My blood pressure is at a unhealthily high level, due to an article on the BBC website, which talks about a report in advance of its publication tomorrow. First of all, what is that about? If the report is due for release tomorrow, why release the details in advance, and have everyone speculate about its contents? Why not... oh I don't know... wait until the day for publication, and publish it? I am becoming a grumpy old woman....

The report will apparently say that despite better health, better education and more stuff, children's lives are harder than they have been in the past. What raised my blood pressure sharply was this comment from a mother (my italics):

'Lincolnshire mother Sarah Parish said she refused to believe her children suffered as a result of her job. "I wanted to find me again and have something for me as well as the children. I enjoy my job, I knew they would be no worse off at nursery as they are at home with me. I do miss them incredibly but I make sure I spend time with them and do the things they enjoy doing as well," she said. '

So... I conclude that this woman puts her happiness over that of her children; won't be convinced by any actual evidence that things aren't the way she'd like them to be; and is too selfish to admit that being at home with their mother is better or different from being at nursery.

I think we are on very dangerous territory as a society: research shows that children are MUCH better off with a single loving adult than at nursery, where they will have the divided attention of people who are paid to keep them safe, but not to engage and love them. The younger the child, the more profound the difference between institutional care in a nursery and home will be.

If children are neglected and abused at home, they would of course be better off in an environment where they are at least kept safe. How many children IS that? Most of the parents I know are fallible, and have their own idiosyncrasies, but love their children and want to do whatever is best for them. The trouble is that government propaganda about getting parents back into work and providing affordable childcare, often gives the impression that putting children into nursery is a better option for the children than being cared for by the loving adults in their lives. Research shows the opposite.

When the suffragettes were fighting for the vote and rights for women, what they hoped for was a world in which the work that women traditionally were doing - looking after children and caring for the house - was recognised as of equal value as the work traditionally done by men. By the time I was growing up in the 1970s, the feminist movement had subverted that aim into the call for complete equality, the right for a woman to be like a man, to do the same jobs as a man and to be treated like a man.

At that time, neuroscience seemed to think that men's and women's brains were alike, and that the differences between them were either the result of environmental influences, or an anomaly. We know better now, know that there are differences in men's and women's brains before they leave the womb, and these lead to differences in their general attitudes, their abilities and shortcomings, and their approaches to the world.

Among my friends, among the wonderful women I met when I had my first child, when I went to a National Childbirth Trust neighbourhood group, I was unusual. I had had a career and a good job in the city, and I gave it up when I had my son, in order to be with him. It wasn't something I had to agonise over: the day before he was born, it was 50/50 whether I would stay at home or go back to work; the day after he was born, I didn't have a choice. I couldn't have left him with anyone.

To say that this deep emotional attachment took me by surprise, is an understatement. I thought I knew about having a baby and looking after it, because I had two siblings who were 13 and 15 years younger than me respectively, and I had helped a great deal with looking after them when I was a teenager. I knew about caring for children, playing games, looking after ther physical needs. What I wasn't aware of until I had my own children was the bonding that made me want to protect my child from all harm, all strife, all danger, all unhappiness. It's a good evolutionary habit, driving one to keep babies safe, and look after their needs over and above your own, and it is being subverted by encouraging women to leave their young babies in nurseries at a very young age.

I feel that my mother had no choice but to stay at home in the 1950s to look after her babies... that was just expected of her. The feminist movement appears to me to have worked hard so that contemporary women now have no choice but to go to work, and leave their babies in the care of nurseries and nannies. I don't see that as progress. Progress would offer women real choices, the freedom to go to work if that is really what she wants, but also to stay at home. Shortly after I stopped work to have my first baby, Mother and Baby magazine surveyed their readers to discover their real atittudes to staying at home, and discovered that 80% of women would prefer to be at home with their babies. I'm not sure, but I guess that less than half of those actually have the freedom to choose that in fact.

What I think is really damaging to our society and to families, is that women having traditionally put the rest of the family - and especially their children - first, and themselves second, are now encouraged to put themselves first and the rest of the family second. Most people seem to think that's OK, and good for the wives and mothers in our society. I think it is just as unbalanced as it was before, but in the other direction. Really, we should be learning to consider the welfare of the family unit and balancing the needs and wishes of all the members of it to agree how the family should work. Saying "I refuse to believe that my children suffer..." doesn't indicate this is what is happening.

