wobbling as they went up the aisle. They'd roped in a couple of cousins and they were so tiny they weren't supporting it at all - it had been raining outside and they looked as if they'd taken shelter under the coffin.

'I think he's learnt his lesson with Mum - I've heard nothing about carrying the coffin this time. But there's talk of a harpist. Some tiny women who's taught the Thai royal family, apparently, manhandling this gigantic harp.

'She must be pretty strong by now, so I suppose if they do decide to carry in the coffin, they'd do worse than to ask her to put down the harp and lend a hand. She'd have to do a better job than the cousins.

'But I've half a mind not to go at all. Last time round, my brother - you know he hadn't seen Mum and Dad for years, completely ignored them, just after the money - spent the entire funeral sitting behind me and crying down my back. I told him any crocodile tears this time and I'll be out of there.

'And then there's Mum's flat. I wanted to clear it all out but no, he says it needs to have all her things left in it so it feels like home.

'Home? It smells of wee and feels like a place someone's died in. In fact, it's felt like that for years, a long time before she did die.

Beth's parenting advice. Part 1

2008-03-03T13:42:00.000-08:00

On Friday I collect Beth from late games practice. She sits in the car, nodding in time with music that she alone can hear through her headphones. She does the same at supper.

The next day is Saturday. I collect her from some sort of inaccessible school thing with a friend, drive them both to the friend's house, wait while the friend changes, drive them home again.

On Sunday I take Beth riding, do the shopping while she does various terrifying things in a ring; collect her and drive her home.

On the way, she pulls out her headphones. "Mum," she says, "You know our problem?"

"What?" I ask.

"We don't spend enough time together," she says, with the air of someone dispensing hard won and valuable information.

But she does, unasked, help carry the shopping in, make me a cup of tea and, later, sits heavily on my lap - she's as tall as I am now - to give me a box of chocolates and my Mother's Day card decorated with hand drawn daffodils. So this time, I take it as the well intentioned advice it's undoubtedly intended to be.

Where is Debio?

2008-02-29T14:25:00.000-08:00

I don't normally do a 'calling all cars' thing on the blog, but just wondered if anyone out there knew what had happened to Debio (Land of Sand)? Her blog has been removed. Is she OK? Does anyone know? All answers on cyber postcard. No prizes but would love to find out.

Spreading the pinkness

2008-02-28T23:56:00.000-08:00

Big, pink things need to be distributed widely - so I'd like to pass on my very treasured one (top of sidebar) to Expat Mum, Crazy Cath, Elizabeth M and Molly Gras. With love, pinkness and the accompanying cuddly feelings (but don't take too many at once or they'll make you sick. I'll be posting some bitter twisted ones to go with them soon).

Dawn chorus

2008-02-28T15:02:00.000-08:00

"She won't move!"

It's 7.00 am and Deborah is sitting on the floor in the middle of the kitchen, making loud mewing noises, while Leo rapidly loses his temper nearby.

"Deborah, if you want to make sounds like that, go and make them in the sitting room."

She disappears. Within seconds, the mewing starts again, only louder.

"I said 'Go into the sitting room,' " I say, as Leo shows every sign of leaving his brief simmering phase and going instead for rapid boil mode, like those extremely fast kettles that are being advertised, though with the additional features of being much redder in the face and also capable of sudden, explosive violence.

"I am in the sitting room," says Deborah.

"She's in the doorway, which is why it's just as loud," says Leo, slowly, deliberately and with considerable force.

The cat, who has always had a nice sense of timing, chooses this minute to make an appearance from the garden and treat us to a new game of her own devising, called 'Keepy Uppy with a mouse." The mouse has every appearance of enjoying the game less than the cat, though the screams from Deborah as Leo finally runs out of patience may also be contributing to its general air of malaise and world-weariness.

We catch the mouse in a shoe. It runs up the shoe and falls out from a considerable height, attempts to stand up and falls onto its side. The cat, obviously brimful with new ideas for fun things to do with a small rodent, reappears before we can stop her, and bats it in an exploratory way with a sheathed paw. We recapture the mouse and release it outside. It huddles under a wall, looking vulnerable.

"We should put it out of its misery," I say, as I always do.

"Well, I'm not doing it," say Leo and Deborah, jolted out of their argument by the excitement of seeing something that's so obviously a much bigger victim than they are, despite being so much smaller.

All this, and there's still breakfast, school snacks, school uniform and my own departure to organise.

By the time I get to my first lesson, I feel as if I've already completed a full week's work.

"What do you say to your music teacher?" asks the class assistant, as the children line up at the end. I can only hope they see fit to recommend a large G&T followed by the rest of the day in bed.

Throwing in the towels

2008-02-27T09:17:00.000-08:00

Not content with one freak accident, Francis busily accumulates more. He arranges to visit a factory. Hours before he sets off, it bursts into flames. He drives to Grimsby so he can share the rare beauty and magic of the dawn fish market on the docks and, that evening, feels the tremor of the UK's most vigorous earthquake for 250 years.

He baulks, though, at my suggestion that he might like to move on his own into reinforced, low level accommodation, carefully selected to avoid fault lines, tectonic plates, motorways and all materials implicated in cases of spontaneous combustion. "You could fill the place with sardines," I say. "They're definitely not on any list of hazardous materials, though I suppose you could slip on them."

Meanwhile, I have problems of my own. At school, the big xylophone is making a funny buzzing sound on the low notes. Either Francis' freak accident syndrome is catching, and it, too, is about to explode into flames, or there's something trapped inside - quite possibly the remains of an old music teacher, traumatised by one too many bracing motivational assembly chats.

"Now," says Sasha, to the school. "I want to talk to you about waste. When you dry your hands after you've been to the toilet, what do you do if you take too many paper towels?"

The children are baffled.

"I'll tell you exactly what you do," she says, voice rising scarily. "You just throw them on the floor. Creating mess. And one day, when you come in, there won't be any more, because thanks to your wasteful habits, we'll simply have run out. For ever."

There's dead silence.

"Now, here's what I want you to do. If you take too many, I want you to take all the spare ones to your teacher. They will be pleased, because there are so many things they can do with them. Like - mopping up after painting or...........

"Anyway," she continues, in a slightly hurried way. "They'll work out things to do with them. I expect they'll even put them back into the dispenser for you, if you ask nicely."

Given the general hygiene standards of the children, encouraging them to spread a merry trail of slightly used paper towels round the rest of the building seems to make about as much sense as keeping a colony of threadworm as the class pets.

The other teachers appear strangely unenthused by the notion that they might spend some of their free time carefully reinserting paper towels into a metal container so grimy that it looks as if, with just a little modification, it could provide a terrorist with a perfect starter bio-weapon.

"We need to cut down on mess," says Sasha. "Remember, a lion can choke on a plastic bag." It's the first useful piece of advice I've had all day.

Awards.....

2008-02-25T09:17:00.001-08:00

Pink, big, impressive. And that's just my new award. Thank you Sweet Irene.

Table manners

2008-02-25T08:48:00.000-08:00

Normally it's Francis who makes bizarre home decor decisions but this month, it's my turn. And I've taken full advantage of the fact.

The table was heavily reduced at the end of the sales and, judging by the torn and tattered nature of the price tag, had been for some time when I saw it - two enormous clues that could scarcely have been any more obvious if they'd come with big, red labels reading, "Don't buy this table," or "Unbeatable offer - exclusively reserved for the stupid and gullible!!!!"

Clearly my deerstalker hat and logical deduction gene is a more than normally recessed one.

"That's a very good price," I said to the assistant who gave me a look that I took, at the time, to be one of shared complicity but was, I now realise, a prime, "Is this one really this stupid or does she simply have a first rate sense of irony," expression.

"Mmmmm," she said, without committing herself.

"Large. Cheap. Slightly scuffed. Cheap. Solid..."

"And cheap," she chimed in, cleverly sensing the way my mind was working.

"I'll take it," I said.

She gave me another of those looks. This time I think it was tempered with pity.

"I hope the table's OK," said Francis, after he's dragged what looks like the hull of the Kontiki into the kitchen, "because it's so heavy I don't think we'll ever get it back out again."

He sets to work with a screwdriver and puts on the legs.

"Mmmmmmm," he says, as the fourth goes on, sounding like the assistant. "Right. Help me turn it over."

"A triumph," I say.

"Did you try sitting down before you bought it?" he asks. "No? Go on, then."

When I do, the fatal flaw strikes me. The table is ludicrously high. If you're less than six foot tall, sit down and your head bobs above the table top like a swimmer in choppy water. Deborah will struggle to see her plate in the evening, let alone manage to point her cutlery in the direction of the food.

"Bloody hell," says Lindy, as she sits down at the new kitchen table. "What sort of look are you aiming for? A tea time dwarves' symposium? Mind you," she adds. "It could be quite fun. I've always thought you come with some much more exciting names for Snow White's little friends........"

