Long time no blog

I know.

It's been a long time.

I've run out of ideas.

People have noticed.

Usually, the people I work with are a rich source of inspiration but they are no help.They dodge me in corridors, "I'm not talking to you, last time I did it ended up in your blog." (sorry, I did it again).  They make suggestions: How to get a small baby to sleep, the importance of a good moan, why the band sounds so bad, and much better things that I can't remember now.

I'm tired.  Worms are all coming out backwards and upside down. Every evening I fall asleep on the sofa and wake up with cramp, thinking that I'll try to write something tomorrow.

My Dad always said, "Tomorrow never comes," so today I write that I've nothing to write.

For Hire

I'm finding this weekend quite difficult. My friends are packing their cars; playing a game of Tetris with duvet, wok and a year's supply of pot noodles. They are sad and proud. I should have been doing the same. My son was going to his insurance choice University but couldn't get accommodation, so has deferred. We are all agreed that a gap year won't do him any harm but I still feel a bit sad.

Now he has to decide what to do with his year. I notice that the list pad has disappeared from the fridge, so I know he is making plans. Earning some money has to be somewhere on his list.

Yesterday was a regatta day and a group I play with were asked to provide music on the quay. I was already sad and tired (from the second week at work) but the thought of making music in public with this bunch of adult beginner musicians had made me grumpy and snappy. The poor Long Suffering Husband really earned his title. The one rehearsal we'd had was awful and I was not looking forward to feeling public humiliation. The LSH and my son were patient with me. They carried my instrument case, chair and music and ignored my snappiness. 

"I've forgotten my music stand. Oh, how could I be so stupid?"

I kicked my clarinet case, folded my arms  and set my face into a toddler worthy pout, "That's it I can't play!"

"I can hold your music," my son said.

"Come on, get the bass out," cajoled the LSH.

It was fine. The band played really well and in half an hour had almost completely cleared the quay of people, so we could get to the pub for a drink.

My music stand was amazing. Not only did he hold the music at the right level but he stopped it blowing away:  better than pegs or even knicker elastic. I've never had a music stand that helped you keep time by tapping its foot and followed the music, so that if you got distracted by a waving audience you only had to check its eyes to find your place. He also changed the music and turned the page. His mate suggested that it was something he could put on his CV: professional music stand. I think he could  make it a business venture and put himself out for hire. I would highly recommend him. He hasn't set his prices for the general public yet but it cost me a Jack Daniels and Coke on top of his normal board and lodging.

I believe other human music stands are available but I doubt they are as good.

This one did seem particularly dedicated to her art but won't last very long if she keeps kneeling on concrete.

I love my job

I suspect I'm not the only teacher that had forgotten. There are others like me who might have cried a few times this week; a few who are drowning in paperwork on a Saturday morning; several that promised themselves that, "it wasn't going to be like that this year." But we are week humans and in six weeks we have forgotten the pace we need to work at to keep up. 

I was going to be so organised this year and nothing was going to bother me. Stress: what's that? I don't even have it that bad. If I taught a subject that the government cared about it would be a lot worse but teaching can be never ending. 

Over the summer, when I had a bit more energy I was full of bright ideas. Things that would excite and challenge the children. Thinking was the fun part but now it's time to implement these ideas I'm wondering how I'm going 

to fit it all in.

I always worry that I've forgotten how to teach and spend my first week in a blind panic, worrying that I'm not doing it properly. The second week is better. Children walk into class singing the song we did the previous week or talking about their listening diary or asking if they can carry on with their composition. "Phew," you think, "I wasn't talking to myself."

But with the second week comes the feeling that to do all the things you'd like to do you would have to go so fast that you'd break the space time continuum and meet yourself coming backwards. 

Of course, by the second week, it's not just your ideas. You have colleagues, headteachers, pupils and parents all making suggestions at you. 

"Miss, when is recorder karate going to start again? You need to start soon because I'm going to get my black belt this year."

"Can you teach the play leaders some singing games?"

"You'd like to come on the school trip, wouldn't you? It's on the day you don't work, so that will be fine."

