Someone else to slap

 I’m not sure what is happening to me in my old age. Rarely an advocate of violence I have recently had a strong urge to slap people.

Today, my intended victim is Gillian Keegan - Education Secretary. 

When discussing the crumbling schools problem, caused by a freeze on school building funding since ‘austerity’ started, which might have been fine if schools built in the 1970s weren’t built of chocolate aero bars, she complained that no one ever said, “You know what, you’ve done a fucking good job. No one ever says that, do they?”

There’s a reason for that.

However, she has done a great job of making me want to slap her.

This time, she’s ordered an enquiry. Fucking good job Gillian. 

I mean it wasn’t her fault that her department couldn’t get the calculations right, It’s not her fault that it was announced before it was checked. It’s not her fault that maths wasn’t compulsory to 18 for her staff. But she has ordered an enquiry.

Great job. And as she will be keen to point out the total amount going to schools is the same. £59.6 billion  isn’t to be sniffed at. 

It’s an easy mistake to make. Those of us who count children for a living know; they’re slippery little things, moving around, giving you a heart attack thinking you’ve lost one. It’s so easy to under count the number of pupils in schools and really 0.62% extra children is a tiny error. Let’s not mention that there are over 10 million children. 

“Schools haven’t got the money yet, so what’s the problem?” Gillian thinks. “Surely schools don’t plan how to use the money they’ll get in April in September? This changes nothing. The teachers pay award is still fully funded. The total amount given to all schools (59.6b) is an increase of 3.2%, so that fully funds the pay increase of 6.5%. There is no arguing with that.”

Amazing job Gilly.

The uncounted children will mean that each pupil will have £50 less spent on them, the percentage increase in funding per child is only 1.9% (when inflation is 6.6%). 

“No problem. Just don’t eat the glue sticks. Oh, you already stopped that? Never mind. You don’t need all those staff do you?”

SLAP 

What a fucking job you’ve done Gill. 

 

Wellbeing

Would someone please slap the person that invented the well-being survey.

No seriously. I mean it. A great big slap, right across the face. Then ask them, “What the fresh hell were you thinking?”

I’m not normally a supporter of violence but if you happen to come across TennantR, FisherL, PlattP, JosephS, WeichS, ParkinsonJ, SeckerJ, Stewart-BrownS then I don’t think you should hold back.

Pick them up by the scruff of the neck and say, “I was perfectly happy at work until some HR twit stumbled across your research and decided that managers should be forced to ask me to complete a questionnaire about stress once a year.”

The last thing anyone who is mostly happy in their job needs is to be forced to think about the things that irritate them. Even worse, to be asked to write them down. 

Humans have a tendency to focus on the negative. This isn’t a bad thing. It keeps us alive. Watch the one tiger, rather than the thousand pretty butterflies. When there aren’t any real tigers we have to train ourselves to see the butterflies. The Well-being survey does the opposite of that.

I can’t imagine what it must be like for managers’ stress levels to read all of those niggles; often things that they are powerless to change, that are also causing them stress.

What do you like about work? - that’s what I would ask. 

I like funny children, making noise that sometimes turns into music, my colleagues, the Friday sit, chatting about how recorders make perfect vomit tubes. I like my music room and going for a walk at lunchtime with a book and if my well-being scores are lower than normal it’s because it’s my birthday coming up and birthdays (specifically my birthday) always makes me grumpy. 

Keep a lookout for the butterflies 

The past wasn’t so long ago

 “So what do you think about the Russell Brand thing?” appears to be the new chat up line. 

That’s what I think I’m hearing anyway. Young men try to convince young women that they don’t believe it. “It’s mainstream media.” “They’ve got it in for him.” “Yeah, he was a bit - you know - but it was the time.” And the young women look at them, doe-eyed and say, “Oh yes. It was different then.”

Was it, though?

This past wasn’t so long ago and I remember. In fact if you are over18 you probably remember.

