‘Bad school’ fears expose some not-so-great parents

I’m not oblivious to the fact that it tells us something very damning about our education system but I wonder if, amid all the lying and cheating that parents are now doing to get their kids into good schools, the irony of their position ever occurs to them.

“Data obtained using freedom of information requests showed they were being caught using false addresses, pretending to be Roman Catholic, lying about siblings and even impersonating family members in an attempt to secure places.”

So there you are, pulling any stunt going to secure the best possible education for your children and in doing so, you teach them a lesson that is as bad for them as it is for the Society in which they will grow up – that rules are for other people. Or should they ever ask how they ended up at that particular school, do you just lie to them as well?

Game for a laugh – how gaming icons die

One of those comments that puts everything into instant, stark perspective:

“The worlds greatest gamer didn’t show up for the biggest online tournament of the year at the weekend,” geekish Older Son announces.

“Why was that?” asks his not-that-bothered Father.

“His mum and dad said he’s been spending too much time on the computer…”

Bursting bubbles. It’s what parents are for.

Paternity leave – odd as it sounds, gentlemen, you need to grow a pair…

Pfc. Tierrine Wesley holds his 7-month-old son for only the second time following his unit’s welcome home ceremony at Wheeler Army Airfield in Hawaii. Soldiers on deployment when their child is born are allotted up to 10 days of paternity leave that must be used within 60 days of returning home. See more at http://www.army.mil New Soldier-dads get administrative leave, Army says (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

These things tend to fly off your radar when they don’t personally affect you, so forgive me if I’m a little late to the party in discovering only while driving home last night that a man can claim up to 28 weeks off work for paternity leave, on almost full pay.

I nearly crashed the car. Rare are the times that you will find this blog sympathetic to Big Business but next time I hear its spokesmen complaining about over-regulation, I shall no longer be so quick to put it down to rampant self-interest.

Only if this is some over-reaction to the modern commercial tendency for people to be worked like dogs does it begin to have any shred of credibility. Increasingly elastic working hours, Sunday working, Bank Holiday working – there’s a debate to be had there all right but SEVEN MONTHS…?!

I’d wind up in a rut I might never climb out of, were I to have half-a-year off work. Besides, I do think this ‘bonding’ thing is  overstated and somewhat symptomatic of a country gone soft. You’ve got the best part of two decades to interact with the little blighters before they leave home and if you think they’re fascinating now, wait ’til they start talking politics and ambitions with you, bringing stunning young women home or taking you out for a beer.

I went paintballing with my two at the weekend. We laughed together, ran about like mad things together and got shot together, by each other wherever possible. Great as the early days are, I would take that particular fathering experience over a whole week of aimlessly shaking fluffy toys above a cot with a vacuous grin on my face. To behold developing intellect and sharpening wit in your own flesh and blood is humbling and exhilarating in equal measure. Those first six months, in comparison; well, you’re basically a glorified zookeeper.

And all the while, our Armed Forces are out there firing guns for real, implementing the half-baked folly of politicians, while their own kids sweat it out for weeks on end, learning to hate the ring of a telephone. Do you really want to shrivel up in shame next time you find yourself drinking alongside men in uniform or are you comfortable with the idea of being a bit pathetic?

Six weeks. Tops. Come on, guys, man up.

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Premature death – let’s hear it for the plusses

“Old age (?)” – Unknown Painter from the Low Countries (16th century) (Photo credit: Tilemahos Efthimiadis)

And so it comes to this, when the infirmities of old age have you well and truly in their grip.

Your medical notes get to include a cartoon sketch of your every bowel movement.

I know this because I’ve seen her notes with my own eyes at the residential home. This once proud woman has her motions, er, logged, in pictorial form, so that the doctors can spot trends and assign the appropriate treatment.

Remember this.

Remember these words when you look up at the age of 35, or 42, or 57 and see the bus that you failed to spot from the kerb, hurtling, irresistibly, straight for you.

Bummer, for sure, but also escape.

Not for you the endless days of imprisonment, in bed or wheelchair, as old age creeps cloyingly by. Not for you the sentence of irrelevance, as life becomes a spectator sport, charging along without you on the far side of a care home window. Not for you the vacuous stare and inane grin, while a carer talks you through the lunch menu like you’re a small child.

And not for you the Rolf Harris treatment whenever you’re wheeled into the lavatory. To the very end, your stools remained a matter for you and you alone.

Given the choice, of course, most of us will take the chance, pressing on towards our autumn years with the desperate hope that we’ll be the one in a thousand who’s still playing tennis at 80 and whose end comes quickly and quietly after a good meal.

Should such optimism prove brutally unfounded, however, I think we owe it to our loved ones to forearm them with a little perspective.

Grieve as they will for what you’ve missed, it’s important that they also quietly rejoice at what you’ve been spared.

Death in your prime, I’ve decided, gets an unduly bad press.

Love is … a sensitive toilet rota

The thrill of a new love affair? They’re right, it does go. It couldn’t possibly last, or your life would be a madhouse.

They’re also right, however, when they say that it can be replaced by something deeper, stronger and richer. As well as by a whole lot of stuff you would never associate with love in a million years. Until it happens.

It was just the same routine small talk Mrs NoL and I have every morning before we leave for work. Is the back door locked? Have you got your lunch? Have a nice day.