"Oh, I'm glad I've caught you. I've decided that being in the band would be good for Billy this year. He's just started bagpipe lessons. When will you be able to have music ready for him?"

"Miss, can I be Jesus at the Royal Albert Hall?"

"Will you make us a rehearsal CD?"

"We are expecting Ofsted this term."

You'd forgotten just how long it takes to mark a set of books, plan a differentiated lesson that is entertaining and informative, sharpen your pencils, put up a display, arrange music, type up song words, make resources. You had started to believe the hype that you only worked between 9 and 3.  But you'd also forgotten just how wonderful and funny children can be. You'd forgotten that feeling when you realise that you've taught someone something. You'd forgotten 'end of day staffroom hysteria'

One of the jobs we were asked to do (let's show ofsted a broad range) was put up an advocacy board for our subject.  We were asked to have a child generated wordall. Teachers panicked. It can be tricky to be creative when you are struggling to remember between 30 and 300 names. I worried that I might not be up to it. I worried that the children would come up with unprintable words. I asked them to write 5 words about music or music lessons. Some wrote 'fun' five times and although I despaired for their lack of creativity it was better than if they'd written 'boring' (thankfully, no one did).  Even 'crazy' was a compliment and then there were loads of brilliant musical words. Finally, there is the pleasure of seeing something that you have created come together.

There can't be many jobs with this much variety and I really do love my job. Just remind me of that next time I'm exhausted and tearful.

Statues (again): a campaign

Girls need role models. They need to see that women have become things that they could aspire to and they need to see that women don't have to be perfect.

Yesterday, the LSH told me he'd bumped into his colleague at work who manages the Moot Hall in the town and she'd mentioned that she's not seen me in a while, "She should pop in, we've got Queen Elizabeth I visiting on Saturday."

"She's dead," I told him.

"Oh, she knows because that's what I said."

Both feeling slightly guilty for being so flippant, we decided to show our support.

As we were going in we met two children that I teach. They had already been in to see the Queen once before walking to the toy shop to spend their pocket money. The little boy had bought a dinosaur and the girl purchased two matching toy rings. She was going back to present the Queen with one of the rings; she was smitten and stated her ambition to become Queen when she grew up. Obviously, this is an unrealistic dream but her brother wanted to be a dinosaur, so I think it's fine.

It it any wonder that little girls role play is still based around being Princesses and getting married, when these are still the only ways they can gain recognition.

It made me think about my visit to London and the statues again. Boys have so many more role models to choose from. There are statues of men who seem to have done something no more significant than be at a battle. 

Our town has several statues of men but not one of a woman. Last time I blogged about statues someone offered to recommend putting a statue of me on the Prom. I know it was a joke but I was terrified at the idea. I would hate it. "But I'm not perfect," I thought, "I've done nothing significant, a statue of me would scare the birds and I'm still alive." 

I do think statues should be of people from history but there is a problem of women thinking they need to be perfect to be shown. They haven't even been able to get a statue of Margaret Thatcher in Parliament Square, despite her obvious historical significance as the first female Prime Minister because lots of people didn't like her and they can't agree on the handbag.  The most famous statues of men in our town are of  Byrhtnoth, a Saxon leader who got his head chopped off in battle, allowing the Vikings to invade and Edward Bright, a grocer, who is famous for being 47 stone and dying at 29. 

The last time I visited the Moot Hall was to watch a drama about Captain Ann. The children from school had been and the girls had been wide eyed and enthusiastic when they got back. 

"You have to go," they said, "she was brilliant. She got all those people food and then she was hunged up by her neck to die. The judge said that he could hang her because people called her Captain, which was a man's title. It changed the law, though. She was amazing."

Most people don't know her story. I was telling a neighbour the other day, who was home for the Summer from Uni, where he's studying history. 

"Is that the grain riots?" he asked, "We studied them last year and I was really shocked to find out that such an important person came from here and I'd never heard of her."

