Playground Politics

Like every social group, the playground contains a fascinating mix of differing personalities, parenting methods (if you’re me, most other parenting methods are better than mine because how else do you explain just how frightful my children’s behaviour is compared to others?) and varying levels of willingness to get involved with the school fund-raising, extra-curricular clubs or classroom assistance activities (for NO money, NO reward and VERY SORE FEET, and despite the fact that we all pay a big chunk of council tax which allegedly makes our education “free”…and yet still I am the mug running the café single-handedly at the school Christmas Fair…). A completely non-scientific study has brought the following different breeds of playground politician to my attention:

·         Domesticated Dad: A rare breed indeed, this is the Dad who appears to have all his children’s educational requirements entirely under control, without the need for spreadsheets  or barked orders from Mum. Domesticated Dad is an endangered species.

·         Harassed Mum: These people almost always have full time jobs, or part time jobs which actually manifest themselves as full time jobs once Harassed Mum has finally completed the last thing she needs to do before managing at last to extricate herself from the office, amid rumblings from her full time colleagues (who accomplish in their full time hours around 90% of what Harassed Mum accomplishes in her part time hours) about “Flipping Part Timers”. These are the people who always volunteer to help out at school functions, and it’s normally through a sense of guilt caused by them not being able to do the school run on a regular basis.  Always the last to find out what’s going on, unless of course she happens to bump into The Oracle on one of her rare visits to the school, thus obtaining a full download of the week’s occurrences in one sitting, and that’s only if she doesn’t have a meeting she has to be at.

·         The Oracle: The person who knows absolutely everything, and I do mean everything, about any occurrence, recent or otherwise, which has taken place in and around and often also outside of the school catchment area. Every single school in the country has at least one of these. This person knows facts long before they appear in the public domain, and with a frightening level of accuracy.

·         The Gossip: Normally obtains material from the Oracle, but will take input and turn into output any information at all, whether it is accurate or not, since information is not subjected to any sort of verification process. A sort of News of the World in human form. News communicated via this person travels faster than the speed of sound, especially if it’s bad or inaccurate news.

·         Greater-spotted Power-magnet: These characters are attracted to the school management team like un-be-wellied children to a muddy puddle. Their strategy is to befriend the head teacher. Their modus operandi is a thinly disguised brown-nosing campaign, with the ultimate objective of ensuring a smooth path through school for their offspring. It almost never works, because quite frankly head teachers are just not that daft.

·         Lesser-spotted Power-magnet: These people choose instead to hang around their child’s class teacher, in the mistaken belief that if they do so, the fact that their child is a lazy, good-for-nothing trouble maker will somehow pass unnoticed. This is an alternative to the awful prospect of having to alter their parenting techniques. This is rarely successful, unless of course the classroom teacher is spectacularly naïve, in which case fair play to the Lesser-spotted Power-magnet for spotting and exploiting a navigable loophole.

·         The Bad Egg: The parent who has a well-beaten path to the head teacher’s door through the horrific behaviour of its young. Usually engenders a strange dichotomy of feelings from other parents – extreme sympathy because of the frequent appearances before the beaks, tempered by self-righteous fury at the treatment of their own children at the hands of the little horror(s) belonging to the Bad Egg.

·         Earth Mother: The uber-calm Mum with a long string of children, all of whom are always perfectly washed, dressed and on time for school, with all the right homework, money and correspondence in their school bag, and all of whom behave beautifully. Earth Mother has never been carpeted  by the head teacher. Earth Mother does not participate in gossip. Earth Mother never shouts at her children. Face it, we all are simultaneously fascinated by and pissed off with Earth Mother, compounded by the fact that we can’t help but like her. We have absolutely no idea how she gets through all that laundry. We can only imagine she has access to some house-elves (see below).

·         Freeloader: Arguably, the most sensible parent of all. The one who does not get involved in helping out with any of the school activities or fund-raising, but fully expects its child to benefit from it all. I suspect this parent believes an army of unpaid house-elves comes along and does all the work, whilst the rest of us are sleeping.

