Indicative Stoat

When the older children in the school study Victorians I always think it's a good opportunity to look at the National Anthem and decide if it's still a good representation of British values and use it as a composing stimulus.  Children need to learn to be creative and can often surprise you with their understanding and knowledge of the world. 

When we looked at the words to all the verses of the National Anthem they were surprised at how brutal (in their words) it was.  Usually, when I do this lesson someone will question whether the Anthem needs to be about the Queen.  There is nearly always one person in the class who thinks that we shouldn't have a monarchy. 

Children have changed.  One child said, "But if the Queen doesn't rule us, who does?"
When I said, "Our MPs represent us and the Queen just gets to oversee what they agree," the children actually snorted with disgust.  In their eyes MPs were so useless that we might as well go back to a feudal monarchy.

This is the fault of the mess that is Brexit.  Whether the children were for or against it they had very strong opinions about the people who are supposed to be delivering it.  Our government has lost the goodwill of the next generation and that is worrying.

Almost every group has included a Brexit reference in their National Anthem composition.  It's not all politics, though, as food features very highly.  Fish and chips, tea and biscuits, scones, full English breakfasts (and a confusion between Brexit and breakfast) have all been mentioned.  One of my favourites includes the line, "I saw Treza Mae (sic) in the cadbury shop, she turned round whilst eating a lollipop." That kind of rebellion is almost as wicked as running through a field of wheat.

Children are sponges and are absorbing everything that they see and hear on the TV, internet, at school and at home.  Most adults are finding the subject difficult.

Even if you are politically engaged you have to concentrate.  Journalists are finding that if they have a day off then they are confused.  Jess Brammar, Head of News at Huff Post tweeted, "Took a day out of the news yesterday for a long weekend away and have completely and utterly lost the thread of Brexit, does this mean I can just leave it and concentrate on something else until it's done?"
Normal people (not news journalists) replied that they lost interest a while ago, or that if they went to Yoga they lost the thread.

I have still been reading as much as I can (it's what I do) but I still miss things.  The other night I came back from the swimming pool and the Long Suffering Husband said, "What is this indicative stoats thing?"  I still had pool water in my ears and hadn't looked at any news for at least 90 minutes.
How was I to know that I'd misheard votes as stoats? 

As far as I can work out, indicative votes means that MPs are going to vote to indicate what they would be prepared to vote to accept.  Unfortunately, I don't think many of the suggestions are available but as the idea was put forward by Oliver Letwin, whose last big idea was the Poll Tax, we probably shouldn't be surprised.

I don't think the idea of an indicative stoat is such a bad one.  We could get a stoat into parliament and see which way it points.  It could be the new way of deciding everything, like Punxsutawney Phil, the groundhog who decides whether the people of Gobbler's Knob can have Spring early.  We could take her out of the box and put the proposals on two signs and see which way she points.  It couldn't be any worse, could it?

The only problem is that it is often difficult to tell a stoat apart from a weasel and there are enough of those in the House of Commons already.