Wonderful round up of the current review of home education on Jem's blog here.

The point is: they had already made their minds up... and are having a bloody time trying to prove that they have the evidence they say they have. But the way this government behaves, will that matter?

Looking forwards to the past

I must admit that before I studied the stone age with my children, I had a very Hollywood or cartoon vision of the people. I studied the stone, bronze and iron age at school, but had the impression that the people were brutish and barbarian, and not at all the intelligent people that we like to think we are.

I knew that the monuments and circles like Stonehenge were designed to line up with the movements of the sun, without ever questioning how on earth primitive man, with no compasses, clock or calendars could possibly have found this information.

A night under the stars, watching for meteor showers and talking with my children about the life of the stone age people who lived in our garden, taught me more than months of lessons in school. I realised that I would be an ignorant townie and probably starve if dropped into the stone age world of flint knapping and hunting deer. Or die of poisoning, eating the wrong berries or plants. Or die of exposure, unable to build a house without a ready supply of bricks and mortar from a local Wickes (which is itself built over a bronze age habitation).

I realised that the people of that time were not much different from us in appearance or intelligence, but they had to be educated to be able to do most things for themselves... a man would have to be able to make his own weapons and tools, build his own house, make his own clothes, catch his own food. Their intelligence wasn't less than our is, but it was all directed towards survival skills and being able to do all the necessary things oneself. Goodness what happened if you got sick or hurt. Well... you died, if you didn't have close family to look after you.

In today's world you can go through life quite incapable of catching or killing your meals, unable to identify plants and herbs, unable to build houses, make your own clothes, or even cook our own food.

In their world, there was a magical economy...you didn't waste anything, and used whatever was the appropriate tool for the job. In our world, we have become careless of the raw materials we have at our disposal, and unthinking about throwing away anything which doesn't serve our needs at the moment.

This is a change which happened only recently: my grandmother never threw away a useable jar, piece of string or elastic band. She remembered a world without packaging, where you took your own jug to the inn for beer or bag to the grocers for eggs, and the world of the second world war, with rationing and shortages of sugar and meat.

Our modern world became blase with plastic and oil and we have frittered away the resources which in years to come we may be held to account for. Our morass of plastic which washes up in the stomachs of albatross chicks inadvertently fed poison by their parents. Plastic tags, trashy plastic toys, plastic bottles, plastic bags and packaging and useless little tokens of our throwaway society. For years, because we haven't had to think about where our food is coming from, where our next piece of plastic is coming from, we haven't thought at all... I recently heard a talk on radio about how our grandchildren may regard our profligate use of the worlds resources on stupid bits of unnecessary plastic... you used it...for what!? to hold new pairs of socks together? To attach price tags?

My feeling is that while we think our lives are full of worry and economic angst, we are probably living now in the richest and least worried state of all time and will look back with envy at a time when - in the west - we don't have to struggle to survive. I don't believe the doomsday predictions about 2012, but that's not to say that I don't think the Maya knew what they were talking about: it is the end of one age, and the beginning of another, and it is possible that there are changes ahead whether due to climate change caused by us or climate change caused by natural cycles or climate change caused by the end of an astronomical phase ending in pole shifts and disasters... but which ever way, we will begin to see changes caused by the climate shifting.

We need to change back, to go back to being people who conserve the things they have, who know about the natural world and what burns/doesn't burn, what can be eaten/can't be eaten and how to use old tech to do the things we want, in case new tech lets us down.

I found this website, Primitive Ways, which has lots of information about making your own baskets or tanning your own hides, and also a fascinating article about the belt which the iceman Otzi carried with him on his last journey cross the pass in the mountains. It reminded me how wrong I was to regard early man as ignorant or unintelligent, for what intelligence there was in the things that he carried and the things that he'd made.

That's not to wish us all back to the stone age in the years to come, but to hope that we learn to apply some of the economy and intelligent use of resources that were a necessary feature of those times.

Unfortunately I fear that the tragedy of the commons indicates that we may postpone taking action until it is far too late - and by taking action I am not just talking about recycling and using low energy light bulbs, but planning for rising sea levels, changing food production methods and a world where maybe nothing will happen at the touch of a button, and we may need to learn to be responsible for ourselves.

Einstein is quoted as having said: I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.

I think he would have imagined a fight between two worldly powers, and not a fight against environmental changes, but if we get it wrong, he's right anyway. It's back to the stone age.

My version of a Unicorn chaser...

WHYohWHYohWHYohWHY
Ok, it takes me quite a long time to get up a head of steam on anything... I am a relaxed live-and-let live sort of person usually. But this has to be the giddy limit as my grandmother would have said: Watford Council are banning parents from supervising their children in playgrounds.

I think there is a danger to our children from people - mostly men - who prey upon them sexually. Yes, yes, I know women do too, as a notorious case which recently went to court shows very clearly... but in 20 years of working in a legal department, my sister has never come across a single case, where she has seen thousands involving men. The number of women involved is tiny.

If you look at the proportion of people in gaol for any reason, and how many of those are men and how many are women, the truth is that there are 20 times as many men, even though you are more likely to be sent to gaol as a women if you are taken to court, and for lesser offences.

The point is... even though more men offend than women do, you are still twenty times more likely not to be an offender, and children are more at risk from accidents and poor supervision than from sex offenders. Even then, I would say a child who cannot be supervised by their parent will be more at risk from an offender than they would be if other parents were in the park.

