Invasion

Funny how this home educating business gets a hold of you.

Odd how you can wake up in the dead of night/middle of dawn/early morning and feel totally violated and see your abuser parading around London in a ministerial car (guzzling your money down its engine).

It feels like an invasion.

Then, that's what this government is good at. Invading.

They invade our streets with cameras watching every move we make, and targeting young women's behinds in their own homes.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/merseyside/4609746.stm

"You only have to read the impact statements of the lady to realise the harrowing effect that this had on her. Her life has almost been ruined, her self-confidence entirely destroyed by the thought that prying male eyes have entered her flat."

I can imagine. In her own flat. Her privacy invaded.

Then, there's the banking system. The 'light touch changes' (oh, and we know that stupid phrase so well) proposed by Brown and his glove puppet Balls.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/gordon-brown/4949859/Gordon-Brown-calls-for-morality-in-financial-system.html

"Ministers including Alistair Darling, the current Chancellor, and Ed Balls, Mr Brown's former economic adviser, have admitted that Labour made mistakes regulating the banks before the current crisis.
But Mr Brown has refused to concede any errors or apologise."

Invaders love to take over your language and debase it. Like they take you and your family over and debase them.

"Gordon Brown calls for morality in financial system."

And that from the moral wizard who sold off Britain's gold at its lowest price, who stripped the country's savers of £100 billion. Morality. A sweet word you can swing around shedding incense from. Not one you can bite for authenticity. Not a coin that rings true when invaders shout it at you. When they are standing on the moral high ground screaming 'abuse' at you.

Meanwhile, there are so many comments and outpourings of hatred from our invaded land for the glove puppet. Here's one round up. There are many more.
http://johnrentoul.independentminds.livejournal.com/21314.html


"Blair’s relationship with Balls was not usually so fruitful, and it got worse. One aide who worked for Blair at Number Ten said: “I respect him but I don’t like him.” Just in case I missed it: “I really did dislike him.” Why? “Fundamentally he is an intellectual bully. The tone was hectoring.” Yes, but, I asked naively, was he personally offensive? Hollow laughter. I was told how he would belittle civil servants, for example, when they came to the Treasury asking for more money. “You are complete tossers,” he would say. “You haven’t got a grip.” I have lost count of the number of Blair’s former advisors who have said that there were times when they could not bear to be in the same room as Balls. His rudeness and his bearing of grudges were said to “reflect and reinforce the worst aspects of Gordon”. One MP who came to the House with a reputation as a Blairite told me that Balls has never said hello when their paths cross. This is, you will observe, the one known exception to the rule that everything about him can be explained by the requirements of the next Labour leadership election. "

The glove puppet wants more:
"Despite that, Balls is now well placed to contest the leadership of his party when the chance comes. There is no question that he will try to seize his chance. He has moved beyond being his patron’s creature to being a big beast in his own right. The ruthlessness and determination that for years was deployed for Brown is now pressing his own cause. He always said that Brown’s advancement was a means to a Labour end; just as his own ambition is now."

Ruthless and determined? Oh, yes, we can believe that. That's what invaders are, isn't it?

Remember the stories about Genghis Khan? He was no patsy. No Mr. Nice Guy.

Balls has invaded schools like some kind of evil fungus. Cookery classes? Certainly. Academy schools? No problem. Independent schools? Don't like 'em, can't control 'em so invade them and take over. Sex education? Oh, you WILL learn how to put condoms on bananas, children, and no matter if you're too young to realise what bananas are.

That's what invaders do. Take over your duties. Take over your children (because they can treat them so much better than you do). Take over your lives (because local authority sock puppets are SO much better at educating than parents are).

Then there's the ultimate invasion: IRAN which equalled WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION.

Send in the investigators. Find those nuclear bunkers. I wonder they didn't PLANT some. A few courageous souls said: "Oh, we went to look for those weapons - but, whaddya know? - there weren't any. Anywhere."

IRAN= WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION

HOME EDUCATORS = ABUSERS + NON-EDUCATORS

Yeah, right!

INVADERS.

The Year of the Tiger

I'm sitting here in my jarmies – yeah, I know I SHOULD be all ready but we eccentrics are allowed a bit of different behaviour occasionally.

Anyway, I don't know what I'm going to come out with... I seldom do when I start to blog... So here it is. A tumble of thoughts.

Of course, it's different in the middle of the night. Then, I could blog among the masters – or should I say the mistresses – of all blogdom. I'm on fire in the wee sma' hours. Alight with words, stinging with injustice, ripe with acid and sarcasm. Of course I've forgotten it all in the morning.

Or most of it.

