Snow Day

Why, in the UK, does the snow take us by surprise every year?

We act like we have never seen the stuff before.

Ohmygod! Snow! On the ground. On the roads. Everywhere! White stuff! I can’t possibly travel in that. Our modern technology just cannot cope with it! We’re just not built to function in snow! Stop the country! Back to the caves!

A hundred years of industrial revolution grinds to a halt in the time it takes for some middle class office worker to pull back the curtains, see an inch of snow on his people carrier and decide that it is simply too difficult to attempt any kind of journey into work.

Scott of the Antarctic would throw his frozen shite at us in disgust. I bet Sir Ranulph Fiennes is out on his front lawn right now sunbathing and eating a Cornetto.

What utter wussies we are.

The entire country shuts up shop. It’s ridiculous. My wife has had to take an unpaid day off work today because all the bloody schools are closed.

There’s barely an inch of snow on the ground here in the Midlands! It’s nothing. Nothing at all. When I was a kid I can remember weeks and weeks of heavy snow in ‘81/’82 and having to walk to school in it every day. The staff all turned up for work. And so did most of the kids. The only time the school ever gave us a day off was when the boilers broke.

Nowadays everybody leaps onto the smallest snowflake as an excuse to take a day off. To have an impromptu holiday. No wonder this country is the poor old man of Europe. Where’s our hardy British spirit gone? Over the last few decades it’s been replaced with a whiny, wheedling, shirking tendency to try and wriggle out of any onerous responsibility or task that requires even the tiniest bit of hard work. Nowadays I suspect schools and businesses close merely to avoid the possibility of litigation should someone slip and smash their buttock on a kerbstone while trying to gain access to their premises.

It’s cowardly, lazy and a little bit tawdry.

The snow up North has been far worse and I bet there’s a fair few people there who will still struggle into work nonetheless.

From the Midlands down to the South though (maybe I’m wrong) the snowfall hasn’t been nearly as bad. It should be business as normal with the added novelty of some beautiful winter views to gawp at from our office windows.

Instead most people are at home watching telly or building snowmen in the garden.

I’m not. I’m at work.

Harrumph.

Pass me another turd, Scott old man, I’ve got the ballista working properly now.

Dr Evil

Yes folks, it has been confirmed.

I am Dr Evil.

I am the one who dispenses negative vibes and foul atmospheres upon the ones who are incautious enough to cross me.

How do I know this?

My eldest boy has just told me (at approximately 09.00 hours) that I have given him a bad day as he stomped into school with a face like a stone mason’s elbow.

Why?

On day when he was already weighed down with coat, sports kit, lunch bag and school bag he also wanted to take in to school the biggest A4 folder of Yu-Gi-Oh cards that the world has ever seen. He could barely get himself out the front door let alone all the way to school.

So I vetoed the cards. They were staying home.

Cue a 10 minute tantrum in front of a work colleague who is giving us all a lift to school this week (Karen is in Birmingham every day taking an accountancy revision course) which made us all late.

And when I say tantrum, I mean TANTRUM.

The kind of tantrum that Godzilla used to throw over Tokyo in the seventies that saw buildings levelled and bridges bounced into the ocean.

However I didn’t back down and Godzilla had to settle for stomping his way across a playground full of oblivious school kids who were all intent on making the most of their pre-school playtime by having a good time. I told Ben the power to have a good day or a bad day was still in his hands and his choice to make.

That’s when I got the “you’ve already given me a bad day” line.

All my fault, you see.

*Sigh*

I haven’t talked about this before as I wasn’t too sure how I felt about it but the school thinks Ben might be borderline – and they are stressing words like “borderline” and “mildly” – aspergers.

I guess this would explain some of his behaviour – his ability to become totally fixated on something that interests him to the point where he cannot stop talking about it and his total inability to cope emotionally with any kind of change to his daily routine.

And Karen and I are grateful to the school for being relatively quick on the ball and so openly proactive about it. They’re going to organize some tests to try and confirm their suspicions.