Only a car

2008-02-22T01:29:00.000-08:00

"It's only a lump of metal," I say to myself.

The flat bed loader has arrived to take away Francis' old car for scrap. There's just enough of a charge in the battery for the man to drive it up the ramp. He parks it facing the only other car there, a white Rover. They are almost nose to nose, massively immobile, like prize fighters squaring up for a final bout.

The car was once my father's. He bought it when he was already ill and, for the first, and last, time in his life, abandoned his 'Which' guides with their careful reckoning up of every feature and instead went against his nature and splashed out, figuring, sensibly, why not?

It was briefly my mother's and then, after her death, it belonged to Francis.

The loader turns round and drives back up the road. As it passes the house, I see that a strand of red and white sticky police tape that secured the boot has worked loose and twists gaily in the slipstream as if we've decorated the car to celebrate its final journey.

I look down, hard. It is, after all, only a car.

Cunning plans

2008-02-21T00:25:00.000-08:00

The nightmare of half term is shattered by the nightmare of an e-mail from Sasha, reminding us that as the school inspectors are due for a visit, our lessons must be not only flawless in the execution but pristine in the planning, too.

As somebody whose notes for the term so far read, "Amass fortune. Escape," I can't help feeling that I may have a little work to do. Oh, all right. A great deal of work, given that lesson plans should be so hedged about with jargon, goals, success criteria and enthusiasm that it's quite hard to see what it is you're teaching, let alone what the children are actually supposed to get out of it.

I start with reception who, this term, will be embarking on 'Five fat sausages.' In just ten minutes, aided by a smallish but essential quantity of hallucinogenic drugs and a Thesaurus, I've turned a flimsily constructed little nursery rhyme into a mansion of ideals, so lofty that with retrospective planning permission it could probably make a nice home for a Russian billionaire or, with just a little more work, be whipped up into a doctoral thesis entitled, "Towards a fairer economy: the pork and seasonings dynamic," and submitted to the London School of Economics.

The school, in what I suspect will prove to be a masterpiece of misjudged lulling and false security efforts, has so far presented the inspectors as lovely people who want only to offer kindly advice and make our lives the kitten and rainbow paradises that they deserve to be, rather in the manner of those books that portray hospitals to children as earthly manifestations of fairyland.

And, as I give the Year 2 music lessons a slick makeover (before: Sing songs, go back classroom. After: Explore dynamics, pitch, rhythm, write and perform ostinatos, develop listening skills, thinking skills, speaking skills - all in just half an hour!! No brains were harmed in the making of these lesson plans) I can't help wondering just when the truth is going to dawn.

Pursed lips

2008-02-20T01:48:00.000-08:00

"Mum, I need to see a psychiatrist," says Deborah, who has definitely been watching too much tv this half term.

"Why?"

"Because I'm too scared to go upstairs. It's not normal. I think it's a neurosis. And, in any case, there's monsters in the wardrobes."

I sigh - a parent's theatrical 'How many times do I have to tell you?' sigh. Deborah sighs back, only better and more theatrically.

"If you want me to take you to the adventure playground with a friend, you have to go upstairs and tidy your room."

There's a pause while Deborah tries to work out whether it would be worthwhile seizing the phone, locking herself in the loo and calling a friend anyway, and I try to work out what I'll do if she does.

Very fortunately, the phone rings, sparing us the necessity of finding out.

"God, I'm bored," says Vicky. "Even wine's losing its appeal. I got so fed up I even tried experimenting with the bog cleaners to see if I could get them to explode, the way it says they do on the labels if you mix them up."

"And did it work?"

"Did it, f***."

"So what have you got arranged for the rest of the day?"

"I'm so bored I've booked myself in for a fairly drastic bikini wax. It's all very well sorting out your top hair but there's no point leaving it like that. What with ageing and having children, everything's running wild - or falling out. I looked down this morning and for a second I could swear there was a horrible old man with a tangly beard and pursed lips staring straight back."

It's just dawned on me that the phone's on loudspeaker and Deborah is listening, open-mouthed.

"Mum," she says. "Why has Vicky got an old man looking at her in the bathroom."

"I - She -." For once, I'm at a loss.

"At least my monsters are imaginary," she says. "But Vicky. She needs a psychiatrist. Definitely."

And shaking her head thoughtfully, she sets off up the stairs.

Carbon footprints in the sand

2008-02-19T01:37:00.000-08:00

Francis is up at 5.00 am, early but not bright, to make the journey to work by train. And so, owing to the audible nature of his misery, are the rest of us.

"Fifty miles away and it's going to take me three hours. I'd be better off using a pack horse."

"Hang on, darling," I say, "I'll nip out and see if anyone's left one out for recycling."

I get The look. Normally it's just A look - 'The' look being reserved for occasions when it is imperative to communicate, without words, how fundamentally I have failed to measure up to theoretical wifely standards - as defined by Francis, anyway - by being flippant when a mature, considered approach is called for.

"I'm not a horrible, unpleasant bitch," I say, indignantly to Vicky later.

"You're not?" she says. "Then why the bloody hell am I friends with you? You'd better shape up or they'll have you carted off to Lovely Land with the other mothers and we'll never see you again for the clouds of platitudes. Tell you what, I'll text you some insults to get you started. They're left over from a dinner party we had at the weekend. And I want to see them all used up by evening."

I'm not expecting Francis back until late and am just contemplating the prospect of cooking the children's meal with disfavour, wondering if raw chicken really is as harmful as they say it is, when there's a strange roaring noise from outside.

"Good God," I say to Deborah, who is trying to deepen the scandal of middle class drinking habits by wresting my second glass of wine from me and downing it in one while I fight her off with the bottle, "What do you think that is?"

Before she can reply, the front door opens and Francis appears.

"The good news," he says, "Is that the office have found something I can drive till we sort out another car."

"And the bad news?"

"Come and take a look."

Outside is an enormous truck. It's not so much a cross between a Jeep, Land Rover and cement mixer as an of amalgamation of all three. It has a vaguely militaristic look to it - though one that is immediately negated by the paintwork, which sports the company logo floating in a vibrant seascape, complete with mermaids, sardines and something I greatly fear is an octopus peeping coyly from from one of the wheel arches.

"Nice," I say.

"Nice?"

"Just wait," I say, and call Beth, who has been more than unusually pouty and unpleasant since she came back from school, ever since I told her we might have no way of transporting her to her next social engagement.

"You will be able to go to your disco at the weekend after all," I say. "And just look at what we'll be taking you in."

Beth stares, then a look of total, unmitigated horror crosses her face.

"No, please, no," she gasps, and runs into the house.

"Every cloud....." I say to Francis. "Fancy a beer?"

Half term - double the fun. Guaranteed!!!

2008-02-18T00:38:00.000-08:00

Worried about missing out on those precious early morning school run moments over half term?

Now, just for you, local authorities have combined forces to come up with a very special offer: the chance to double the fun all the way through to Easter by spreading your half term over not one, but two whole weeks, absolutely free!

It's so easy. There are no forms to fill out - you don't even have to scrawl an 'x' on a document with a shaky, hungover hand.

Follow these simple steps and there's a very real chance that you, too, can make lie ins a thing of the past!!

All you have to do is have at least two children in different schools run by different councils and you can virtually guarantee that, despite the giant steps in communications technology, those crazy officials in adjoining areas just a few miles apart will never talk to each other when they're planning the school calendar!

The result? Pure magic.

Thrill in Week 1 as the first child on half term is prodded awake so you can get the others, who aren't, to their school on time.

Then enjoy the experience in reverse the following week.

Lie back - or, more realistically, sit bolt upright - and give your life a boost by keeping the roller coaster term time experiences coming all the way through half term, too - guaranteed!

Thrill to that all time 6.30 am favourite, "Mum, have you seen my sports shirt? I need it NOW!"

Gasp at the twists and turns of the daringly plotted hunt to find it against the clock.

Marvel at the way it turns up under the sofa, covered with dog hair and unexplained sticky patches, just after you've dropped a distraught child, sobbing, "I'm going to get detention if I turn up without it."

Wonder at the high powered car chase as you try to work out exactly which bus the children are on and if it's possible to throw the shirt through the window

Snore as those powerful tranquillisers kick in

And next week - do the same thing all over again.

Happy Half Term!!!!

Bling for the blog

2008-02-17T02:38:00.000-08:00

Thank you Debio for my delightful awards. Mya, Iota, Molly Gras, Sweet Irene and Expat Mum - they're yours. Polish in second drawer down.

Party politics

2008-02-17T02:26:00.000-08:00

"....She marched in to see the director of studies and said, 'I'm not doing my A-levels here - the teachers are a bunch of incompetents........"

"...Who am I? The boyfriend. Apparently."

"...So I was her best friend when she was living with her mother in the States and Ruby was her best friend here. She took one look at me and you could see the hatred in her eyes. I was the rival. Friend, lover, she just didn't know. I tell you what I think. I think she's evil."