I’m Harassed Mum by the way, with possibly a side order of the makings of Bad Egg (although I am on the run from the beaks and they have not caught up with me as yet, but as we all know this is only a matter of time), and the polar opposite of Earth Mother. In case you hadn’t already worked it out. Engineer is most definitely Domesticated Dad. Which one are you??

What I know now I am in my forties

You cannot be everyone’s friend. As a teenager, I suffered endless painful angst about the fact that I wasn’t everyone’s friend. In my late teens and early twenties, I stopped caring (pretty much around the time I gave up exercise and took up drinking). In my thirties, when I got married and had my children, and when I finally learnt to empathise, I started to care again. Now that I am in my forties, it’s not so much that I don’t care any more, because I do, deeply. But I am content to live with the undeniable truth that not everyone likes me and that’s ok. And, amazingly, I don’t like everyone, and that’s also ok.

Politeness and respect are really important. I have a heap of unresolved, unresolvable, retrospective guilt which visits me usually in the middle of the night and won’t leave me alone, and it’s basically about when I have been rude or unkind to people in the past. I remember my mother saying it to me, and I now say it to my children: “Don’t treat people unkindly or disrespectfully, because you will regret it in the future..” She was right, I do regret it.

Experiences are much more valuable than material possessions. You remember experiences for ever. You rarely remember material possessions (except my beautiful green bike from circa 1976 which I may have mentioned before…) Kids says they want the latest eye-wateringly expensive gadgets for Christmas or their birthday. But they get more fun, laughter and memories out of an experience.

You never have enough money. Well, you do if you’re Bill Gates. But in recognition of the fact that most of us are not, we pretty much never have enough money. It’s like that annoying physics of packing for a holiday: the combined weight and size of all the clobber you want to put in your suitcase is greater than the sum of its separate parts. Your total income will always be roughly 10% less than you require your outgoings to be, no matter how fiercely you budget, and that percentage is greater at Christmas time (unless you are my best friend N in which case you probably have your whole life organised in a spreadsheet and you never have and never will overspend).

You cannot outwit a bureaucracy. It always flipping catches up with you in the end. It’s usually better to just accept this fact and not even try.

Even if you do not try nor have ever tried to outwit a bureaucracy, at some point the bureaucracy will believe you to be attempting to outwit it even if it has not a scrap of supporting evidence.  It’s usually because someone has inadvertently spelt your name wrong and consequently a computer has you confused with a tax evader or mass murderer. When this happens, until someone actually takes an axe to the computer in question, you will be tarred with this brush for the rest of your days.

No transfer of domestic power supplier ever goes smoothly. Live with it.

Things Aint What They Used To Be

At the risk of sounding like my mother (for example: “All this modern music! It’s just NOISE! There's no TUNE! It all sounds THE SAME! I can’t tell when one song ENDS and the next one BEGINS!”), things just aint what they used to be. This is made very clear to me every year at Halloween. For a start, my children want their costume bought ready to wear, rather than creating a ghost’s outfit from a sheet, my Dad’s army spats, a variety of empty cardboard junk, and a big pot of glue made from flour and water (which coincidentally was the exact recipe you used to make your hair stand on end as well). Secondly, they go out armed with a pumpkin-shaped plastic bucket in which to contain the loot that they expect every single house to provide. Thirdly, they grudgingly come up with one solitary (and almost always a bit rude and inappropriate) joke which is supposed to count as their “treat”. No thought is ever given to doing a dance or singing a song (unless it’s a rude one of course: “Trick or Treat, smell my feet, give me something nice to eat…..” etc). And they normally need help with the punch line until they have visited the 20^th house, at which point they finally manage to remember it through the fug of sugar-related bad behaviour.