But then she says, “If you need to brush your teeth, go and do them now, because I need the toilet and I suspect you won’t want to be going into the bathroom after me…”

And on the way to work, it occurs to me that after 20 years of marriage, that is love.

But try writing a ballad about it.

Conditioner, plumper and a circular argument

I am awoken by Mrs NoL raving about her new skin conditioner, which she believes is taking care of several wrinkles that had been making themselves at home around her eyebrows.

“It contains a plumping agent, you see,” she enthuses.

I am married to a woman whose battle with weight has been an ongoing source of dismay for her ever since she produced our first child, 18 years ago.

She is now cock-a-hoop over a plumping agent.

I cannot think of a thing to say.

Treat this as a warning shot aross your bows, Mrs Blair…

Much as I’d normally pounce with relish on even the slightest opportunity to decry either party to the Blair marriage,  I have to give Cherie Blair QC some benefit of the doubt at least, following her pronouncement on stay-at-home mothers at last week’s Fortune Most Powerful Women London Conference.

Despite the inevitable barrage of criticism the former PM’s wife has received from equally inevitable quarters, I’m minded to side with this commentator in concluding that the main target of her concern were women so delusional as to think of full-time motherhood as the easy option, because stretching themselves in any context other than a Zumba class sounds a little too much like hard work.

However, while I canot find a full transcript of the interview, the following video clip does not entirely dispel the suspicion that Mrs Blair regards the stay-at-home species in general as letting the side down somewhat.

So just so we’re absolutely straight, madam, I would merely mention the following:

• I reject your insinuation that there is no self-satisfaction to be had from being a full-time mother and home-maker, should a woman choose that as her lot. In an increasingly fractured society, indeed, such contrarian souls are a beacon of hope.
•  “They want to be the best possible mother and they want to put all their effort into their children…” Why you should say this with sneer, I have no idea but it does you little credit. You do it your way and let others do it theirs.
•  Does it ever occur to you, that office life and the corporate ladder may not be for everyone? That, along with the fulfilment you seem to think is guaranteed every woman who steps through its doors, there is also greed, spite, megalomania, office politics and the daily triumph of jargon and bureaucracy over clarity and action? I rejected that world 17 years ago and now see my wife – a teacher – despair of it, in what should be one of the most fulfilling vocations of all. To paraphrase an old quote about fishing, you see stay-at-home mums as escaping from reality, when they are arguably escaping to reality, passing up empire building in favour of home building.
• “My job as a mother is to bring my children up so that, actually, they can live without me” – superficially commendable but also, potentially, rather self-serving. If you were defending stay-at-homes in court, I suspect you would be all over this.
• Finally, something that occurs to me about my own home-maker mother: when she wasn’t investing in her family, she looked outwards and found many fulfilling years in the Mothers’ Union, Women’s Institute and her local branch of the RNLI. All rather quaint and dated now and I doubt Fortune would touch any of them with a bargepole but they all had this going for them: they were simple, worthwhile organisations, with simple, worthwhile objectives. Stood alongside a self-congratulatory jolly like a Most Powerful Women Conference, I believe they can hold their heads high.

Songwriters – you need a cat

Dejected Older Son walks into the study.

“I’ve just spent an hour trying to find inspiration for a new song,” he tells me. “I’m getting absolutely nowhere, then the cat walks in, brushes my guitar with his tail as he goes by and produces the most beautiful chord I think I’ve ever heard.

“I give up…”

Fragmented modern families – can I get an app for this?

Image via CrunchBase

I haven’t seen them for some time, you must understand. In her case easily a year; in his, not much less.

And I’m a bloke. Details of who’s seeing whom, who’s pregnant by whom and who’s split from whom, have a tendency to exit one ear as fast as they entered the other one. A flaw in my social skills that was always likely to be horribly exposed in this age of fragmented families and the shifting sands of once solid titles like ‘Mum’, ‘Dad’ and ‘Uncle’.

So when the two of them approached yesterday, even a social dullard like me picked up on the fact that the toddler in her arms wasn’t on the scene last time I saw them together.

After a few moments of catching-up pleasantries, I’m introduced to him.

“Meet our new addition to the family,” she says.

Interesting, I think, I’d thought her child-bearing days were behind her. Ah well, modern medicine and all that.

“What a lovely little chap,” I say, “and doesn’t he look like his mummy?”

The air suddenly develops a slight chill. “I’ll take that as a compliment,” she says stiffly. “He’s adopted.”

iPhone; we have a problem.

While I’m not yet into app culture, I reflected afterwards that if those who create them could come up with something that makes embarrassing moments like this a thing of the past, I’m upgrading my cellphone tomorrow.

Call it the Fragmentogram. You see two vaguely-familiar people with children approaching, you point your phone at them and it gives you something like this:

“Bob and Sheila. You met at Dougie’s 50th, 18 months ago, when both with different partners. His split amicable, hers messy. Don’t mention secretaries. Co-habited since January but he has commitment issues. Both kids hers, he can’t have any. One on right has learning difficulties – don’t stare.”  

Seriously, make the damn thing and name your price. I’ll be the guy leading the stampede.

If you could be invisible for a day

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

 

“We were discussing this at college recently,” Older Son confides. “Most of the lads talked about hanging around women’s changing rooms but it suddenly occurred to me that I would probably go to Paris and beat up street mime artists until their audience broke into rapturous applause.”

Either he’s subconsciously read that line somewhere else or he is prone to moments of inspiration that I envy.