But to be honest I feel ambivalent about any kind of potential diagnosis.

If it is aspergers then I suppose it means we can use well honed coping strategies to (a) cope with it ourselves and (b) teach Ben to cope with it so that he can go on to have a successful life (as indeed do many people with full blown aspergers). But it also means he’s picked up a label that we’d rather he didn’t have. An inevitably weighty label that could wear him down if he’s not strong enough to carry it.

Or if it’s confirmed that it isn’t aspergers then – whoop-de-doo – he’s, to all intents and purposes, “normal” but has a genuinely frightening temper and a large streak of unreasonableness that could hold him back from any kind of future success if he doesn’t learn to control it.

*Sigh* yet again.

I’m trying not to dwell on the negatives but after an exhausting morning like this one it’s damned difficult because now I’ve been given a thoroughly bad day too.

Which makes me think that Ben’s behaviour isn’t that abnormal after all and maybe we’re all on the aspergers spectrum to some degree without always being aware of it...

Proper Winters And Erin Grey

So is this a proper winter?

There’s been considerable debate in our house.

Well. Karen mentioned once that the temperatures this year have actually hit freezing a few times rather than just being “a bit chilly” and I grunted in reply that they still haven’t approximated anywhere near the arctic winters that I remember from my childhood.

But thinking about it I can only really recall one particularly arctic winter from the 18 or so that constituted my pre-adult life...

*(adopts West Country pirate-like accent for no good reason whatsoever)* Aar, it were the winter of ’82 and us young uns had to be carried through the mile high snow drifts like new born lambs in the arms of the bare-chested, ruddy nippled menfolk lest our poor shoeless feet should freeze solid like the last packet of rissoles at the bottom of the meat freezer at Iceland...

I think 1982 sticks in my mind because it was my very first year at Secondary school (the “big school”) and I had to tramp a mile or so there and back on foot which back then seemed akin to some poor African child walking 15 miles to fetch water from a bore hole and slay a gazelle or three on route, skin it and bring it home pre-butchered and ready for the village cooking pot.

Really I had no idea I was even born.

But the winter that year was genuinely very bad. A proper winter in every sense of the word. Snow that was several feet deep and lasted for weeks. Icy winds that froze ponds, streams, canals and rivers solid. Loads of days off school because either the boilers broke down or not enough staff / pupils made it into school to make a normal school day viable. And so bleak and grey outside that it seemed as if the sun had fizzled out completely like Jim Davidson’s telly career.

Going outside was frequently not an option that winter. I can recall in particular having to work hard to bend my parent’s arms to allow me to go for my usual Saturday morning walk to the papershop (we call them newsagents now) on a morning when the overnight snowfall had been extraordinarily heavy. Not going out that day was not an option for me. You see, every Saturday during this period I would religiously go to the papershop in the morning and hand over my hard saved cash – a piddling amount by today’s standards – to purchase a couple of packets of Buck Roger’s In The 25th Century sticker album stickers. I was very close to completing the album but the one sticker that I was most desperate to have and hadn’t yet acquired was the portrait of Colonel Wilma Deering that was to go on the very first page alongside Buck Rogers himself. My 12 year old self was very much taken with Colonel Wilma Deering – played by Erin Grey – and watching re-runs now it seems clear to me I must have had a thing about rather austere looking women with steely blue eyes and a slightly cold manner... though I will say she did look bloody fine in those tight jumpsuit things that they constantly crow-barred her into.

Crow-barred? I do hope not. I’d like to think that perhaps they oiled her up instead in order to facilitate her body’s smooth entry into that 1980’s smooth warm white Lycra... ahem. Oh yes. Where was I?

Well, this particular Saturday I finally got that much sought after sticker and it was fabulous. It was worth battling through snow drifts that were so high they swamped my wellies. It was worth enduring the biting cold that ate through my finger gloves like Kerry Katona eating her way through the last rissole at the bottom of the meat freezer at Iceland. It was worth the whole God damned ice blasted winter.