"....She says we have met. Apparently I came round to her flat ten years ago when she was having a moving out sale, bought a Barbie for my daughter, then had a huge row with my wife over whether it was an appropriate toy for our little girl. It went straight up to the loft and I haven't seen it since."

"...Do you like the ring? Twenty five thousand dollars! Apparently that stone is just about the best you can get. I know 45 is a bit late to be tying the knot but my three cats - I call them the girls - love him."

Parking fine and dandy

2008-02-16T10:54:00.000-08:00

Two letters arrive for Francis from the insurers. One confirms that his car is worth less than a Northern Rock share; the other expresses mild surprise that he has declined to insure anything with them ever again.

Belatedly, I check consumer review websites and discover that there are two types of comment about the insurer. The first sort praise its charm, low costs and ease of contact when policies are first taken out. The second all complain bitterly of the firm's intransigence, small payouts and capacity for spreading misery round the world when claims are being processed.

"We should have looked at these before we took out the policy," I say to Francis. But he is too busy slipping a letter about a parking fine under his other post to answer.

I don't like to tell him that I can spot a penalty fine envelope at fifty paces and that he's hopeless at concealing things. The reason I don't like to tell him is, naturally, so I can store up the information and surprise him with it when he next complains about the phone bill which - judging by the other post - is scheduled to happen about an hour from now.

Marriage is a war but one where, if you're lucky, you achieve a stand-off early on and spend the rest of your years trying to upgrade your weapons to achieve tactical superiority. His parking fine, my phone bill. Thank God he wasn't killed in that crash. Forget Nintendo games to boost brain power. Sharpening your wits on your husband instead definitely does it for me.

I check my e-mail spam. "Basic Craps," the first is headed. So, so right, honey. But worth it. As far as Francis and parking tickets are concerned, you can hide, but you can't run.

Prickly nasties

2008-02-15T11:25:00.001-08:00

".......so the bad fairy came along and took away all the warm fuzzies and swapped them with prickly nasties."

Another day, another assembly, another story with a moral that appears to bear absolutely no relation to the reality of life at school, or anywhere else for that matter.

So far this term we've been treated to:

- the man whose garden withered until he let all the neighbourhood children play in it; moral, let them in or the little b****** will vandalise it anyway

- the giraffe who only achieved true happiness by giving away all her possessions; moral - giraffes, wise up.

- the cheerful woman who refused to let untold misery grind her down and always had a smile and a quip for everyone; moral, doesn't even bear thinking about but definitely involves martyrdom, brave smiles and a national epidemic of passive aggressive behaviour, which I think is probably attributable to global warming and almost certainly spread by a new strain of horribly complacent mosquitos which fly about with their tiny heads tilted on one side in an attitude of irritating compassion and understanding. At least it makes dengue fever sound positively delightful by comparison.

The story concludes (there's something about prickly nasties being replaced by a good fairy who gives everybody warm fuzzies and is promptly arrested on suspicion of child abuse) I play the hymn with the music upside down, but nobody notices, including me, and then it's time for a staff meeting.

If the children are allowed to barbecue a sausage to commemorate Australia Day (why sausages? Why Australia Day?) will there be a vegetarian alternative?

One of the teaching assistants is going on a firefighting course. Somebody points out that as she is not in until midday, fires can only be allowed after lunch. Also that the fire brigade advocates getting the hell out of the building and leaving the fire fighting to them. "It's just for little fires," she says, looking wistfully at the smaller electrical appliances and clearly willing them to burst into carefully controlled flames.

At the 'Any other business' stage, I ask if there are any themes that the teachers would like reflected in the music lessons. There is a long pause.

"Pirates, Countries and Light," says a Year 1 teacher. "All about me," says the Reception team, "and we're doing food in the second half of the term. They could sing 'Sizzling Sausages'".

"Animals," says Sasha. There's a pause while I wonder whether to ask if this is a magisterial comment on the rest of us or a theme, then decide against it and just write it down.

Later, at home, I practise a new song. It is called: "Thank you Lord for this new day." Deborah is rolling around the carpet and screaming because I won't stop playing the piano so she can watch television and Francis is gloomily studying more documents from the insurance company that appear to read, "You're a loser. Accept it and take this derisory cheque, or else."

I look at the performance note at the beginning of the hymn.

"With quiet joy," it says.

Wheels within wheels

2008-02-14T00:04:00.000-08:00

Francis' car insurers point out the teeny tiny print that they've concealed under the stamp on the envelope containing this documents. It says that if your car is a write off, they get to cancel your policy immediately, don't pay you a refund and keep the money. It's an industry standard, apparently, and one that I can't help admiring for the unabashed greed it displays, so naked that it would be turned away at the doors of a flasher's convention for indecent exposure.

All would be lost except that, as Francis' policy happens to expire at the end of February, we have scored a small but significant victory over Big Business and are thus triumphant.

Just not for very long.

"What do you think of this advertisement?" asks Francis. He shows me a description of a car, so amazing, judging by the description, that it appears to have been hand-crafted by angels in some celestial workshop where love, attention and the blessing of God appear to be the benchmark production standards.

"It sounds fantastic. What is it?"

"My old car. I'm putting it up for sale."

Years ago, Francis inherited an old wreck of a car. Owing to its rarity value - most of its counterparts have long since fallen apart, and a small bunch of self-deluding enthusiasts is buying up the few that remain in a vain attempt to talk them out of their determined attempts to rust themselves to death - it is worth more than it might be, but not as much as Francis' advertisement would suggest.

Several hours later, the bidding is rocketing up, often rising by as much as - oooh, £1 or £2 at a time.

"I think it's safe to say that we should soon be into double figures," says Francis. At this rate, given that the insurance company appears to be planning to offer Francis a similar amount for his now written-off work car, we should, at the very least, be able to afford quite a decent framed picture of the replacement car Francis would have like to buy but, as things stand, can't.

"Do you know how you're going to get to work?" I ask.

"No," he says. Then adds - and I should have seen this one coming - "But if you play it on the piano, I'm sure I can pick up the tune."

Closing the motorway

2008-02-12T15:11:00.000-08:00

Francis calls as I'm investigating the fridge, trying to work out whether any of the assorted scary looking objects in tupperware containers is food or, more likely, a colony of small, slightly smelly alien hatchlings, left for safekeeping by their parents while they head off for a night on the tiles.

"I've just closed the motorway," he says in what, with hindsight, is a tone of unnatural calm.

"Oh, well done, darling," I say, only half listening and vaguely imaging closing motorways, like judging Miss Mermaid, to be another slightly eccentric job requirement - a sort of reverse opening ceremony where you pocket the champagne, close the scissors and rewind the ribbon into a neat figure of eight shape round your fingers.

"No, you don't understand," he says."I'm at the front of a three-car pile up but I'm fine, thanking you for your concern."

"I am concerned," I say. "But I take it you're not badly hurt, otherwise you wouldn't be able to call me. What happened?"

"A van ran into the car behind me and I couldn't accelerate fast enough to stop him hitting me."

"Are the other drivers OK?"

"Well, the van driver who started it all isn't."

"Why?"

"Because I've just punched him in the face."

"Oh."

"I didn't like his attitude."

"I shouldn't think he's wild about yours, either," I say. "Why did you punch him?"

"He started blaming me for braking. Then when the police came over, he decided he didn't like their attitude much, either, so he ran away. They asked me if he had any distinguishing features and I said, 'Yes - a big bruise on his right cheek where I hit him," and they all laughed. Anyway, they've brought in a couple of bloodhounds and they're tracking him across the fields."

Francis arrives home several hours later, sounding considerably less calm as the shock sets in. He calls his boss, whose immediate reaction is to ask when he'll be in again.

"Wrong way round," says Francis, helpfully. "First you ask how I am, THEN you demand to know when I'll be back. It's better for employee morale. Just a tip for next time."

Then, surveying the still driveable car with its crumpled boot, secured by police emergency tape, he pours himself an extra large drink with an only slightly shaky hand and starts to ring the insurers.

Trifling moments: extracts from a suburban drinks party

2008-02-10T14:31:00.000-08:00

"- I do wonder how she copes now she's in the police. She's just so pink and fluffy. She'll call me up and say, '" Hi, Mum. I just had a few minutes free after arresting a shoplifter so I thought I'd call up and see how you are.'"

"- Trifle? Anyone want some more trifle?"

"- So I unwrap it and it's this book full of tips. For girls, allegedly. And I can't make head nor tail of them."

"- Then she rings me up the other day and tells me she hasn't had a moment to herself all morning what with wrestling one criminal to the ground after another, and she's black and blue all up her legs. Then she just goes, 'Love you, Mum. Just turned the sirens on. Sorry if it's a bit noisy.' And, then, to crown it all, she calls this morning and says, 'Hope you're not cooking, Mum, I just had to tell you what I've been up today"

"- Yes I did do something completely different for the first ten years. But I'm certainly not going to tell YOU what it was."