Most men were decent, respectful people. Except that they refused to believe that some men were monsters. Most women didn’t want to be treated badly but they refused to believe that a man who was awful to other women would be mean to them. 

We put the outliers on TV. Those whose behaviour was so shocking it made us uncomfortable enough to try to laugh it off. 

Nothing has changed. Nothing will change until we stop pretending times have changed, know that some bad men exist and stop rewarding those  because it’s easier than admitting what they are really like. 

So, girls, if you are presented with this chat up line then the only truly sexy man is the one that knows the comedian, who I wasn’t going to write about, for what he is; shockingly awful enough to be entertaining from a distance but not someone you should want in your real life. 

Real men collaborate. 

The Sky is Falling

 I haven’t written a blog in ages. It was our disastrous holiday to Bristol that did it. Trust me, none of you wanted to hear me whine on about rain, cow poo and parking fines. I’ve also been doing much more proper writing and didn’t want to waste my ideas. 

Foraging innuendo nearly tempted me back, as did back to school grumpiness coupled with an unseasonable heatwave. There was a moment of joy when I worked with some small people and we made really nice music and then the comedian (who I refuse to write about whose name rhymes with Muscle land) used the word Baroque and my fingers twitched over the keyboard.

However, I have returned for an inspirational, seize the day message.

The weather turned, the wicked witch blew in from the East, the rain smelled of fish, all the leaves flew from the trees and I was walking down a footpath feeling maudlin. Worry pricked my every thought and then an acorn hit me on the head. Smack! It crossed my mind that I had been attacked with a claw hammer - it was that painful. Comedy cartoon squirrels circled my vision and a lump sprang up on my head complete with the ascending pitch slide that you would expect. Maybe the noise was just in my head, it was impossible to detach imagination from dizzy reality.

What if this is the way I go? I thought.

Years of drinking water, avoiding sex drugs and rock and roll, or daily yoga practice and it turns out I’m going to die from an acorn falling from a tree. Chicken Licken  wasn’t so stupid after all. 

Some people would take that as an inspirational ‘live for today’ message. So this is my gift to you, as a first blog back after a short reprieve.

Midsomer

 I love a TV murder however I’ve always said that if I lived in Midsomer then I’d get out of there…quick. I wouldn’t wait for the second person to be killed. How stupid are those people that live there?

I’m on holiday.

I wanted to go to Bristol to see hundreds of balloons in the sky but due to general indecision and being less happy about leaving home than before there was no Bristol accommodation left, so we are staying in a barn just outside in a rural Somerset village. 

The dog is completely freaked out by the country sounds, smells and an echoing barn. There are big dogs that say, “Moo,” outside the door, a farm dog that barks all the time, rabbits, sun, rain, shadows, fences, stone circles, witches. You name it, it bothers him. Still, there are plenty of cow pats to roll in!

I’m beginning to share his unease, though.

As chief map reader I’ve noticed how close to Midsomer Norton we are and how all the villages around this farm sound like the people that have been murdered.

Stanton Drew, Compton Dando, Queen Charlton, Bishop Sutton, Norton Malreward, Hinton Blewett, Compton Martin, Rodney Stoke, Farrington Gurney, Tarrant Monkton, Sutton Benger and….Mark!

The panic phase

 I seem to have hit the panic phase of the six weeks holiday earlier than normal. We are only two weeks in and already I can see that it's not enough time.  The first week was spent just relaxing enough to feel normal.  The second week was spent cleaning and now I'm in panic mode. 

The Long Suffering Husband had a day off from his new full-time job as a retired person; one day without a golf game.  He said, "Let's do something."

"Oh...That...would be ni....actually....I'm not sure.....still too much....the cupboard....book...."

I looked up and saw him looking at me with 'that' look. And I realised that I was in panic mode.