I still have the sticker album and no, it isn’t complete. I think once I got Wilma my incentive to buy the packets of stickers each week suffered a loss of impetus. I’d got what I wanted: Erin Grey in a tight blue futuristic zipper top smiling sardonically to camera. What a girl. Hard as steel but gorgeous enough to make the coldest of winter snows melt.

Which of course they did. Eventually. Leaving the world a rather grey, limp and drab place in its absence.

*sigh*

Now that folks was a proper winter.

Costumes

Because it’s Children In Need day today we’ve had to send our two boys off into the world dressed for the stage.

The youngest, Tom, has had to go to nursery dressed as a pirate. This has meant attiring him in a stripy top, a sword belt, a little waistcoat and some trousers that have been theatrically shredded at the bottom to give him that “Mutiny On The Bounty” look.

He looks frighteningly like Mr Smee from Walt Disney’s Peter Pan.

The costume has been finished off with a little foam hook that he can wave around. It’s very blunt and soft and I suspect the only danger to life and limb will be a transference of snot from Tom’s extremely runny nose to the face of whoever gets too close to him.

I wish I was clever enough to make a joke about Mutiny On The Bogey but I’m not so I won’t.

Our eldest, Ben, has in his own opinion been rather short changed in the dressing up stakes. His school, for some possibly pacific reason, has demanded that the children attend today dressed as “dancers”.

Hmm. It’s not an idea to inspire a rough-and-tumble 7 year old.

Ben spent the entire journey to school this morning eyeing up Tom’s hook with unmasked envy and I must admit I feel a little sympathy towards him (although I expressed this by making sundry jokes about ballet tutus and suggesting that he tell his mates that he’s come to school today dressed as Wayne Sleep). While it’s laudable that the school are promoting the idea of non aggressive interaction and trans-gender activities I can’t help feeling that most of the kids – boy and girl – would have been far happier with a “Kings and Queens” theme, say, or a monsters theme or, yes, even pirates. And if some of the girls wanted to dress as a King rather than a Queen and some of the boys wanted to be a princess for the day I’m sure it would have been fine.

But at the end of the day you can’t stop boys being boys and girls being girls.

Ben owns a fine collection of toy swords but even if Karen and I hadn’t tooled him up with the best that Toys R Us had to offer I guarantee he would have gone out on a walk and found himself a stick or a branch and fashioned his own. My motto is: better a cheaply manufactured foam sword than a piece of lead pipe lifted off a building site. Especially when you’re on the receiving end.

But back to the “dancers” theme. I can only assume that someone at Ben’s school is a fan of Strictly Come Dancing and I now feel that we’ve regrettably missed a great trick:

With the addition of a grey wig, some wobbly jowls and a paunch made of several sofa cushions Ben could have gone dressed as John Sergeant.

I’m sure that would have made him feel a lot better.

Meme-ories Are Made Of This

I haven’t responded to a meme for a long time but today I’m making an exception by answering one sent to me by lovely Lucy Fishwife.

Basically I have to list 6 random things about myself – preferably things that you don’t already know – and then pass the meme on to 6 other lucky-lucky bloggers. While I think about who to infect with the meme disease here are 6 interesting (I hope) but little known facts about yours truly.

1) I’m a “published” poet. Kind of. I’ve had about 30 poems published over the years in various poetry journals and anthologies. Sadly I’ve never had a collection published or won any major poetry competitions which would have blasted my name before the addled sight of the UK literati. Out of the 30 published I was only ever properly paid for one: £10 for a poem called “Love” that was published in top-notch poetry mag The Rialto. I briefly considered framing the cheque but the law of economics took over and I cashed it.

2) I was at school for much of my younger life with fellow blogger Tris and we still maintain regular contact. He is quite simply and quite honestly my oldest friend. An initial acquaintance and then a friendship which dates back approximately 30 years. I’m very proud of this.