"- There's still lots of trifle left. Come on, you lot."

" - So she says, 'We get up the top of the stairs and it doesn't smell - but only because the bedroom door's been closed for six weeks. I have a quick look and see the body's up against the radiator - and the heating's on full blast. And I think, 'Aye-aye,'. So I turn to the women pcs and say, 'Anyone got some scent, because I think we need some for our hankies?' Wouldn't be so bad except by now the relations have turned up and they're all watching from downstairs. So we're handling things really sensitively and we just sort of roll him to the top of the stairs, but gently. And then his head comes off and rolls all the way to the bottom - and two of the other policewomen faint. Are you making shortbread, Mum? I really miss your shortbread.'"

"....And I just don't understand all the tips. For example, 'Think of your nipples as headlights,' What does it mean? And if I did, what would they suggest using to get a dipped beam?"

The gorgeousness, the gorgeousness

2008-02-09T01:14:00.001-08:00

I'm pretty sure this is a quote from some film or other, though I may have got gorgeousness wrong. I'm pretty sure that 'the' is right, though - so 50% is pretty good and, in the UK, enough to get me a brace of A-starred GCSEs.

More lovely, lovely awards. I think all of you out there may have some or all of them already, but here goes:

The air kiss to Mother at Large, Molly Gras, Casdok, Gwen, DJKirby and Dulwich Mum

The creative blogger to Stay at Home Dad - I'm worried about you, SAHD - you don't write, you don't comment - where are you? To Miss with Love and to Dumdad.

Happy polishing, all.

Staging posts to Lovely land

2008-02-09T01:03:00.000-08:00

It's sickness time at school, enabling the staff to combine two of their favourite pastimes - bringing in home made cake and symptoms and passing round both with equal enthusiasm.

In fact, there are occasions when the whole place resembles some sort of anti-miracle storytelling event. No sooner is one teacher off her crutches than another gets some instead. The place echos to the sound of slow, portenteous footsteps. Add a couple of wooden legs and we could stage several simultaneous performances of 'Treasure Island,' with me, cast by Sasha, taking a cameo role as the Black Spot of doom.

This morning, reception has embarked on a bit of music and movement. The children jog on the spot, freeze, and proclaim the virtues of regular exercise, while I shuffle from foot to foot in order to create the illusion of frenzied activity.

As the song finishes, Pete puts up his hand. "Miss," he says, "My finger hurts." "Just as well you don't sing with your finger, then," I say, in my least plausible jolly voice which grates so much that I half expect the vibrations to cause a flock of small songbirds to be struck dead in mid air and plummet to earth.

The children ignore my voice and instead brandish limbs at me with the gusto of trainee lepers, accompanied by many gut-wrenching moans whose vigour and clarity outstrips anything they've produced during the rest of the lesson. Some hastily pick at cuts so historic they've been listed by English Heritage to try and wrench off remaining scabs, and hold these out to me as well.

"Miss, my hand," "My tooth," "My leg,"

"MY GOD!" I say, rather more loudly than planned.

There's a sudden silence, possibly caused by the fact that this is the first and only time they've ever heard me say anything that's filled with genuine, raw emotion.

"Right," I say, making the tactical error of assuming that underneath the pain, they've been enjoying leaping round the room. "Anybody feeling really ill had better sit on the bench." Within seconds, the whole class is fighting for a seat and the moans and groans are now mixed with screams of genuine pain as skirmishes break out over the last space.

There's a courtesy knock on the door and - "We take music very seriously," Sasha is, inevitably, saying, and looking backwards as she does it towards the group of prospective parents she's bringing round the school on a guided tour.

This is a mistake.

The parents' expectant looks vanish. Music is clearly not a staging post on the way to Lovely Land - not this morning anyway.

Pete, finger troubles apparently forgotten, jumps on top of Clifford, with the clear intention of squashing him to death - forgetting, of course, that in an expanded state, Clifford will take up more room on the bench.

"And on to the library," Sasha says, smartly executing a 180 degree turn, and disappearing again.

Climatic

2008-02-06T11:33:00.000-08:00

The migrating mould has broken all previous records, arriving earlier than ever before and bursting out with vigour in the bathroom where it has forced the grout into ignominous retreat and now delights the entire family with its glorious black moistness as it consolidates its territory round the edge of the bath.

The wall down the side has awoken from its winter hiberation and is moving again, possibly to a more desirable area where property prices are stable. As it sheds its dowdy old bricks, no doubt in the fervent but utterly misguided belief that, thanks to bountiful Mother Nature, new ones will soon grow back, we can only admire its willpower as the garden gate is gradually shaken clear of its frame.

The neighbours, too, are stirring. They aren't usually seen until after dusk, darkness providing cover for their characteristic behaviour - deliveries of anonymous hate mail and cries of, "Who did threw that brick? I'll get you, you little b****** if I see you again."

It's a wonderful world. Let us rejoice in it, using the repertoire of quaint old four letter words that Thomas Hardy so strangely omitted in his classic works. Sometimes I feel that here, strangely, I am closer to nature that he ever was.

I love you all.

Climactic

2008-02-05T16:09:00.000-08:00

"Have just heard ad for something called climactic air conditioning for cars. Can it be true?" I text Vicky.

"Suspect word is climatic. But if climactic, get me one," she texts back. "Especially if you get to choose the voice."

"If climactic, could sound like Edward Heath and you wouldn't care."

Later, I'm driving along just imagining how much a good, muscular climactic air conditioning system would bring to the dullest school run - 'Hot, oh, God, hot. No - hotter, hotter, hotter. More. More.....' when I come across a car that appears to have been driven at great speed up a lampost and now rests with its rear wheels on the ground, entire front end elevated and resting on the lampost, like an affectionate pet. The lamp itself is turned towards the car, as though making a tender enquiry about its well-being.

The car looks expensive. Its driver, a man resting his arms on the steering wheel, is staring straight ahead. There is no sign of any other car, urban fox or cat that might have caused the accident. It's as if, maddened by something the lampost said, he has simply done his best to run it down.

"Do you need help?" I ask, winding down the window.

"I'm fine," he says, not looking round. "Can't say the same about the car, unfortunately."

"Oh, well. It happens," I answer, with the first platitude that comes into my head. It makes him turn and look at me for a second, with evident incredulity. It is obvious that not only have I never seen a car up a lamppost before, but nor has anyone else, judging by the small crowd of pointing, happy onlookers that's rapidly gathering to film the event and post it on social websites round the world.

"Just saw car up lamppost," I tell Vicky, when I get home.

"Probably just road testing his climactic air conditioning," says Vicky. "Maybe not such a good buy after all."

The joy of sects

2008-02-04T15:06:00.000-08:00

"Do you prefer authentic 17th century music or the modern pieces written especially for children?" asks Sasha, next day.

Ten minutes into my recorder lesson, she's entered at a gallop. Appalled by the noise the children are making, she plucks recorders from them as she passes so that by the time she reaches the piano she resembles a demented Interflora employee, bearing what looks like a bunch of deformed, bloomless stems.

“This school is noted for its above average discipline,” she lectures me. “That was absolutely dreadful. I could hear them all the way down the corridor.”

She announces that she has a lute and is not afraid to use it. To try and work out my next move in this musical one-upmanship version of 'Stone, paper, scissors,' I have bought a book in a second hand shop about old musical instruments. It has the grippingly apposite title "Old Musical Instruments," and copious illustrations. The very first one features the Sirens who, it says, "symbolise the forces of destruction unleashed by evil sounds." Not a good time to start acting on those voices in my head, then, and claiming that satanically altered madrigal words made me swap my recorder for a set of kitchen knives.

"Apparently Sasha belongs to some weird sect," I tell Vicky, when I see her later. "One of the other teachers told me."

"So what do they believe in?" asks Vicky.

"Apparently they see evil everywhere."

"So does everyone Bad Lindy's ever met. Proves nothing. And it's practically inevitable with the recorder, I'd have thought."

"It follows the teachings of a woman, who emerged from a submerged continent after 35,000 years to reveal the truth."

"Which is?"

"They believe the human body is evil. And when I think of all that ogling going on at Miss Mermaid, I've got more than a grain of sympathy."

"It took her 35,000 years to come up with that?" says Vicky. "Somebody should have told her to pop down for another few thousand years until she thought up something more interesting."

News from the Deep

2008-02-03T09:18:00.000-08:00

"The job's killing me," says Francis. His words contrast oddly with his pink, healthy complexion and the cheerful way he speaks them as he cracks open another can of beer.

He shakes his head sadly at the enormous spreadsheet on the screen in front of him, so big that nobody alive has viewed it in its entirety.

Stabbing the tab right button, he sets off on his nightly exercise programme which, as far as I can tell, involves seeing if he can reach the far end before falling asleep.

"What are those figures supposed to tell you?" I ask.