There should have been a clue that it was coming early when I had a full on panic attack in a bookshop. It was a shock.  Bookshops are usually my safe space but last Saturday I walked into Waterstones and couldn't breathe. The books jumped up and down on the shelves and shouted. They all wanted to be read and all I could think was that there's not enough time. 

"Don't panic!" I thought to myself, imagining the front cover of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which was gifted to Arthur Dent just as the Earth was about to be flattened to make a new interstellar highway. Of all the times to be told not to panic. 

I read somewhere that of all the times you panic, it is only 8% of those times when the thing you are panicking about will come true, which is why you shouldn't panic.  But I will never read all the books, my cupboards will never be clean and tidy forever and it looks like I'll never finish writing this blessed book.

Even my fitbit has been trolling me.  Whenever I look at it near the end of the day, when I realise that I need to sit down and do some words, it tells me the date I should be writing about.

I’ve stopped taking photos because I know….1882!

If you are prone to a touch of panic then can I recommend that you don't ever think about writing a book, unless, of course you are actually talented and hard working and able to finish anything without forgetting to eat.

Name Tags

I saw Oppenheimer.

It was a struggle. Just sitting still for three hours, for me, is impossible. But it was more than that. It was a struggle.

“Didn’t you like it?” asked the lovely visiting author at book club, as we discussed the comparative  merits of the Barbie film, feminism, toxic masculinity and the experience of ‘everywoman’ in her book. 

“Oh, I did but it was distressing.”

I think that was the point. You were supposed to feel uncomfortable. 

It could have been much shorter. The whole minute countdown to the bomb test scene could have not been in real time. The music could have been continuous without huge sections of silence and when it did play hundreds of violins could have not played competing rhythms. They could have made the women less trope-like. (The naked sex woman, the underrated intelligent drunk and the Cassandra who warns that Japan were about to surrender)

It could have had an easier timeline and it could have been easier to tell all the men apart. 

However, that would have made it too easy to watch and it was supposed to feel as though you were tied to a rock having your eyes repeatedly  pecked out by eagles.

It was an amazing piece of cinema. Not one you’ll want to watch again but the acting was sublime and the use of colour gave a depth to pov I hadn’t seen before. 

There has been a lot of secrecy about the film and not much analysis post release, except for men of TikTok farting at the end of the countdown. I think it’s because it leaves you feeling devastated. It’s not really something you want to talk about.

We saw it as a family (a wonderful but rare occurrence) and as film lovers were able to discuss our appreciation of it and my inability to sit still (this is my formal apology) 

After about 20 minutes of confusion I had whispered in the Long Suffering Husband’s ear, “I need the date in the corner and for all those men to wear name badges.”

It was almost as though the film makers heard me and the men suddenly had badges. (Although they had all been to the Elon Musk school of naming things: U2, X20, C3PO.)

“That was not the kind of name badge I had in mind,” I hissed at the LSH. 

Hiroshima is a beautiful town that is still grieving for what was done to it. I was particularly struck by two stories and one photo and a document I saw while I was there. The photo was of a child’s bike in the destruction. The document was the date on the surrender form. The first story was of the man who was working in Hiroshima during the first blast, survived a little battered and shocked and went home to Nagasaki only to survive the second blast. But the one that really upset me was the story of Sadako Sasaki.

She was just two years old when the bomb dropped, 2km from her home. Most of her neighbours were killed but her mother and brother escaped the fires. Apparently uninjured she lived a normal life until she was 7, when they discovered that she had leukaemia. The next 5 years of her life were spent with this disease and the trials of its treatment, until she finally died at 12 years old. While she was in hospital she folded over 1000 paper cranes (which Japanese legend stated will allow your wishes to come true). Her classmates also folded and then erected a children’s statue in the peace park, millions of people from around the world have also folded. When we visited Hiroshima in 2020 a project was underway to get as many folded cranes there as possible and it was quite a sight.

Having seen the Oppenheimer film and understanding ‘boys and their toys’ I think I’m going to be busy. If you want me I’ll be folding paper cranes.