3) I had a childhood crush on Charlie’s Angels. All of them. But primarily it was Cheryl Ladd who floated my boyhood prepubescent boat. This is odd as she is blonde and with very few exceptions I go for brunettes. I have a wonderful wife (brunette) who thankfully feels unthreatened by this early blonde obsession and bought me the boxed set of Charlie’s Angels for my birthday last year. It’s crass, it’s dated, it’s so unbelievably 1970’s (even though it was filmed in the 80’s) but Cheryl Ladd has still got “it”. Though she has now been usurped in my affections by Keeley Hawes. Gotta move with the times, right? (Yes my search to find something previously unknown and interesting to say about myself is becoming desperate.)

4) One of my most vivid school memories is of the school playing field being covered in daddy-long-legs at the end of September / beginning of October (back when the seasons worked properly). One kid in a year below me made the mistake of charging towards the seething mass screaming out loud. One disoriented daddy-long-legs – evidently its bearings lost or fancying a kamikaze-style last act – promptly flew into the boy’s open mouth. Folks, it really is possible for a human being to turn bright green.

5) I have never in my entire life eaten steak. I don’t know why. I don’t have anything against red meat (though I’d hate to see my own going underneath Gordon Ramsay’s knife). I’ve just never ordered or desired a steak. Does this mean I am not a real man?

6) I used to write stories as a young boy where I was a superhero called Donny Osmond (look, I saw an Osmond cartoon once and it made an impression, OK?) and I had a gang of superhero friends who ranged (unsurprisingly) from the lovely ladies of Charlie’s Angels, the good guys from Star Wars, Logan and Jessica from Logan’s Run and for some weird reason Abba. I still have the stories – all hand written in little exercise books – beneath the bed. One memorable scene features my grandparents flying X-Wing fighters to blow up a humungous enemy star ship piloted by the evil Witchy Woo Hoo. It is my life’s ambition to make it available in all good books shops.


OK. Now for the tagging part. With apologies I’m tagging Tris, Inchy, Kaz, Brother Tobias, Kate and Amanda though please don’t feel you have to.

And lastly – the rules:

1. Link to the person who tagged you
2. Post the rules on your blog
3. Write six random things about yourself
4. Tag six people at the end of your post and link to them
5. Let each person know they've been tagged and leave a comment on their blog
6. Let the tagger know when your entry is up.

Good luck and God speed.

School’s Out For Summer

I had grand plans this week for a whole host of scintillating posts and internet based ribaldry but alas illness has laid me low. What started off as a nasty head-cold for me and Tom developed yesterday into an alarmingly debilitating fever which, I hasten to add, we have both now begun to recover from – Tom’s 9 month’s old immune system kicking in a lot harder than mine. He’s crawling around the floor this morning insinuating himself into as much mischief as possible.

I however am still moping around like a wet rag.

But there’s something quite nice about it today. I’m feeling better than I was – enough to actually enjoy being ill. I’m watching trashy TV and making my way through all 7 Harry Potter books. I haven’t got to return to work until Monday. I feel somehow like I’m skiving off from school.

It’s a great feeling.

Off The Cuff

I’m in a buoyant mood this afternoon.

Maybe it’s because I have the day off tomorrow.

Maybe it’s because the sun is shining and myself and my work colleagues spent an extended lunchbreak in the park eating ice cream – Flake 99’s no less – and pretended we were school kids once more bunking off for the afternoon. Though they (the Flake 99’s) cost considerably more than when I was a boy.

Or maybe it’s because I’ve managed some decent quality time on my novel this week (yes that old chestnut... I’m still writing it). A grand total of 125,262 words and still growing. I’m entering the final phase of the story now. The final third. It’s becoming something of a beast. Something I have to wrestle with and force to assume the submissive position beneath me each time I work on it. Who’s the daddy, eh? Who’s the daddy?

Er. Not sure if that analogy is entirely apposite. I mean, what I do with my Friday evenings is my business, right...? Ahem.

Or maybe it’s because I’ve booked a week off the end of May so that Mrs Bloggertropolis and I and our burgeoning little dynasty can head off into the glorious hills of Wales and partake of some much needed R&R time while the rest of the crazy rat-race we call life goes on without us.