When you are the Trick-or-treatee, there is much scrutiny and ultimately often voiced disappointment with the loot you have provided. “I don’t like these” said one child this year. “Can I have the money instead?” Seriously. I was flabbergasted. Is that acceptable?? And although every year I always stoically put monkey nuts and satsumas in amongst the loot on offer, I have yet to see a child actually select either of those items. I am pretty sure that satsumas in my day were considered to be a pretty good treat…

And let’s not forget the arrival of the pumpkin into our lives. I had never seen a pumpkin until a few years ago, except in a Charlie Brown cartoon, and I had certainly never smelt one. Because nothing smells quite like the stinking, stringy, soggy entrails of a pumpkin. Even pumpkin seeds are somehow creepy. How can the feel of a seed make you gag and shudder? Of course, in the old days, we made our lanterns out of neeps. It was a hard shift, hollowing out a neep. You ended up with several bent spoons and broken knives, as well as various blisters and callouses. But it was worth it, because you could make soup or bashed neeps with the remnants, and the burning candle inside the lantern filled the house with a pleasant smell of cooking neeps. Let’s face it, these days it’s you or the pumpkin. The unspeakable stench will kill you in the end, so you have to put the lantern on your doorstep and hope for a kindly prevailing wind.

Halloween is a timely reminder for me that Christmas is coming. This year I am hell bent on doing something about the mountains of gifts which Boxer and Judge receive (which last year took them a week to finish opening. Not their choice, I hasten to add). These mountains of gifts cause them to completely forget about what Christmas is really about, much like distracting someone with something shiny: “Yes yes Jesus and Mary and Joseph, I get it, now then, that’s another one for me isn’t it?” So this year, I am a woman possessed. One main present each. One stocking each containing a variety of smaller gifts, each one worth less than or equal to £5, and a Satsuma, obviously. With careful forward planning and management of lovely and generous friends, any other presents will be from family or god-parents. Nothing else.

This year we will be enjoying experiences rather than things. Children remember experiences. They rarely remember things (except my beautiful green bike which I got for Christmas in 1976, and which was stolen 2 weeks after I got it. I have never got over it.) Mine have never been allowed to ask for a whole lot for Christmas, so when they write their letter to Santa, it is to ask for one thing only. And then I let myself down by starting to do my shopping so early in the year, in order to spread the cost, that I forget what I have already bought and end up with an enormous pile of gifts, exactly what I was determined to avoid.

Not this year. This year, things are going to be much more like they used to be.

Parental Enlightenment

My children are my greatest educators, in lots of ways.

I remember my older step-daughter’s comment from around 6 weeks after the birth of her first child: “If I had known at the start that I would spend the rest of my life working out ways to outwit my child, I might have thought twice about it…”. This sums it up exactly. No matter how intelligent you are, how well you run your own life and how good you think you are at reading other people, as soon as you have your own child you are pretty much no longer equipped to look after yourself, let alone a tiny, defenceless, vulnerable human being, for whose welfare you are entirely and terrifyingly responsible. Let’s face it, for the first few weeks after the birth, you cannot even remember how to start the car any more.

Other things you only learn post childbirth:

1. There is no such thing as an “easy birth”. Anyone who tells you they have had one is either lying to protect you, still high on pain-killing attitude-adjusting narcotics or is recalling it from so long ago that merciful time has washed all painful memories away. Any process requiring pain-killing attitude-adjusting narcotics which you could sell for a serious amount of money in your local pub is never going to be easy. Get real.
2. Any mid-wife or health visitor who describes breast-feeding as involving a “tiny nip” has either never done it or is lying to protect you. Breast-feeding makes your toes curl. EVERY TIME.
3. Telling people how to raise their children is a multi-million pound industry. And you will still get it wrong. Even if you read every super-nanny book available, at some point your child will still tell you that they hate you and that you’re the worst parent in the world and that everyone else they know has a better life.
4. You will be amazed at how well you can do without sleep.
5. You will never finish a conversation, cup of coffee (without having to put it in the microwave to reheat it half way through) or newspaper again unless your child is asleep.
6. Your ability to consume alcohol without turning into a dribbling, havering, incoherent wreck will drop like a stone.
7. Entire evenings with your friends in the pub can now be filled with conversations about school catchment areas. Nothing will be resolved due to everyone’s inability to process alcohol efficiently (see point 6 above) coupled with the fact that every council’s catchment area policy is random and illogical. And the fact that if any council suspects that its residents know all the rules around catchment areas, it must immediately change some or all of them without notice or consultation.
8. People who park their cars with 2 wheels up on the pavement really piss you off. You have never noticed it before. But then again, you have never considered the ability to proceed unencumbered along a pavement with a buggy as a benefit before.
9. You watch people who park in the parent-and-child spaces at supermarkets like a manic hawk, just to make absolutely sure that they actually have children when they emerge from their car.
10. The people who are the least well qualified to give you advice will be the ones who give you advice. The people who are the best qualified to give you advice (eg my mother) will be the ones who say “I don’t really know, I haven’t got any experience, I have no idea what I’d do” or the old classic “it was much easier for us in my day”. Yeah right, of course it was. You had no money, no soft play facilities, no children’s TV, no car, no innoculations to spend sleepless nights deciding about, and absolutely no advice from health care professionals. How is that easier?
11. You will feel guilty about every single thing that you do, from choosing the wrong toothpaste with an inappropriate fluoride content, to allowing your child to eat a packet of chocolate buttons. You have probably never suffered from that much guilt before. You will get your fill now though, because as if current guilt is not enough you will also develop retrospective guilt about things which didn’t make you feel guilty before but which now, with the benefit of empathy, cause you to cringe inwardly every time you think about them.

In short, there should definitely be some sort of qualification exam before people can have children, and all children should definitely come with a handbook. If a toaster comes with a handbook, why doesn’t a complex organism like a child have one?

Corporate Ponderings…

There was a story in the newspaper last week about prison vans being ordered at vast expense, only for the powers that be to discover that they are too large for most courthouse entrances. Really. You could be forgiven for thinking that it was an extravagant (VERY extravagant, like £900 million, I mean how can a few tall buses with blacked out windows cost that much?) April Fool. Of all the people in the world in whose shoes you would not want to be, the project manager of that particular project probably tops the list.

Of course, we all know what happened here. Lots of people, probably dressed in suits, have got together, done a whole lot of talking and very little listening, and have probably come up with a list of proposals, which have then been circulated around a whole lot of other people who either weren’t invited to the original meeting, or were vital to the meeting but couldn’t be arsed to attend, and who thus have done even less listening, and they have prioritised the proposals, and then someone completely different who actually controls the money has had a look at the list and rejected the first 5 items because they are too expensive. So number 6 has been duly selected, but because it was number 6 no one in either of the original parties did any form of due diligence about the viability of the proposal because they only checked proposals 1 through 5. And absolutely no one thought to get their measuring tape out and check the dimensions of a courtroom’s approach roads against the proportions of the vans being ordered. This is because number 6 ticked pretty much none of the boxes, and thus was never really intended to be a serious proposal in the first place.

People have not been singing off the same song sheet. Their ducks have not been placed in a row. Have you ever seen ducks in a row? I have only ever seen ducks in a line, and it’s usually quite a dishevelled and quite frankly a bit stinky line too. If this is a standard analogy in the human world for being well-organised, is it really any wonder that the flipping trucks don’t fit through the gates?

Corporate speak is a shifting landscape though. We are seeing a whole new generation of words and phrases entering common usage, so out goes brain-storming, thinking outside the box and blue sky thinking, and in comes collaboration, transformation and optimisation. At the risk of this becoming a rant (I mean, we wouldn’t want that now would we), here are a few other favourites of mine