Ann Carter married her husband, a local butcher, at St Peter's Church (now the Maldeune Centre) and as his wife wouldn't have been hungry at the time she led a raid on a grain ship. She put herself out to help the cloth workers in 1629 who were not earning enough to buy one loaf of bread a week. She led women and children onto a Flemmish grain ship to fill their caps and skirts with just enough grain to feed their families. The fact that she was sentenced in her own name, rather than her husband taking responsibility for her crime as was the policy at the time, probably had more to do with the fact the town didn't want to lose their butcher than changing the policy on women's rights to be an individual. 

After watching the drama we discussed the history.

"We should have a statue of her," the Moot Hall manager said.

"Oooh, I don't know. I can think of better things to spend money on," someone else said.

I explained that I thought it was important. That girls need role models.

People agreed with me.

"There will be opposition, though. Some pubs wouldn't stock the Captain Ann beer because she was a thief."

"She wasn't!" The actress that had played her was indignant.

She was, though and that's fine. It's impossible to be perfect. It took someone who was prepared to break the law to make changes and without that we wouldn't know about her (even though her story has been suppressed for years).

During this visit to the Moot Hall we resumed our conversation about a sculpture. We talked to the Mayor. Maybe we could commission a local artist? Maybe a woman? It could go in the grounds of the Maldeune Centre and be sculpted from the remains of the holm oak that had to be cut down recently.

It sounds like the start of a campaign. Who's with me?

Game Theory of Education

It's hard to even think about what is going on politically with education. It certainly seems like no one really knows what they are doing. For the last fifty years governments have been tinkering at the edges, making changes that they hope will help raise standards but when they can't agree what raising standards actually means the whole thing ends up a battered old tatty political football. 

They talk about 'what parents want' as if all parents are an amorphous blob with a hive mind. They talk about curriculum, inspections, the qualification and training of teachers, uniform, testing, record keeping, grammar schools, academies, grant maintained, local authorities, education hubs, books that children should read, composers they should know. They rarely talk about children.

The latest headline said, "All schools could become grammars." Hmmm. Now, I could be confused but if all schools were grammar schools that would be a comprehensive education system.

The current policy seems to be an experiment in game theory (for the mathematicians) or social interaction theory (for the psychologists). It's a policy whereby all rules are lifted. Schools and parents (or the loudest of those) can do what they like and the government will just sit back and watch.

It's a risky strategy and one I can't imagine them sticking with for long. However, if you don't have children who are  in education at the moment then it is going to be quite interesting to watch.

Long Lost Family (a tribute)

It was my grandmother's funeral. This is not the first of my grandma's send offs that I've attended, not even the second but the third.  Not many people are lucky enough to have had three Nannies but with that luck and joy comes the eventual loss.  I was going to send my mum a sympathy card but I couldn't get past the idea of writing, "to lose one mum is unlucky but to lose two is just careless.  Hope you are OK.  Love you," and that seemed somehow insensitive.

My mum was brought up in a wonderful family.  Her mum, Doris was like the Queen to me. I have some memory that they shared a birthday (but I could be making that up).  Doris was moral and kind, with a Welsh accent and a sniff that let you know exactly what she disapproved of.  Mostly, this was my grandad and his drinking habits. We went to visit most Saturdays and had tea with sandwiches and milk jelly and watched her shout at the wrestling on the telly. Mum was the oldest and always knew that she was adopted. Doris and Ted had thought that they couldn't have children but were soon proved wrong (four times) after my mum went to live with them.  It was never a secret but Doris so desperately wished that my mum had been hers that it was only after her death that mum thought to search for the woman that had given birth to her.

Some of my late teenage years were spent in Somerset House, searching records.  Pulling big dusty books off shelves and applying for birth certificates. Mum would get briefly excited but none of the leads ever came to anything.  About 15 years ago she found the name of the unmarried mothers home  in Northampton that she was born in and her and my Dad took a nervous trip.  There had been a fire and no records had survived. Before giving up she decided to hire a specialist, who after another 5 or 6 years found a likely match. This woman had a different first name and had lived in a different area to one mum had believed she was in and, amazingly, at 82, was still alive, with the same surname and no other children (surprisingly, still being alive and never getting married made her harder to trace) A carefully worded letter was written and there was much joy, excitement and fear when the word came back that she had never forgotten the baby she had to give up and would love to meet. 