Who knows?

Let’s just let the good times roll.

School Play

Karen and I went to see Ben in his school play yesterday afternoon armed like every other parent there with camera/video recorder/Dictaphone/iPod/mobile phone and every other piece of hi-tech gadgetry ever invented.

There were so many lenses and LEDs flying about the place that Steven Spielburg would have creamed his little furry boxers.

We took Tom along with us though he took little interest in the performance, preferring to sleep snuggled up in his car seat on the floor at our feet. Call it charisma, call it charm, call it innate acting ability but Tom’s afternoon nap commanded a fair bit of the audience’s attention... at least in the part where we were sitting.

The school play however was squeakily superb. Lots of cute lines delivered with volume and enthusiasm (but no feeling or understanding) and I’m proud to say that Ben’s delivery was the loudest of all. He was playing a transformer toy newly delivered by the tiniest Father Christmas I’ve ever seen and though he had but one line he gave it his all. Full lung capacity.

I’m not joking - I saw the first two rows of the audience visibly recoil and the stage shudder slightly as the air above it was warped by the sound waves. The headmaster was seen to exit the hall with blood pouring from his ears. Even Tom stirred a little in his sleep.

That’s my boy.

A star is born. The roof had been raised (literally – three cracked rafters and 17 missing slates, last seen flying towards Birmingham on a supersonic jet stream).

Mark my words; it’ll be RADA when he’s older.

Either that or a job as a town crier.

Thursday’s Weather

I’ve had the glums for last few days – a combination of work dross, lack of sleep, a bad back and the interminably grey skies that have sat over the entire country like a giant pie crust.

What kind of filling are we, I wonder? Steak and kidney? Chicken and mushroom? Beef and onion?

I have no idea and as you can imagine pondering such questions has done little to improve my mood.

However, I can’t deny that there is something comforting about the featureless grey skies that have lidded my world for the last three days. Maybe I’m only saying that because I’m English and we English are secretly proud when our weather proves to be even more mundane and dreary than our European cousins think it.

For some reason it takes me back to my junior school days... huddling in the playground wearing a home knitted bobble hat and those annoying mittens tied together by a giant piece of string, watching the world go by over the other side of the school fence, thinking how lucky all the grown ups were to be able to go about their lives without having to be stuck at school all day...

I seem to recall that for a short period in 1980 there was a huge thunderstorm nearly every Thursday afternoon. Forked lightning and everything. It sticks in my mind only because the headmaster at the time – the evil Mr Enoch – informed us that Thursday was named after Thor, the Norse god of Thunder (hence Thor’s Day) and so the thunderstorms were all rather apt.

Sigh. I’m so glad I came out of school with something embedded in my skull (other than a thrown chalk rubber).

And now I sit at work, watching the world go by outside my window and think how lucky all the kids are to be attending school rather than sitting here behind my desk grubbing at interminable paperwork and trying to diffuse the latest plumbing disaster to hit the public toilets...

Is that amused hammering I can hear in the distance...?

Countdown

No, not a paean to twice-nightly Richard Whitely (alas – I’ll save that for another day) but a notification to all interested parties that baby Tom’s arrival is now a mere 7 days away.

The cot bed is ready. The pram is ready. Sleepover arrangements for Son No. 1 are set up and code green. Karen’s hospital bag (complete with food goodies to supplement the hospital slop) is all but zipped up and ready to go. The boy’s school has been notified. Work colleagues are primed. The family are on tenterhooks. The hospital is on permanent and ever-ready standby...

But I don’t feel prepared at all.

It’s weird. It’s not like I’m unaware of what is about to happen (hey, for a guy that’s a big thing) it’s just that I can’t seem to make it feel real. Life at the moment is carrying on much as it always has and all seems perfectly normal. I can’t imagine how things are going to look and feel next week with our family increased to 4 at all.

As this is Karen’s second I guess she has a better idea of what to expect but me – I’m blissfully ignorant. I guess it’s going to be something of an adventure... one that’s going to last a lifetime. But hey – what other kind is there?