• You can’t polish a turd: this means that a group of people, in full recognition of the fact that some situation is poor and unfixable, are meeting nonetheless, probably at vast corporate expense, to discuss how poor and unfixable it is. Rarely will anything be resolved.
• Strategic: Neat, slick, expensive. Never going to happen.
• Tactical: Messy, manual, also expensive but in people hours rather than computer development. Almost always the favoured option. No one ever seems to worry about people hours.
• Collaboration pod: a slightly posher than normal, well-furnished meeting room containing a phone, a set of microphones and a computer with a web camera and a network connection, which usually doesn’t work. In special cases, there may even be an interactive whiteboard which no one knows how to use, and a video link, ditto. Usually there’s a flip chart in the corner. In almost all cases, the door has the words “Collaboration Pod” written in unsteady capitals on the door, not always spelt correctly.
• End-to-end thinking: intended to ensure that the rambling, disjointed route a customer transaction takes through all the different internal parts of a business is invisible to the customer, who just experiences slick, efficient, customer-oriented pleasantness. In reality, each part of the business only considers its own boundaries and doesn’t give a crap if those boundaries don’t interface properly (or indeed at all) with the boundaries of the next part of the business. So the customer experiences a total shambles, and rarely does it end well. (Obviously this is a sweeping generalisation. There are many examples out there of businesses which do end-to-end thinking very well. But I cannot rant about them…)
  

There’s a lot to be said for dictatorship then, you would think. One person makes the decision, there’s no discussion or argument, and anyone who makes a mess gets flogged, so there’s a much greater incentive to succeed. Simple!

The Art of Familial Communications

My sister, let’s call her Little Vulture, is my friend, I am pleased to note. I do hope she agrees. It has become apparent over the years with my dealings with others who have siblings that this is most definitely not a given. She is usually able to finish my sentences for me, which is lucky since these days I have often forgotten by the end of the sentence what I originally intended the end of the sentence to be.  She appears to have forgiven me for the systematic destruction of her felt tip pens circa 1973 whilst she was safely at primary school and I had the run of her toys. I have almost forgiven her for persuading me to tell her what I was giving her for Christmas BEFORE Christmas every year until I finally woke up to her little game (last year), and for always making me have the train at Granny’s house which didn’t wind up and quite frankly wasn’t even an engine if we’re being absolutely honest about it, whilst she swanned around the track with the lovely green wind-up engine.  When things are emotional, Engineer sighs in a long-suffering, resigned way, and gets his umbrella out, as when Little Vulture weeps, I weep, and vice versa. Even talking about the fact that we make each other weep makes us weep. Quod erat demonstrandum (or rather quod esset demonstrandum, let’s make it a conditional rather than a sure thing, even though we all know it’s actually the latter). Apologies to all you fluent Latin speakers out there if my tenses are a bit off. I haven’t had to go there since about 1982, and I haven’t missed it AT ALL.

Engineer has about 152 siblings. Or it might be just 12, but I lose count after the first 6 TBH. Judge and Boxer have (at the last count) 29 first cousins, 2 big sisters (we agree to abandon the qualifiers “half” and “step” a long time ago, as the latter implies fairy tale evilness and the former is just plain silly. How can you be half a sister?), a niece and a nephew, and an expanding plethora of other assorted less immediate relatives. They are a close family. How they manage to transmit information between themselves with the sort of efficiency one normally associates only with ants or bees, and definitely not with anything in the human world, without duplication or distortion, occasionally looping in sisters-in-law / step-mothers on a need-to-know basis, is a constant source of amazement to me.

Little Vulture and I are amateurs in comparison, viz:

Little Vulture: “Well, of course, you know after the papier mache balloon / exploding curry / non-swimming pigs / veering under a motor vehicle / ducklings for dog food (delete as applicable) incident (these are all real incidents, by the way, in case you were wondering)…”

Me: “What papier mache balloon / exploding curry / non-swimming pigs / veering under a motor vehicle / ducklings for dog food (delete as applicable) incident??”

Little Vulture: “You know? What we were talking about at the cinema the other day?”

Me: “You went to the cinema with Fred / Wilma.”

Little Vulture: “Oh. So I did. Well, anyway….”

The presence of our cousins, Lioness and Bear, who to all intents and purposes count as siblings, further exacerbates the problem. They cry, we cry. It’s exhausting. Communication between us all is further complicated by vast geographical distances and the fact that each link in the four-way chain has a different preferred method of communication. Lioness and I prefer instant messaging – this way there is far less chance that we will make each other cry, and it enables us to communicate during our manically busy working days. Bear and Little Vulture favour good old-fashioned telephone chat. This way Bear can make calls from his car on the way to or from yet another comedy encounter with his in-laws, and Little Vulture can enjoy the update with her feet up on the sofa and an appropriate refreshment. This means that things get communicated 3 or 4 times, or not at all, and many things get lost in translation:

Me: “Lioness texted – apparently Bear’s blah ran away with a fishcake!” (incidentally, this is not a real scenario because that would be a bit silly)

Little Vulture: “Yes, Bear just called…it was actually a fish finger…” I think you see the problem.