"Nobody knows," he says. "Even the forecasting guru they commissioned it from has forgotten what it's about. But if I can decipher it, I get to judge the Miss Mermaid contest."

"Tell me you've just made that up."

"Yes," he says. "Because I'm a judge anyway."

"Miss Mermaid?"

"Yes? So? It's all linked to Omega 3."

"In which case, why not Miss Fish Head? I could come up with several contenders, starting with Sasha."

"I'll suggest it for next year," says Francis, deadpan. "Meanwhile, I'm a judge because we're the biggest sponsors. Honestly, it's a nightmare."

"Let me get this right," I say, "You have to judge a bunch of gorgeous, pouting, nubile women?"

"Yup."

"So, apart from being gorgeous and pouting, what are you judging them on? Their tails?"

"That, and their innner beauty."

"How do you do that? Analyse them for edible oil content?"

"No. I just get to ogle them from a table under the stage."

"I want to come with you," I say.

"OK," he says. "But are you sure you'll be able to walk in the tail outfit without falling over? And you would be ....well, a left field contender for the title."

"Don't be daft," I say. "I'm nominating myself as ogling monitor."

"I'll think about it," he says. "I do hope you're not jealous."

"Jealous? Of a bunch of luscious beauties all trying to get your attention and prepared to do almost anything to gain the title? What makes you think I'd be jealous?"

"That's all right then," says Francis, and carries on with his tabbing.

I go out and turn on my own computer, taking limited consolation from Megadik's latest e-mail assuring me that, "Evenings alone are a thing of the past with your brand new dick," - while being unspecific as just what sort of new brand new friends a middle aged female music teacher with an extra appendage might acquire. Perhaps I should ask the mermaids for tips.

Awards

2008-02-02T04:14:00.000-08:00

Dumdad, in Paris, has very kindly passed on the Excellent Blog Award, originating with a Canadian blogger who says:

'I love being a part of the blogging community and part of all the friendships that I've formed so I wanted to give a blog award for all of you out there that have Excellent Blogs. By accepting this Excellent Blog Award, you have to award it to 10 more people whose blogs you find Excellent Award worthy. You can give it to as many people as you want but please award at least 10.'

I would like to pass it on to the following (as it's at least 10, I plan to add more):

Not wrong, just different; Casdok (Mother of Shrek); Mother at Large; Sweet Irene; The Rotten Correspondent; Crystal Jigsaw; Mutley the Dog; Frog in the field; Potty Mummy; Stay at Home Dad - this a rugged one, SAHD, you'll like it!; To Miss with Love; DJ Kirby; Lady Macleod.

Dumdad, who is currently celebrating a major lottery win - check it out and bid for your share now - has also awarded me a chic Parisian award which I think adds that touch of continental sophistication I've been searching for for so long. Thank you, Dumdad.

Blowing it

2008-02-01T09:35:00.000-08:00

It's playtime and I'm just about to call in the children for choir practice. My plastic trousers are sizzling on the radiator like a left-field hors d'oeuvre in a low-budget cookery programme with a brace of shoulder pads, resembling refugees from an experimental sanitary towel factory, keeping them company.

Outside the hall, the children are, as usual, peering putting their heads round the door like tiny spies. Either they're struggling with the metaphysics of self, context and reality or else Sasha has bugged their healthy eating snacks with little cameras and is paying per second of compromising footage.

I text Bad Lindy, Vicky and Francis to update them on my morning so far:

"Think may have blown shoulder pads gambit."

"What about mixed presentation platter of oily fish? Known international friendship symbol," suggests Francis, whose brain has clearly performed a successful separation exercise from the rest of his body and is now living underwater and suffering from pressure sickness.

"Stupid c***," texts Bad Lindy, with the characteristic depth of sympathy and fellow feeling that's made her such a strong contender in the 'Confidante of the year' awards. "Try blowing the f****** recorder instead. It's the only language she understands."

As I pick up the special non-trip rubber casing into which the overhead projector lead must be inserted, thanks to new health and safety regulations, retching slightly as I encounter its own protective coating of old jelly and bits of second hand sausage, making it to tactile sensation what strychnine is to tea at the Ritz, Conrad appears.

"Miss," he says, "I don't really want to come to choir." I wink at him. "Conrad," I say,"I'll let you into a little secret. I don't want to, either. But if you don't let on, nor will I."

Power-dressing the rubberised trousers way

2008-01-31T04:35:00.000-08:00

It's fair, I think, to say I'm not looking my best. A sudden mid-journey rainstorm means that I'm now wearing rubberised trousers over my power-dressing skirt, causing it to settle like a snowdrift between my legs.

I look, according to taste, either like someone simulating the arrival of the placenta for an educational but tasteful video on giving birth, or Miss July from the Mature Fetishists' Calendar.

At this time of day, the hall is normally empty, giving me the chance to commune with my marracas before the first class arrives. But today, even I can't miss the ominous hush that's seeping out under the door and through the cracks in the window.

Pushing the door open, I'm confronted by interesting spectacle of 40 or so parents, all the children, a full set of staff and Sasha, who is tapping her watch and looking distinctly angry.

"Class assembly," she mouths at me with her back to the parents, dislike managing to jet, like steam, between her clenched teeth. "Had you forgotten? Fortunately, I was able to keep everyone entertained for a few minutes with a few jokey anecdotes about the importance of timekeeping while we were waiting. Oh, and you might want to kill the fluorescent bobble hat."

It's hard to stride into a crowded room full of strangers at the best of times; a good deal worse when a bunched up power dressing skirt has compelled you to adopt a legs apart rolling seafarer's gait.

I sit down on the piano stool, a good 3 inches higher than normal thanks to the extra padding.

"Let's have the worry song," says Sasha. "It seems appropriate."

Fortunately, it's one I know by heart as it's a school favourite, for reasons I still have yet to fathom:

"Worry is a scary thing, often makes us ill
Reasons can be differing
Really causes jittering
Yet worrying about things doesn't get them done
So talk to someone who can help
Together make a plan
Deal with your worries one at a time
You can, you really can."

"Thank you," says Sasha. "Now, let's have year 2 telling us all about how to be nice to each other."

At the end of the assembly, she leads the applause.

"Now, everyone," she says, "I think we've learned some very important lessons about being nice. And what I'd like you all to do - teachers and parents as well - is to turn to the person next to you and tell them something you really value about them. And when you've done it, put your hands up."

Sitting apart from the others at the piano has never felt more isolating. Soon, mine is the only hand that isn't up.

"Oh dear," says Sasha, "Our poor music teacher. Do you think nobody could find anything nice to say about her? I do hope not. I think we should all find something nice to say to her during the day to cheer her up for being in a bit of a rush this morning, don't you?"

There's a general murmur of assent, then:

"School dismissed," she says, and the whole, awful business comes to an end.

Sardines on the line

2008-01-30T09:23:00.000-08:00

"Shouldn't you have left for work?" I ask Francis.

"Told them I'd be late."

"Excuse?"

"Sardines on the line at Crewe."

"Just two points. First, we don't live anywhere near Crewe. Second, you drive to work."

"Ah, yes, but the sardines don't know that, do they?"

Feeling either that I'm very stupid or, more likely, that Francis spent too long studying the surrealist pieces at the art show we went to and is entering his mid-life melting clocks phase with a vengeance, I abandon this conversational thread in favour of swearing as I try to mount my trusty bicycle, without any significant success.

"Stay right there," calls Francis. "I want to come and watch."

It would be touching, this spouse to spouse farewell ritual, were it not for the fact that I know Francis is only here because he wants to see whether it's possible for me to cycle anywhere in my ersatz 80s power dressing outfit, and make sure nobody can look up my skirt while I'm doing it.

"I don't think that Alice band is doing you any favours," he says.

"Deborah lent it to me," I explain.

"It's too small and it keeps slipping down over your eyes. Mind you, if Sasha has a thing about Star Trek you'll be fine - you've got a distinct resemblance to that blind engineer chap La Forge. Though I'm not sure about what looks like the output of an entire viscose factory round your chest or the swirly skirt. And what are those lumps on your arms?"

"I've got a shoulder pad slippage issue," I say.

"Forget Star Trek. You look more like a pirate auditioning undercover parrots, one at a time."

"If you keep going on like that, I swear that if I get my hands on a phaser, I'll put it straight on the castrate setting, even if it does run counter to the message of peaceful missions of discovery. Now beam me up onto my saddle. I'm heading into the alien zone."

A shoulder pad to cry on

2008-01-29T14:49:00.000-08:00

"It's obvious," says Francis, later that evening, when I ask him for his advice on getting closer to Sasha. "You have to be more like her."

"What, more like someone so wedded to 80s power dressing that she looks as if she's had shoulder pads surgically implanted. Either that, or she's secretly breeding them on some secret factory farm. If some crazed shoulder pad activist sets them loose, there'll be shoulder pads running amok on every high street in the country, giggling they forcibly accessorise every woman of working age with pussy cat bows and Alice bands."