I must admit though I’ll be glad when the hospital bit is over – to have Karen and Tom and the boy all safely home again with our feet resting on a big pile of dirty nappies, necking down a cup of tea and wondering if we’ll ever sleep through the night again. That seems a long way off at the moment.

In the interim I’m back at Uni this week – tomorrow in fact: Poetry In English Since 1945. A little bit more up my street after the interminable ravages of the 18th Century novel last term. And a countdown of a different sort is also occurring. The promised money from the untrustworthy Mr CM has until Friday to arrive. Still no sign of it.

My money’s on Tom arriving first...

Hamble Is Evil

I got onto this subject by a rather weird route. Catching an episode of 10 Years Younger last night Karen and I commented on the weirdness of the weird presenter’s name – Nicky Hambleton-Jones. Not Hamilton as you’d expect but Hambleton. Odd. Well. Maybe not that odd when there’s a kid at my boy’s school called Denim (I kid you not) but I was sufficiently bored with the show to drift off in my head and from Hambleton I inexplicably ended up at Hamble and, by association, Playschool.

One of my earliest TV memories is of watching Playschool and being rather puzzled as to why a grown up presenter was playing with the soft toys and dolls. Even at that early age it struck me as incongruous and “not really quite right”.

But that is beside the point. The important thing to acknowledge is this: the Playschool toys were scary. Damn scary.

I never felt any warmth or friendliness toward or more importantly from them. They exuded mute evil and maliciousness in tones that reflected their outward appearances. They’d just sit there in the background while Brian Cant mimed eating a bowl of porridge and hurl the evil-eye at the TV screen. They never moved but you just knew their thoughts were full of death and the desire for human destruction.

The Teds looked like a furry version of the Krays – or worse, the Krankies. They’d rob you at knife point and stab you just to see the pretty strawberry pattern it made on your bib. Humpty looked like a fat, sweating pimp with horrible bacon rind lips and a lascivious smile that never ever disappeared. He personified unwholesome appetites and unnatural desires taken to bad extremes. Jemima... now Jemima you just knew was a snooty cow. A real little madam. On her own she had no real malice or ability to instil fear in anyone – not with those bandy legs. I mean she couldn’t even stand up on her own let alone run after you with a flick-knife. Somehow I suspect she was only allowed to join the Playschool toy gang because she was loaded. She had a mega rich daddy, sugar or otherwise. The rich bitch of the Playschool toys. But I bet she was viciously cruel. She’d be the one egging the others on with snide whispers.... “Go on, Big Ted, cut ‘im, cut his ear off... do it nice and slowly so’s I can see the blood... hey, do you know what they call a Big Mac in France?” A real nasty piece of work. A real bullet-maker.

But worst of all though was Hamble. The doll that looked like Elizabeth Taylor on crack cocaine. Just look at her face in the photo above. Evil. Pure unadulterated evil. Forget the polka dot print dress. She’s wearing a studded leather body-boot underneath with 9 inch heels. She’s got a bag of oranges in her satchel. She’s the ring leader. She’s the boss. And she hates children. Especially little boys. God, you can see it in her eyes. She wants to kill. She wants to maim. She wants to have endless children’s tea parties with imaginary Darjeeling and invisible cake, the sick torturing dirty bitch!

And this show was on 5 days a week for God’s sake!

Is it any wonder I was such a disturbed child?

Think Of A Number

Quite why Johnny Ball is leaping about my subconscious this morning I don’t know – but he is and he’s waving his arms about manically and spouting lots of amazing stuff about numbers, equations and surface areas and doing his damnedest to make it all sound jolly and fun.

And it works.