Of course, SMS communication comes with its own specific set of issues, mainly related either to the vagaries of predictive texting, auto-correct or the fat finger problems which occur as a result of touch screen technology. Thus “sorry will be l8, plane stuck in dog” and other such unwittingly hilarious messages only serve to add to the difficulties of clear communication.

In my twenties, I lived about a stone’s throw from Little Vulture’s front door. Such are our hapless communication skills that we would on a regular basis become annoyed with each other because the other’s phone line was engaged, rather than make the 50 yard journey along the road, safe in the knowledge that the other was in. Well, either that or there was a very garrulous burglar in the house.  

Face to face. It’s the only way.

Bad Grammar. Init?

Right then, the first thing to point out is that since I am not English, and coupled with the fact that I was the only person in my year at school who did not study English Higher, I am almost certainly not qualified to talk about bad English grammar or spelling. Thus, this blog is like a one-legged, rhythmically-challenged, tone-deaf person criticising the tap-dancing skills of others.

Be that as it may, it does not stop bad grammar being something which makes me screw up my eyes, grit my teeth, wince and recoil, shaking my head. You just experimented with that sequence of expressions, didn’t you. My absolute nemesis is the badly placed or completely spurious apostrophe. Clearly, the decision to go vocal about this is a risky one, as it becomes more critical than normal for me to check that there are none of the afore-mentioned offenders putting in an appearance somewhere in the text. How ironic would that be?? 

For me, there are different categories of poorly-used apostrophes, verging from acceptable to just plain wrong. Some I can understand because the rules are thoroughly confusing, and remind me of the rules which did the email rounds a few years ago, the basic premise of which was that if the people who make the rules suspect that the rest of us have figured any or all of them out, they are at liberty to change any or all them immediately and without notice. Some English grammar rules remind me somewhat of the minefield of the random German plural, the two virtually interchangeable varieties of French past tense and the vagaries of the key of C# Major. I may have ranted about this latter item before. Sadly this is Beethoven’s fault, for writing my favourite piece of piano music in my least favourite key (and then insisting upon sharpening a sharp thus making it a natural…I mean, come on Ludwig, I understand that becoming deaf was a career-threatening development for a composer, but it wasn’t really OUR fault as such so there was really no need to take it out on us). Note the correctly positioned apostrophe in that last sentence. Ha!

Falling into this category is the wrangle about where to put the apostrophe denoting ownership by a plural entity, for example the toys belonging to the children. I’ll admit, that’s not clear cut, very annoying and just flipping typical of the English language, TBH. Thus anyone who gets this wrong in future correspondence with me will avoid public criticism, mainly because I will either not notice it, or notice it and assume the version you have chosen is the correct one, since I don’t actually know any better. I think it should be “the children’s toys”, since it denotes the toys belonging to the children. But I don’t know for sure and I’m definitely not brave enough to place a bet on it.

Others are far less forgivable, for instance if I had written that as “other’s”… Just, NO. Particularly annoying are the ones where a standard plural is apostrophised. I mean, why?? “Who let the dog’s out?” The dog is out of what? It reduces the whole meaning of the sentence to rubble.

One of the things I have learned, as the mother of children who are just starting to grapple with the written English word, is that English is not logical. An apostrophe marks a missing letter, unless of course it’s one of the exceptions to this rule (for instance when we shorten road to Rd or Saint to St). An apostrophe denotes ownership. Except for personal pronouns of course (yours, theirs etc). An apostrophe can be used to indicate the structure of unusual words. Except when it isn’t. You see? So basically, I’m ok with a misplaced apostrophe as long as I don’t know it’s misplaced. Oblivion, that’s the key.