Francis, who has developed the probably essential yet strangely irritating habit of taking a short power nap whenever I set off on one of my longer verbal riffs, pays scant attention.

"Wake me up when you reach a recognisable sentence structure," he says, and shuts his eyes.

"Tell me what you mean and I'll stop," I say, gently hitting him over the head with the paper weight formerly known as one of my less successful homemade biscuits.

"What I mean is that you should mirror her body language, or echo back some of the phrases she uses. Soon she'll feel an increasing affinity with you, without really knowing why."

"She will?"

"She will."

This phrase echoing business is child's play, I think, heading off to school the next day, armed with a notebook so I can get the hang of some of Sasha's key bon mots. And there's no shortage to choose from.

"It's not a blueprint, but a road map," she informs the staff room while unveiling her staff healthy eating plan, involving the immediate replacement of chocolate biscuits with carrots at break time.

"We're definitely committed to consulting on literacy schemes," she advises a Year one child who tells her how much he hates the Oxford Reading Tree.

"I don't accept that characteristic," she says, when a Year 2 child, in an ill-advised moment, is overhead telling his best friend that she is a 'big poo'.

"I think we're looking at a rebalancing exercise in power and a transformation of the relationship," she tells the cleaners as they complain that, yet again, green jelly has got into the heated lunch trolley works and blown a fuse and if it happens again, they're going to get jobs at Marks and Spencers instead.

"I can't use any of these," I say to Francis. "She'll think I'm mad."

"In that case, get yourself down to 'Shoulder pads r us,'" he says. "Because your wardrobe is going to need a bit of a makeover."

A very public convenience

2008-01-28T13:31:00.000-08:00

By way of a diversion, Francis and I go to an art exhibition which his company is sponsoring. It's held in a Design Pavilion and is generally considered 'edgy' though, thank God, not sufficiently edgy to be themed entirely to fish.

Once I've visited the art installation formerly known as the toilets, however, I'm so edgy you could fashion me into an octagonal coffee table with corners to spare.

In the spirit of keeping vibrant creativity alive and the punters on their toes or, at the very least, in a semi crouch, the loo seats have all been pre-weed on.

The hand-dryer, a natty black and white object, concealed behind a glass panel, into which you insert your hands, emits the sound of a rocket with power to match, almost sucking off my rings in its eagerness to live up to its proud boast that it dries 'as twice as fast' - while coyly avoiding disclosing just what exactly it is that it dries twice as fast as. Possibly, judging by the end result, somebody blowing occasionally from the other end of the room.

"I've switched on my phone," I hear a woman say to a friend as they queue for their turn to enjoy the spattered seats, presumably so she can convey the intensity of the whole experience to a circle of Important Art People - though I'm a little surprised she's stopped short of filming it.

When I point out any of the disadvantages to the staff, they smile, open their eyes very wide and say, "I KNOW - isn't it awful?" which, while incredibly empathetic and endearing, seems unpromising as a first step on the critical path to analysis, change and improvement.

There are two floors of exhibits. Anything with a splash of colour or sense of happiness or optimism is banished upstairs. The ground floor, naturally, concentrates on monochrome pictures which convey a great deal about life's inherent pointlessness and misery, not forgetting a nod in the direction of torture, sado-masochism and surprise genitalia.

"Oh, so you're a poet," I hear one of the artists say to a prospective customer. "A lot of our work has a poetic dimension." Both nod wisely.

As we pause in front of an elongated statue, arms outstretched at head level, just waiting to be accessorised with a couple of real eye balls, I'm struck by its air of menace and confidence. Dress it in a tailored suit and slot in a couple of shoulder pads and it could be a homage to Sasha.

Bullying by numbers

2008-01-27T14:36:00.000-08:00

"You're going to have to find out what's going on," says Bad Lindy. "He's started on the voice messages now. Listen."

She puts her phone on loudspeaker and an unearthly wail issues from it.

"That's the fourth one he's sent me. Pathetic, or what?"

"I think an early medieval classic called 'I'm a w****r," I say. "Though perhaps Sasha wouldn't agree. And if he really is going out with her, why bother hassling you?"

"Revenge, I'd have thought," says Vicky. "After all, we rescued Ra from a lifetime in overblown prose style in the nick of time."

"What's wrong with direct action?" asks Lindy. "Just lend me your school keys and I'll have the truth from Sasha in no time."

"What are you going to do?" says Vicky. "Conceal yourself in the stationery cupboard disguised as a Venn diagram and shout Fibonnaci numbers at her until her mind crumbles?"

"As it happens, I do a very good impression of a giant gluestick. You'd be amazed at how many hours people spend working out which bit unscrews."

"You're not going anywhere near the school," I say.

"Suit yourself. Then you're on your own."

"You just have to get closer to her," says Vicky.

"The only way I'm going to do that is by having my DNA melted down and recast in titanium. I'm convinced that woman can withstand anything. Come nuclear anhilation, I bet she'll be out there in the nuclear winter, building radioactive snowmen with the cockroaches."

"Not if me and my lead-stored firemen see her first," says Lindy.

"Ask Francis," suggests Vicky. "He must be an expert on getting on with people."

"He's only really good with fish," I say, "which is fine if Sasha happens to have kissing cousins who are haddock. But not otherwise. Though, now I come to think of it, he does speak fluent headhunter."

"Bob's your management consultant, then," says Vicky. "Ask him this evening, or if he's gone that fish mad, wiggle your gills provocatively. I'm sure he'll get the gist."

Crackers

2008-01-26T14:56:00.000-08:00

There's nothing like teachers out on a bender, making it an experience that only the very mentally robust can possibly tolerate more than once a year.

Our school's staff do was originally scheduled for Christmas, which is why the room has been seasonally adjusted with piles of crackers and plates containing small fragments of turkey viciously attacked with cocktail sticks and then left for dead so they can get up to room temperature, just like the white wine.

It's been moved on by a month so we can combine it with a leaving event, thus saving on money, time and speeches.

To say there's a frisson of excitement would be to do a terrible injustice to two perfectly good nouns. As the staff convene - though, judging by appearances, 'congeal' would be more accurate - the mood is one of appalling resignation.

"How will we remember Elsa?" asks Sasha who, inevitably, is leading the tributes. Judging by the pause that follows, this isn't a rhetorical question but a real problem for the school.

I'm just about to volunteer to tie a knot in my handkerchief if it would help, when, fortunately, inspiration strikes.

"Elsa has has to deal with more incidents of vomiting than any other member of staff," says Sasha, brightly. Clearly feeling that she's struck a rich anecdotal vein, she starts listing the top ten barfing exploits in Elsa's professional repertoire, embracing and then thickly splattering, swimming pools, soft furnishings and handbags.

I wonder, meanwhile, if she's going to wrap up her speech by presenting Elsa, who's sporting a look that could be pride, regret or possibly rigor mortis, with her own specially commissioned strain of Novovirus.

It's hard to tell if the staff are swapping looks, or just entering the rapid eye movement stage of sleep, until I spot Caroline, the teaching assistant, who is stuffing crackers up her sleeve.

"I think the street price plummets in January," I whisper, as she starts on the other arm.

"Oh, bugger," she says, at normal volume, while Sasha glares. "What about turkey rolls?"

"Same problem," I hiss. "Your best bet is to fashion them into the crude shape of a bird and wait for lightning. If you can bring them back to life as an Easter chick you might find some takers."

"Do you think I could shove the whole foil platter inside my shirt?"

"Only if you tell the others you always shop in 'Mutant Turtles r us' - and even then I'm not sure you'd pull it off."

The party, based on a definition of the word looser than Bad Lindy's knicker elastic, grinds to a halt at 10.30. I stand on the pavement, ready to provide covering fire for Caroline with the cheese balls I've concealed in my handbag while she transfers the crackers and dessicated turkey into her car.

Sasha appears, gives us a cold gaze, then gets into a waiting car. An arm reaches behind her to pull the passenger door shut and I see the hand. Long, tapering, artistic fingers, coated thinly with long, artistic hair.

It's Colin. With Sasha. Quickly I get the phone and start texting.

Filth on a stick

2008-01-25T10:32:00.000-08:00

"Did I tell you I was being stalked?" says Bad Lindy.

"You did," says Vicky, "I assumed it was attention-seeking and ignored you."

"I can't think why," says Lindy, with as much dignity as anyone sporting a non-attention seeking microskirt, microshirt, maxi cleavage and very little of anything else can muster. "In fact, I reckon I'm fast on the way to becoming a victim."

If my mouth is as wide open with surprise as Vicky's, you could pop in several elephants and couple of suburban housing developments apiece and they wouldn't even touch the sides.

"That would be after a total redefinition of the word 'victim' to include Vlad the Impaler and Stalin, then, would it?" asks Vicky. "Even then I think you'd be stretching it."

"Seriously," says Lindy. "I've had a very odd text. Frankly, I think it's filth."