It was strange for me. My children found it easier than I did: they'd  never known any other great grandparents. The first time I met her she already had great hopes for me, having seen a photo. We had similar eyes, nose and smile. I recognised her immediately from the mirror but never quite managed to call her Nan.

She was an absolute fire-cracker of a woman. With one brother and six sisters she had a typical Eastend upbringing, although her father had been from a reasonably wealthy family and had been a driver in the twenties and thirties. When she was 14 war broke out and was evacuated to Norfolk but soon came home (for reasons I'll never know but would love to), staying in the Eastend.

This is where she developed her philosophy of, "God helps those what help themselves," which she later taught her nephews when helping them to build a brick wall, getting them to climb the fence of the builder's yard. She made a living at this time by stealing flowers from the cemetery and selling them back to the florists. I've never seen quite so many flowers at a funeral, as she insisted on giving other kids a chance to make a bit on the side.

Just before D-day she became pregnant

("All the nice girls love a sailor") and was sent to live with her oldest sister (in the area that my mum had been searching for records). The boyfriend never returned and the baby was given up for adoption.

Amazing women do amazing things and in those days you couldn't keep a baby if you were a single mum. If you were lucky and your parents were alive and young enough then your baby could become your sister but there was absolutely no chance of keeping the child without ruining your reputation. It is tempting to wonder what life would have been like if today's values had been in place then.

I have no doubt that she would have been a fantastic mother. She had doted on her little sister, been the wicked, fun Auntie to her nephews and was even childminding her great niece when we first met her (at 83). However, so many other lives would have been poorer, including hers.

She started work for a glass manufacturer, etching glass and cutting mirrors with diamonds. It was skilled, physical work and she was good at it. She organised parties and outings and became lifelong friends with one of her colleagues. 

This colleague had an argument with her boss and said she was going to leave. My amazing Grandmother told her, "If you're going I'm going too. Let's start up on our own," and so they did, running their business until they were well into their seventies. If you ever had a Yardleys compact set, then you had one of the mirrors they cut. It didn't make them rich but it gave them a good living so they could buy their own flats and my grandmother found a new hobby of foreign travel and holiday romances.

By the sixties her life was really swinging. She had a nice little side line going helping her boyfriend, the much quieter, gentler older brother of the infamous Kray twins, Charlie. These were the days of huge beehives, which she died pink to match her nicknames of Candy or Flossy; the days of pub lockdowns, sing-a-longs and alibis. 

One of her sisters had been in an abusive marriage and as soon as the children left home my grandmother brought her to live with her. She bought a sweet shop for her to run and cared for her for the rest of her life. For years, my sister worked with this nephew and we often wonder what would have happened if they had shared stories.

By the time we knew her she was retired but still having notorious Birthday BBQs. The whole street, her relations, friends from the Eastend all crammed into her West Essex garden. The George's flag waving proudly at the back and signs pronouncing that a 'wild woman gardens here' adding to the atmosphere. 

A year ago, her body began to fail. Her doctor recommended a daily gin and tonic; a prescription she was only too happy to double. Her friend and business partner cared for her until the end,  showing true love for an amazing woman. 

The funeral was presided over by a shocked looking vicar, whose eyes widened comically as the eulogy was read. When it was his turn to speak again his voice had risen several octaves and he sounded more like a children's TV presenter, as he tried to keep a light and happy tone.  The curtains closed and the congregation stood, jigging and singing along to, "Wish me luck as you wave me goodbye..." He struggled to keep the twitch from the corners of his eyes, biting his top lip hard enough to drain the colour. 

It was an absolute privilege for me to have known this amazing woman and I am so glad my mum got to spend many hours every Wednesday with a special person that she will never forget.

The Archers and real life

There are several ways to embarrass and distress your children but none seems more effective than The Archers.