Quite annoying it is, really, because everyone keeps pinching my post threads. I was going to post about what Kelly green and gold posts about. I often am going to post about what Kelly does so wonderfully. She quite puts me off. I feel disgruntled that I can't post about what Kelly and all the other fantastic and wonderful home educator bloggers write about because I'll just look like I've swiped their ideas and am too lame to think up my own.

You naughty amazing people.

You really real people.

Ordinary, one might say. Average, perhaps.

Yeah, I'm laughing right now.

Their words dance, sing and do a little miming as they launch into their routines. Their logic whizzes past my ears making me hear a bit better. Their points enlarge my travailling brain so I can see their thoughts and their thoughts are good.

Ah, me. I need a little Year of the Tiger in me.

So what is my blog entrytoday?

It's simply this. I've been dipping in and out of Flip, a book about business. And the author says something quite interesting and important which is, boiled down in a kale pot, is that we must take our weak points and make them our strengths. See them as our finest qualities.

So, on the fear prospect, yes, society – meaning we, the people – is kept down by fear.

Yes, BIG BROTHER is out there.

BUT, when you flip it, WE ARE BIG BROTHER.

We watch each other. We report. We gather intelligence. We fashion armies. We wield power. Fear is just the method THEY use to make you think you're powerless.

We are not impotent.

We, in fact, are the whole cannoli, the big cheese.

We pay for everything.

We 'support' everything. None of these individuals in power could be in power if we didn't maintain them in power. They'd have to go away and get jobs.

In the past, we did away with the monarchy. Yes, the royals were important and people really did lose their heads over them. But now they're just people with other people maintaining them in the lifestyle and all that.

We are the people. We have the power.

We are BIG BROTHER. There are more of us. We have the POWER.

We co-operate in our own subservience, or we don't.

We agree to abide by their rules, or we won't.

"Tyger, tyger, burning bright
in the forests of the night"

The people are the tigers (or tygers) in the forests of the night, and the day and the whole year round.

No wonder the elite are frightened.

It's The Year of the Tiger.

The year of the natural force of tigerhood. The silent and purposeful gaze from yellow eyes. The slope towards predictable and controlled mastery. The movement of the huge shoulders. The majesty of the great cat.

It's time to come out, tigers. It's time to stalk our power.

It's The Year of the Metal/White Tiger.

Motto: I win!

Lords and tainted ladies

I suppose you'll have noticed that Lord Soley and Baroness Deech are demonstrating their total ignorance and complete disgust for honest and ordinary people in Britain.

Dear Lord and Lady, congratulations on being Labour or Lieboor stooges. Congratulations on falling for the utter and contemptible balls uttered by, er, Balls.

Since you subscribe to the principle that, to be one of a group containing a criminal indicts and condemns you, perhaps you will consider the implications of that thought.

Lord Taylor of Warwick is being investigated for fraud.

"POLICE have begun a fraud inquiry after a Conservative peer received more than £70,000 in expenses by claiming to live in his mother’s home, which had been sold off when she died.
The move follows a Sunday Times investigation last month which raised serious questions about the probity of Lord Taylor of Warwick’s expense claims.
Taylor, a former barrister, part-time judge and university chancellor, was claiming allowances for peers living outside London when his home has been based in the capital for 18 years.
He attempted to claim his main address was in Solihull, West Midlands, between 2001 and 2007 because he was looking after his sick mother. However, she died in 2001 and her house was sold at the time.
Peer claims £70k for home that does not exist
Labour peer claims £100,000 for empty flat
He said later that he had lived in “a number of homes in the Midlands over the years” but would not say where they were. However, a close family member said Taylor had not had a home outside London since he moved to Ealing in 1995.
Following the Sunday Times article, the police and Crown Prosecution Service decided there should be a formal fraud investigation.
Taylor stopped claiming expenses in November 2007. There had been a Freedom of Information inquiry that month about his declared principal home.
Baroness Uddin and Lord Clarke of Hampstead are also facing criminal investigation over their expenses after reports in this newspaper."
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article6832360.ece

So, if Lord Taylor, Baroness Uddin and Lord Clarke are found guilty, you will be guilty of fraud also.

What? you shriek. You're innocent, you say? You've never pinched as much as a postage stamp? Why should you be punished because other people 'might' be guilty of crimes?

Heh, heh. Does that matter to me? You're a lord (or a lady) and you're tarnished with the same tar as the Lords and Ladies who might be lying and cheating the public purse (which is, of course, jingling with money conned out of ordinary folks). Yep, sirree, you come from the same stable so you must be the same as them.

You're not innocent because you belong to a group containing felons. You, personally, may be a pure-living chappie, but your colleagues in the top house 'could' be fraudsters. They 'might' be criminals.

If you're innocent - which of course is possibly true - I'll give you a break. I'll let you prove you're innocent...