I hated Maths at school. Absolutely loathed it. And I hated Physics even more. Our Physics teacher, Mr Prior, resembled a leather jumpsuit wearing troglodyte with a beard bushy enough to lose Ray Mears in and who demonstrably had a pathological hatred of all secondary school pupils. Especially wimpy secondary school pupils who had utterly no grasp of the manly science of Physics. What can I say? Mr Prior rode a huge eff-off motorbike to school everyday and regularly flirted with the svelte, cool-eyed French teacher (whose name escapes me but who looked like a female version of the keyboard player from Duran Duran) while I was a weedy bespectacled nerd who found numbers and pulleys and electrons all rather boring.

And yet I was totally addicted to Johnny Ball’s Maths/Physics based educational programmes.

The man was mesmeric. A little bit insane yes but he managed to make Maths exciting and even appealing. His enthusiasm was infectious. Even a numberphobe like me found himself swept along by Johnny’s unbounded zeal for number patterns and intricate gear systems. I think Johnny’s trick was not his intelligence in his chosen subject – formidable though it was – but his ability to communicate and transfer his own passion for the subject into the hearts and minds of his viewers.

If Johnny Ball had been my teacher at school I’d be an award winning physicist by now or even better I’d have had my cherry taken by the unnamed French teacher above. Instead I’m a disgruntled civil servant who writes novels and poetry in his spare time and whose cherry wasn’t offloaded until he was nearly 30.

I kid you not.

Hmm. But maybe that’s sharing a little bit too much information?

I’m sure Johnny Ball would be able to plot an entertaining graph mapping out my divergence from manly science stuff and my headlong dive into the world of literature and not pulling anything but a cracker for three whole decades... but as he isn’t here you’ll have to make do with this 'ere blog.

In the meantime my unanswered question is this: whatever happened to Johnny Ball?

Set Dates And Done Deals

Karen saw the hospital consultant this morning and – fingers and toes crossed – we’ve been given a date for the caesarean that Karen has requested to bring young Thomas Arthur into the world.

October 9th has been booked into the diaries of all concerned – about 5 days before the official due so hopefully Karen won’t pop early (her words) and ruin the best laid plans of mice and men.

We have to go for a final scan on September 17th and then it’s just a case of waiting and trying to arrange the logistics so that practical matters run smoothly. It’ll be a first if they do!

Other news: Ben starts his new school tomorrow and in about 45 minutes time Karen and I are off to see our bank manager to reschedule a loan which should free up enough cash to render our current mortgage worries unnecessary...

Like I said: fingers and toes...

Bring Back The Nit Nurse

This week my household has enjoyed a singularly itchy encounter with nits, care of my boy’s infant school. The poor lad’s scalp has been a moveable feast for a whole army of little head lice and their chomping offspring.

We have staunchly countered their invasion with copious administrations of hair conditioner and that old standby the nit comb. To be sure we remove every colony of the nit nation Karen and I have also submitted ourselves to regular nit grooming.

I’m proud to say that not only was I nit free but my hair is now lovely and glossy and has a sheen not unlike satin seen by moonlight.

Now, as problems go nit picking (ho ho) is a pretty small one and easily dealt with though it is a mite (pun!) inconvenient to have to submit to the nit removal regime every night.

All of this could have been avoided or the chances of it at least lessened, however, if the school employed that hardy bastion of anti-nit warfare, the Nit Nurse. We used to have regular visits from this rubber gloved lady of lice destruction when I was at school and all occurrences of nits were nicely contained and quickly dealt with as a consequence.

My boy’s school however does not utilize the Nit Nurse – maybe this is a national policy, who knows? – as they feel it draws negative attention to the condition and stigmatizes those who develop it. What rot. So instead of nit outbreaks being stamped upon quickly and efficiently they are left until the whole class gets infected. Marvelous. That’s one way of “leveling the playing field” I guess. Now no-one need feel picked on just because they’ve got nits… cos everybody’s got ‘em.

I can’t help feeling that this is a sad case of political correctness over commonsense. It’s also surely just a marketing problem. Sell the Nit Nurse to people in a positive light and you remove the stigma along with the nits. Simple.

And what stigma is there anyway? My boy has been very proud of his head-based nit farm and has eagerly been telling everybody about it.

Well, those who have stood still long enough...