I think this decision by Watford Council sends out all the wrong messages: parents can't be trusted, children are better off with stranger professionals than their parents, and all people must be regarded as offenders until proven otherwise.

I hate HATE it. I didn't consider myself to be the sort of person to say this, but this country is going to the dogs. The RSPCA-organised, bolt-gun executed dogs.

I wonder if there will ever be a time when the date of September 11 goes back to being an ordinary day? I don't think so, not in my lifetime. It was the day which seemed to be the end of the world, when everywhere seemed vulnerable. Thousands of miles away from New York, it seemed to me that if New York and the Pentagon weren't safe, there weren't many places that were....

I asked my daughter what memories she had of the day, but she was six then, and barely understood what was happening. I remember them asking me if what was happening was close to us, and I told them no, it was in America a long way away, and their interest in it dwindled. Only I was transfixed to the screen, fighting the impulse to phone my family and tell them what I had seen. I wanted so much to make contact with them, but I realised immediately this was a world-changing event, as soon as the second plane hit. I realised the the invulnerable place America had occupied was gone.

It seemed dangerous to be anywhere near a city, because we couldn't see how big this thing was, initially. Would it be a continual series of plane hijacks and crashes all over the world, against western targets? Would London be next, or Paris, or Rome? Initially I just assumed that they had chartered an aircraft and crashed it - I didn't realise the horror of the event for some days. Then I had a dream some nights later, of being in one of the planes, and I felt the letting go, the calm, realising there was nothing I could do, nothing that could stop the plane crashing, and feeling it wheel under me and crashing.

It felt like there was nowhere safe for a long time, and for months I looked up if I heard the sound of an aircraft. Being in London, near tall buildings seemed dangerous for a long time. It's hard to explain how it seemed on that day... hard even for me to remember how those events made me feel unsafe, even though I was a long way away from the bright autumn morning, the smoke and the dust.

I wanted information, wanted more and more and more, maybe a morbid curiosity, I don't know, I needed to feel that "they" were telling us what was happening... that I would know if planes were going to suddenly drop out of the sky in Europe too. Maybe that should be a selfish curiosity, but in fact I felt immense and overwhelming empathy for the people caught up in the real life events in New York and the Pentagon and elsewhere that day.

I knew, without a shadow of a doubt that there were good people facing terrible choices when they started to jump, and that there were brave and wonderful people caught up in the towers when they collapsed. It was obvious that the people left in the building must have been the rescuers, the firefighters and the paramedics, those who were trapped and those who chose to stay behind to help them. It was easy to empathise, seeing everything firsthand through the medium of television and the internet... knowing that what I saw was as real to me as someone living thirty or forty miles away from the twin towers.

That feeling that we were under threat diminished in the weeks and months, until the bombings in London revived the feelings again, but even then I didn't feel that same end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it feeling I'd been overwhelmed with on September 11. With each passing year, it fades for me, but of course I know that isn't likely to be true for the people who witnessed or experienced it first hand, or lost someone beloved. I know they will be changed forever, with no going back.

This is an experiment to see if embedding works on Blogger. Yay! it does. The video is of my son, Ali, covering the world spins madly on. I think he has a great voice... but I suppose I might be biassed.

Stumbled over one thing which led me to another which led me to another and I landed on this page. It's wonderful, and well worth the time to watch the videos. The picture came from another blog called Tiny House Design, which has lots of interesting stuff in it, including an article about Phoenix Commotion, which built the house above.

Dan Phillips takes materials which no one wants and turns them into fantastic houses for single parents and artists.

I've long had a dream of running my own scrap store... we have to trek over to Watford to get to our local scrap store, and I think it could be a fantastic thing. Many scrap stores only take fabric and small items for art recycling - my idea would be to have a proper scrap store which is self-sustaining, and recycled everything from furniture and building materials to jewellery and beads... all donated items, all given away for free.

I'd like a big site, and to be able to run home ed classes, demonstrations, a cafe and training post as wel as the scrap store. The troube is I have learned from the virtual world that to be succesful you need to specialise. My trouble is I am a jack of all trades by nature. I want to do everything at once.

I also love housing which has an organic aspect - the rolling curving roof of the fairytale house above appeals to me, and I would love to design something similar... I think I might try it out in Second Life.

I note that Dan Phillips is using bottles and recycled glass in the walls of his houses, which is something which my hero Hundertwasser did some decades ago. You can find a lot of images of his existing work on the Flickr group 100wasser.

Following another story in the revelations about Jaycee Lee Dugard, kidnapped 18 years ago, the BBC links to a nasty, cowardly article on double X by someone called Torie Bosch. It seems to insinuate that Jaycee Lee Dugard will be criticised for not having escaped from the clutches of her kidnapper.

Despite putting a reference to Stockholm syndrome in her title, this autor doesn't seem to understand the implications of a captive's relationship with her captor, or why it might have ben necessary for Jaycee to sacrifice her autonomy in order to keep living. She doesn't, in short, seem to understand the reference in her title.

Whether the wider public or anyone else will see fit to criticise her, it should be remember that she was 11 years old when kidnapped, and that it seems likely that she was repeatedly raped by someone who shows every sign of insanity.

I think that it would be better to simply celebrate her release, and the release of her two children, and to hope that she will be able to put this experience behind her and her children and enjoy the rest of her life.