"It was terrible," my colleague said thinking of her childhood, "We had to sit in complete silence during the Archers. If we even breathed mum would wave us away with a shush. And the worst was if she missed it in the week and we'd be going somewhere in the car on Sunday morning then...well!"

I shrunk in my seat and thought about all the times I'd traumatised my children in this way. 

I grew up with the Sunday omnibus and really quite liked it. I enjoyed the warmth of the kitchen, the Sunday paper, the smell of the roast my mum was making and the quiet chuntering from the radio. You might say that I was an odd child. My children didn't enjoy those Sunday mornings in the same way and have shown no signs of becoming listeners when they become middle class and middle aged (although I still have a little hope for my son). I've often wondered how this soap has such high listening figures when it seems so rare to find another person who will publicly admit to a fondness for it. 

"The Archers? Oh no, how old do you think I am?"

At the weekend I found myself in the company of a table full of Archers' fans. It was my Dad's birthday and we were invited to their Greek themed dinner party (I bought a selection of food made with  courgettes). I'll confess that I felt completely out of place and puzzled over how my parents had become so posh. I sat, feeling like a schoolgirl in a group of grown ups, my legs swinging from my chair, listening to people call each other dahhhrling and telling each other that they 'simply must.' They spoke about their abusive childhoods with a freedom that was worn like a badge of honour and those that had kind loving mothers seemed slightly ashamed. One woman was describing her upbringing on a farm with a violent dictatorial father,  how because of primogeniture her twin brother inherited everything and how her tiny niece had pranged the tractor causing thousands of pounds worth of damage she suddenly said, "My life is just like the Archers." Everyone around the table (except the LSH and my son) listened religiously. I hoped that her six year old niece hadn't been drunk.

"I'll never forgive them for what they've done to the Grundies. They've just made them look stupid."

"It's the trial next week. I expect the air in my kitchen will be blue," they joked. 

"Oooh...that man!"

My traumatised colleague pretended not to know when I asked her what her mum thought about Helen.

"Helen? What's going on there then?"

I told her about the domestic abuse/coercive control storyline and how pregnant Helen stabbed Rob and is now awaiting trial for attempted murder, having given birth to a boy in prison.

"Oh yes, I do know about that. Honestly, how do I know? I don't even listen 

to it."

To miss this storyline you would have probably been living under a rock for the last year. It has made the national press and has captured the imagination in a way no other domestic violence story does. Many have donated to Refuge and although I don't understand it, Twitter is showing it's support with a hashtag.

                 #solidari-tea

Helen's trial starts this week and the fans are hoping that Rob will somehow end up in prison. I'm sure the writers will be much more thorough and know that the best they can do is get Helen acquitted, which would humiliate Rob and in reality put her at further risk. 

Real women suffer so much more than Helen has. The Archers' listeners with their blameless middle class lives (despite the wallopings they had as children) couldn't take any more: just the suggestion of forced sex was enough to have them switching off their radios in droves.

The local paper posted a tweet link of a domestic abuse story this morning. 

The headline:

Grays man accused of stabbing dog to death and assaulting Essex Police officers due in court

You had to look hard to see that it was a domestic abuse story. Police had been called in the early hours of Sunday morning to reports of a "disturbance". We know, don't we, that this is code for the fact that the man was beating up his wife? Maybe you are thinking that it was just a drunken argument. Maybe there was no wife. The article then says, "It was alleged that a man had assaulted a woman and kicked and stabbed a dog."

We know what's going on, don't we? The abuse of the dog was part of her punishment or the dog just got in the way as he tried to protect her. We know that the knife had been used on the woman (and probably not for the first time) in a way that assured she didn't fight back but didn't harm her enough to get him into serious trouble.  All Archers' listeners now know that this woman will have been subjected to years of terrifying control and violence. We know that she will have felt powerless, trapped and invisible. Luckily, this man has now assaulted the attending police officer (probably not the first attending policeman) and killed a dog and so the woman may get some protection. 

She's still invisible, though. The press aren't interested in reporting her story. In these days of digital led reporting it's virtual hits not real ones that count and the public will skim over a story about a battered wife but can't hear enough about the poor dog.