Given the fact that Lindy has amassed so much male groin material that she's of setting up 'I-Giblet' - an online rival to I-tunes, but without the music, taste or variety, this is, if anything, more amazing still.

"Go on then," says Vicky. "Let's see."

It takes a while to locate the offending text, as Lindy's nostalgic wander through the sunny uplands that constitute her text archive reveals a cornucopia of giblets that bring back memories. Finally -

"- Look at this," she says.

A blurry, stick-like object, thick at one end, curved at the other is being lovingly fondled by a pair of hands.

"Disgusting, I call it," says Lindy. "Mind you, I'd be interested to know just how he achieved that angle."

A vague memory is stirring in my head.

"Forward it to me," I say, "I'm going to ask Ra. It's not what you think it is."

An hour later, I'm knocking on Cultured Mum's door. She answers it wearing a surgical mask across her nose and mouth.

"Gluten allergy," she says, lowering it to talk to me. "Just been diagnosed. If I cook with wheat flour, I have to avoid inhaling any of the particles or I swell up. You should see my stomach. On bad days it's up and down like a - oh, goodness, I can't think of a suitable metaphor."

"I can," I say, thinking of Bad Lindy. "Anyway, what happens if you need to blow your nose?"

"I've got Tom to build me a little circulating hankerchief on a roll. It works really well except I keep drying the dishes on it by mistake. I'm researching this idea I've got for a cookery book. I was going to call it 'Reaction-free Cuisine'"

"They'll be fighting to publish it," I assure her, then show her the text. Within seconds, either the colour's drained from her face or she's quickly dusted herself in icing sugar.

"A crumhorn. Oh, my God. It's Colin's favourite early music instrument. I recognise the hands. And just when Tom and I have got things on an even keel. We're booked in for his and hers allergen testing next week."

"Colin?" I say, slowly. "Now that is a surprise."

And leaving her to fend off the toxic wheat particles unaided, I make my way slowly back home.

Good with foam rubber

2008-01-24T05:39:00.000-08:00

Assembly today is based on the fable of The Lion and Mouse and is about using your talents, however minimal.

The children are all reading out the nice things their friends have said about them. Some have had an easier job than others. "I am good at making things out of foam rubber," one reads, laboriously.

Then it's time for birthdays. The teacher quizzes David about his special day: "So you had a special party, did you? And you had a magician? How exciting. And did he have a special magic name?" "Ken," says David.

Sasha appears on top motivational form to hand out good work certificates. As their names are called, the children haul themselves to their feet, using the conveniently placed jumpers of their neighbours as grappling irons and their heads for balance.

Whether they're any the wiser about their achievements when they get to the front is open to question. "Good work on your homophones," Sasha says warmly to a baffled looking 5-year old. "You have been trying really hard with your high frequency words," she praises another.

By the time he has extolled the virtues of regular consonant, vowel, consonant practice to a third, I am sneaking furtive looks at the teachers to see if I am the only one who feels as if I've stumbled in on a teaching Klingon as a foreign language session.

But then it comes to a grinding halt. "Those two girls there! Playing with each other's hair. What do you think you're doing. Really!" They smile, uneasily, which prompts further exasperation. "You don't see me playing with your teacher’s hair, do you?" I catch another teacher’s eye and we both look hastily upwards, but the image Sasha has conjured up is so vivid that it might just as well be painted on the ceiling. It's a relief when the classes file out at the end, to the accompaniment of Mozart's Requiem. 'Je t'aime' might have been more appropriate, but there's never been much call for it before today....

Dating the Freecycle way.

2008-01-22T23:38:00.000-08:00

Step one: get fit..................
'Offered: Weight bench and weights. I am too fat, old and bald to use these, who would like them?'

Step two: prepare that gourmet dinner:
'Offered: 7 cans of lightmeat tuna. I hate them. Good news: they expire Dec 2011, so good for stocking up prior to the next inland war'

Step three: turn up the ambience:
'Offered: Six wooden chairs, all with rotted and broken bits, but some parts of each one still good. Ideal for being taken apart and made into 3 or 4 good chairs by someone gullible and well sorted for time with very few friends.'

Step four:
'Offered: One relationship. Slightly used and a bit sordid but could be turned into something much more enduring by the right person.'

With deep sympathy

2008-01-22T15:18:00.000-08:00

Leo's teachers greet me like fellow mourners at a funeral. "Ah, Leo's mother," they say, clasping my hand. There's the flash of quiet recognition that we are sufferers together, made strong through adversity, struggling against the odds. They look earnestly into my eyes as if, through study, they will be able to see into my soul and discover through what mutational fluke I happened to come up with Leo.

They try so hard. "He's not a bad boy," they say. "There's no malice in him," "He does try to lie but, bless him, he has no guile."

After an hour and a half I know what Leo is not. It's harder, though, to discern what he is and, more importantly, what he will be, and nobody really knows. Together, we search for clues.

"Was he always like this or has he.....er......taken a dip recently?"

"....and you've presumably heard the same thing from the other teachers?"

"....it's the organisation that's such a problem - he got a day out of sync and turned up with Tuesday's textbooks on Monday.'

"....and why does he always have to be the one to break his pen and get ink all over himself?"

Sorrowfully, I write down my e-mail address, like a visitor signing a book of condolence. Sorrowfully, they take it. We agree that they will contact me if the lies increase, the homework diminishes, the ink blots spread like a virus through his exercise books.

And then I go home to have a very, very large drink and light a fire with the newspaper cutting announcing that middle class drinking is on a far larger scale than anticipated and that we should be afraid. Very, very afraid.

Poetry, please, with Bad Lindy

2008-01-21T05:57:00.001-08:00

(With many thanks to Megadik's tireless - and poetic - team of spammers, from whom all these lines, with the exception of the last one, are taken).

Megadik
The quicker pecker upper
Its improbable effect on the phallus
Erectile organ, improbable Monty, titanic bodypart
Means
That when I've
fallen I can still get it up.

Or should that be Phallen?

Greatly exercised

2008-01-20T03:10:00.000-08:00

"'Improvised fitness is great fun," I read from the 'Bumper Book of Oh My God Haven't they given up this New Year Exercise bollocks yet?,' a free insert that practically bounded out of the newpaper this morning shouting '1-2-3 and REST!'

"'You can exercise with anything lying around like ash poles, tyres, barrels, jerry cans, overhanging tree branches and kerbs. Allegedly."

We look round Vicky's sitting room.

"I knew I shouldn't have got rid of that improvised jerry can and old tyre raft I was building when I ran out of jigsaws for entertainment," she says. "Do you think you could substitute decorative twigs for branches?"

"Only if you're under two feet tall and can make really convincing grunting sounds when you balance them on one finger," I say. "Anyway, why do you care?"

"No, you're right. Why do I? So what if my six-pack is made entirely out of undigested mince pies - it's incredibly desirable, or so I like to think."

"Here we go. There's something called partner training. It says 'You can have a lot of fun exercising with a partner or friend - you may find it brings out your competitive streak.'"

We study the copious illustrations, which feature men so flat with fitness that they appear to have shed at least one of their three dimensions. Their expressions, in stark contrast to the fun suggested by the dynamic text, convey profound levels of resigned imbecility and their legs are entirely hairless.

"Apparently it makes them more aerodynamic," I say as Vicky runs a finger up and down one of the saddest-looking knees, possibly feeling for stubble.

"What on earth for? Unless they hire themselves out as kites in their spare time."

There are a couple of crashes and the sound of a muffled exclamation and Lindy appears in the doorway, wiping her mouth.

"Post's come. Pity about the postman," she says, snatching the booklet and studying the figures.

"Blimey. I tried a back to back wrestle once with somebody who looked just like those two," she says.

"What happened?"

"Wheelchair," says Bad Lindy. "Now get out the wine. Let's see if we can juggle a packet of crisps and a couple of glasses. Then, if you're still keen on exercise, we'll nip off down to the fire station. It's equipment cleaning day today. I'm sure they'll let us all join in."

Beauty ev'rywhere

2008-01-18T15:31:00.000-08:00

It's week two, and Sasha is formalising a radical new approach to job-sharing, ditching that old cliched one person at a time system in favour of the two of us doing the same job simultaneously.

She plans my recorder lessons and so do I, and then we attempt to teach the simultaneously which I can see might prove a little stressful in the weeks to come.

This week, we arrive together. "What are you planning for today?" she asks, as we survey the children. One boy gently rocks his recorder in a hammock made from its case; another is producing staccato volleys of notes, each one an ear-drum popper while a third has dismantled and re-assembled his recorder several times and is now, with an air of mild bewilderment, trying to blow into the wrong end.

Quickly, I attempt a bit of carpe diem with a note recognition quiz but it's too late. Sasha has already advanced on the blackboard, pinned up a giant bit of music and then compelled the class to play it.

She tries to fob me off by giving me a baton and asking me to point out the notes as she plays them, but can't resist joining in. Soon it's turned into a counting competition for two mad music teachers, one wearing an expression of sullen resentment.