Go on, then, hire the legal aid and prove to this country that you haven't been salting away our money behind our backs. What are you waiting for? I cut you a break.

Prove your innocence. Do it. Now.

No can do? Okey doke, I'll give you another break. Instead of just imprisoning you on suspicion of being a criminal, I'll impound your bank accounts, and I'll send a representative along from the local authority to look under your own private bed for the cash and check the mattress for lumps (potentially betraying the whereabouts of more filched loot). Then I'll question the servants to find out how many houses you have.

That's not right, you cry. How can I prove I haven't swindled? How can I prove that I'm as white as the driven snow...?

Don't ask me. I'm busy wondering how many children will be sent back into a hell-hole of a school and commit suicide because you condone 'checking' their homes and some off-his-nut-with-power local authority prat decides the child will be better off in school. You imply that any home educator can be an abuser, and they have to darn well provide evidence to brainless power-addicted automatons that they, home educating parents, aren't bad for their kids.

Oh, lord, what's good for the goose etc.

Give a thought to what you sow now because you're darn tootin' the whirlwind will be swerving your way soon.

Personal autonomy

I'm still here, trying to navigate the unfamiliar laptop keyboard. My own dear computer stack returns tomorrow having been purged of its dastardly viruses.

E went to a tutorial yesterday. For a long time, E didn't do tutorials because she had such a dreadful time in school that anything school-like was awful for her. She sailed into her tutorial, then came out after two hours looking all serene and confident. "It was good," she commented.

This week has been a bit odd. Braces meant a whole new way of chewing and eating and swallowing and cleaning and rinsing. A law tutorial was nothing to it.

E has an extremely elegant, interesting and logical mind. She is also very funny with a dry spicy humour that hits you just when you don't expect it.

I love her so devotedly. I admire her for overcoming the inhibiting background of school to follow her interests. I followed her into a bookshop yesterday.

She picked up a beginning book on Chemistry. "I really want to get into this subject," she said. "So interesting."

Ah, the unboring life of an autonomous home educating person.

Y, meanwhile, has passed her fancy for gobbling any information she could possibly dig up upon spleens and was enquiring if one could swallow one's tongue.

Er, yes, I think so. Dad, who is a trained nurse, took over the discussion.

Unbridled learning. Curious children. Engendered autonomy. Personal autonomy.

Can't beat it. You won't ever beat it.

There is nothing like the joy of learning. It is a breath of spring in the deepest and longest midwinter. It is a shout of elation from an excited child. It is bread to a starving pigeon. It is the smooth squish of clay through your creative fingers.

A couple of days ago I met a friendly acquaintance I haven't seen for five years at the local store. After the usual chat I was asked which GCSEs the girls were doing and, having been primed by clear-thinking Y, I said: "GCSEs are just for schools to show how 'good' they are."

"Yes, I know," said friendly aquaintance.

Why are you putting your youngsters through them then? said my internal voice.

"R is going through a lot of pressure because of GCSEs," said FA. "The school is making her quite stressed."

The same question presented itself to me.

"She's left two chips in the packet so I had to come around and buy some more for dinner, and now she's gone off to town without telling me she was going."

FA sighed. "Teenagers."

School, I thought. School makes them dead inside. Dead to manners and the lubrication that everyone needs to make themselves a part of society. R protests by being rude. I suppose FA should be glad that R has chosen only to be rude and not to join a gang or to vent her frustration through violence on other children.

It's not teens. It's not being teenaged. It's some schooled teens who see that their parents think work is MORE important than they are. Teens who seek other lost teens because they are the only ones around who actually have time or the inclination to listen to them. It's the lost leading the lost.

With our young we are reaping what we have sown. We are gathering the whirlwind. We cannot see that whatever school gives or, in actuality, fails to give our children is what they are missing in their personalities and their lives. School, no matter how you dress it up or tell people how marvellous it is, cannot provide what children need.

Loving kindness. Interest. Encouragement. A watchful eye. A listening devoted ear. Discussions about spleens and tongue-swallowing.

I will say something that I can never say enough.

Thanks for being you, my beloved daughters. Thanks for teaching me how to love and how to argue and debate and how to think. Thanks for reminding me how it is to be young and fresh and magnificent. Thanks for offering me some of your giant chocolate buttons, Y. Thanks for expressing your delight at your new book - a Japanese dictionary - E.

Thanks for helping me to understand that I am a mother and what that means.

Thanks for explaining things I don't understand so patiently.

Thanks for the loving smiles.

Thanks for crafting the beautiful hand-made cards.

Thanks for the tremendously tight hugs.

Thanks for giving me the opportunity to learn and grow with you, and share your sheer delight in your freedom to learn what intrigues you.

Just thank you.

Ever lovingly yours,
Mum