One of the boys comes up to me. "I've got something caught between my teeth," he complains. I suspect it may be the recorder he was trying so hard to swallow earlier on. He shoves a grimy finger into his mouth so he can show me exactly where the problem is.

"It's making me embarrassed," he mumbles. "Last time, it was so big the dentist had to get it out with a bit of wire."

As the hymn we were singing earlier has it: "Look around! Look around! There's beauty ev'rywhere." Yes, indeedy.

"You've got a good rapport with the children," says Sasha, beaming that smile again. I beam back. Little does she realise that today's 360 degree bonhomie is a desperate attempt to win them over to my side so they will support my plea of self-defence when I am finally compelled to beat her to death with my recorder while maintaining the correct left hand fingering and producing a perfect 't' sound as I deliver the mortal blow.

Putting the sick in music

2008-01-17T05:35:00.000-08:00

The rest of the family regards my piano practice like knitting; something I do with my hands to while away idle moments until something more interesting comes along.

They treat it with the indifference it so obviously deserves. I think they feel quite sorry for me - a poor, bored, ageing woman, sitting there striking random notes and hoping against hope that somebody will take her mind off things with an interesting problem to solve.

Fortunately for me, with all these dreary hours to kill, they're always happy to oblige. The first few notes act every time as a call to arms: within a few minutes of striking up the first notes I can guarantee that there'll be somebody leaning standing right next to me or, if particularly urgent, on the keys, talking to me at length and as loudly as is necessary to drown out that dull old music.

It's begun to dawn on me that this could be the reason I'm still a terrible pianist - but I am a first rate multi-tasker. I've set Beth's algebra problems to 'Shine Jesus Shine,' paired Francis' extensive ruminations on the possible causes of the new bathroom leak with arpeggios, and accompanied Deborah's many lectures about exactly which aspects of my parenting she most despises (it ranges from most to all) with a series of two octave scales in sixths.

In fact, I'm so used thinking of playing the piano as a kind of background activity to any other task that I've begun to feel it's missing on dog walks and during meal preparation.

So you'd have thought that I'd welcome the arrival at school of Sasha, the new music-mad assistant head, with open arms. She's new, she's fizzing with energy and she wants to know all about us and, in particular me. And, more particularly still, absolutely everything about the recorder, because if there's one thing she loves, it's music-making with this age group, she tells me, delightedly, referring, I assume, to the under 8s rather than the over 35s.

She favours oatmeal cardigans and a big smile, as forced as early rhubarb.

"I can see you've got a great sense of humour," she says, when we first meet. "We're going to be a great team."

'Team' in the context of anything other than a now defunct chocolate wafer snack is a word to strike terror into my heart. Teams are for horses or relay runners, not for women fighting their corner against the dark forces of bureacracy, government and clothes shops that sell jackets so small that the only part of me they would comfortably enclose is my drink-swollen liver, making colour matching horribly difficult.

The next day, as I am about to get started on the first recorder lesson of the new term, Sasha appears, cradling a normal recorder and what appears to be its two ugly sisters. It's been pantomime season in recorder land.

"I am feeling ENTHUSED," she says. It's fair to say that she is alone in this, especially when I learn that she has re-scheduled her all her departmental meetings so she can be involved in all future recorder classes.

She speaks wistfully of her old school, where the music teacher used to 'fill the school with beauty', singing as she went. Instead they have me, filling the school with the sounds of muttered blasphemy and lost chords. "How do you want to do this?" she asks me. "On my own," I'd like to say, but don't.

I have never made a secret of my lack of previous teaching experience, which is just as well as Sasha quizzes me so relentlessly that I am thinking of getting highlights from my CV tattooed on my face. There are also moments when the minimal role played by The Arts in my life so far is so dazzlingly obvious you could stick it in the sky and use it to land night flights at Heathrow.

I put music stands together, and end up with something that looks like a minimalist Christmas tree crossed with a miniature version of 'The Angel of the North' complete with my own finger tips by way of decoration. Sasha demonstrates the recorder to the class, years of expertise apparent in every note she plays. Then I take over. "You don't use your left hand for those notes," she hisses.

Sasha’s enthusiasm extends to forming a staff recorder group. Her recruitment drive begins at break, when she attempts to infect the other teachers with her relentless energy.

"Can you read music?" she asks one of the teaching assistants, who is carefully tracing and cutting out 50 paper leaves, a painstaking task which requires total concentration and a large pair of scissors. “No,” replies the assistant, snipping carefully round a stalk. “Would you like to learn?” “No,” she says, again. The scissors tremble slightly in her hand. “What about joining a recorder group?” “I just want to sit here quietly, minding my own business and doing my leaves,” she says,in a voice of just perceptibly rising hysteria. She adds the finished leaf to the pile and starts on the next. “You’re in!” says Sasha.

By the end of break, Sasha has also recruited the caretaker, who arrives at the end of her stirring recruitment speech - "With just five notes there's any amount of fabulous 16th century music you can play," - and is so moved he volunteers on the spot. The following day I ask her how membership is progressing. There is a pause. "I'm making other plans," she says, grandly.

Just for the hell of it

2008-01-15T11:45:00.000-08:00

The council has decided to accessorise the flood warnings with roadworks, which appear in matching sets just where you're least expecting them.

"They're such teases," I snarl, gaily, to Leo and Beth as I accelerate madly away from the large, decorative hole that straddles two lanes, serving no purpose except as a visual illustration of the futility of escape, and round a corner to where the back of the next traffic jam is lying in wait for me.

There's nothing quite like an early morning queue of January New Year's resolution breaking commuters, whose joy at having failed to stop eating, drinking, smoking or texting giblet pictures is matched only by the thrill of being hermetically sealed from but in close proximity to hundreds of other people just like them.

As they attempt to latch their front bumpers on to the numberplate of the car in front, the better to rebuff all attempts by other drivers to turn on to the stretch of road they've grown to love as their own during the three hours they've been stuck in it, it's awe-inspiring to be part of humanity and to see just where thousands of years of evolution have led.

"Remind me to disembowel myself with a tuning fork before I ever get talked into giving you another lift to the bus stop," I smile, epithets trailing like fairy dust and rising up to join the exhaust fumes whose carcinogenic particles shimmer almost magically in a brief patch of early morning sun.

But I can console myself with one happy thought. Unlike everyone else, my New Year's resolution was to ensure that I stayed the same cantankerous, cross, rushed, foul-mouthed harridan I've always been.

And I'm delighted to say that I've kept it, without fail, ever since January 1st.

Now with added blue sky and flowers

2008-01-14T12:06:00.000-08:00

Ta, Mya (Missing you already) so much for my new award. It's adding a much needed dash of colour and loveliness that was sorely missing from my blog. First kittens, now flowers. At this rate we'll all be going to Lovely Land in a handcart.

Except Bad Lindy, of course. I mentioned the award to her, with some pride, and she immediately started work on one of her own - first recipient, me.

If it's ever offered to you, refuse it at all cost.

With the working title 'Sad Bastards trapped in Cyber space' award, it features giblets (naturally) as a reminder of what the real world has to offer and is also armed with a virus. The picture cleverly overrides the 'shrink to fit' command in the blog layout and, once in situ, is impossible to delete. Rampaging through your blog, it coarsens every heartfelt emotion, substituting rudeness for taste and guffaws for refined humour.

I, as you can see, was invaded long, long ago.........

Saddo saves the world

2008-01-13T13:40:00.000-08:00

"God, you know some sad f******," says Bad Lindy, who has battered her way in to show me her pick of the year giblet texts, which she's thinking of turning into a calendar.

"I don't know them," I say.

"Then why are they writing to you? I mean, listen to this." Bending over the screen, with a faint sigh of regret that she's wasting a prime view of her derriere on such a meagre and ungrateful audience, she reads out my latest Freecycle messages:

"'Offered, backpack. Not clean, not new and not waterproof. Would suit slightly grubby indoor and gullible hiker.' And what about this one -
'Offered: Builder's buckets. All at least half full of dried in plaster or mortar but only one has a small hole. Also available, broken fax/answering machine. May be fixable if you understand the instructions which are in Japanese.'"

She looks at me. "These are people who seriously think that they're going to light up the life of some sad b****** by offering them a bucket you can't even throw up in? You tell me what sort of saddo is going to reply?"

I regain control of the keyboard and delete a couple of messages.

"Not you. Please tell me you didn't."

"It's supposed to be good for the environment," I say, sounding, even to my own ears, like the saddest saddo on the block.

"What, you're telling me that getting in your car and driving off to collect a load of rubbish you end up throwing out for good a week later is going to save the world?"

"So they say."

"If you're serious," says Bad Lindy, "the sooner we're all dead, the better." And pausing only to seize the computer, type, "Get a life, c***," and 'reply to all,' she and her giblet texts head off to brighten someone else's day.