Our society has the option to change the way things are at the moment... there is no evil alien in charge forcing us to organise the way that we do. I think that the way the UK has developed their education industry makes no sense at all in the 21st century: we could be giving children more freedom to learn the things that interest them, and instead we are imposing an outdated national curriculum - and heavy testing - on them all. They are being given the impression by the system we squeeze them all through, that they are stupid if they can't read by the time they are six (many famous, successful people have been much older), they are stupid if they can't grasp cursive writing by the time they are seven (many adults would struggle to achieve this), and that knowledge, and understanding, of quadrilateral equations is essential to be a success as an adult (if this were true it would pose a problem for at least 50% of adults).

One of the main points in Frank Smith's amazingly wonderful Book of Learning and Forgetting, is that if you struggle to learn, the main thing you learn is that learning is a struggle. Children are learning machines, and what we should be asking about our system of education is why we think it is necessary to make children unhappy in order for them to learn; and what do we expect to come out of a system that uses a one-dimensional academic measuring stick for people who will go on to diverse futures, being everything from roadsweepers to brain surgeons?

The curent system seems to want everyone to attempt to become a brain surgeon, only lowering their sights if they fail a test at some point. Thus, anyone who doesn't excel at academic work, gradually has to bring their expectations down, lugging along a permanent sense of failure to reach the level required. Is this an effective way to make people into happy and fulfilled adults? I don't think so. Equality of opportunity shouldn't mean trying to squeeze everyone through the same system in the same way - especially in these days of computerised technology, when it would be possible to individualise learning to take account of our children's different strengths and talents.

I see the way that the system treats boys and girls exactly the same as a very damaging thing: the school system hasn't caught up with the fact that we know boys and girls are quite different from the very beginning. Any parent with both girls and boys is aware of this, and that it isn't anything to do with environmental conditioning. I had two boys before my daughter was born, and they had dolls and tea sets as well as lego and construction kits. The dolls were largely ignored (or abused) before my daughter was born. She ignored the boys' toys in favour of crayons and paper at a very early age. My sons loathed being made to sit still; she loved it. They could spend all afternoon with another boy and know nothing, but nothing, about him at the end of it. She would know a child's name, where they lived and how many brothers or sisters they had after five minutes.

It seems ridiculous to me that there is the possibility, with rising unemployment, that there will be families without an earner in them due to lack of jobs, while children are languishing in nurseries so that their mothers can go to work when they would rather not. That boys who would be far better off in their mother's company will be unhappy at nurseries and learning how to disrupt classes to express that unhappiness, while their mothers are unhappy at work.

We have a punitive system of education, that systematically excludes people by raising the bar for progress through the system. It IS possible to change that. We could be opening up education, allowing anyone who wishes to study with their local college or university. How many people do you believe would stick with an advanced course in economics, say, if the intellectual content of the course was way above them? How many people who choose to do, say, electrical engineering, if they had no understanding or interest in the content?

When I took my children out of school, I suddenly realised that my attitudes and opinions upon education were not my own: they were largely formed by my understanding of what was "normal" because I had been through the state education system myself. When I really looked at the system and how it operates, as though I were the alien dropped from outer space so beloved of teachers in providing pupils with a different perspective, I realised that I didn't buy into a lot of the things which the school system adheres to. Putting barriers in the way of people who wanted to learn was just one of them.

Our children have rising incidences of depression, suicide, anxiety. If they were getting happier and better educated with our current system, I could understand the drive for more of the same, but there is every sign that they are not. Children who have been nailed into their seats to read and write at an early age, are having to have exercise regimes, spinning andswinging and catching and throwin a ball, prescribed to counteract dyspraxia. So we are preventing children from doing what comes natually by our insistence on starting academic education much earlier than most of our european counterparts, and then have to prescribe remedial courses in being a child and doing what children do, as a result!

And one in six children still leaves school after 11 years of compulsory education, unable to read and write. It is estimated that one in four is unable to read, write and calculate simple maths problems to a reasonable level. That's leaving aside the permanent sense of failure whicha child must have if theyhave endured 11 years of being unable to do what most of their contemporaries do. This doesn't seem like a successful system to me.

At the heart of our education system is a scientific theory of learning which says that it is necessary to break up information into digestible chunks, feed it out to children and then test teir assimilation of the information, as though the information makes more sense - not less - when you break it into such small pieces that it doesnt seem to relate to anything else. It is a system where helping each other is seen as cheating, instead of just...helping. Can you imagine a situation in an office where someone who is struggling to understand the photocopier was left to handle it on their own, because for anyone in the office to show him how to use it would be "cheating"? This attitude that you should not help, that somehow there is a shame in giving or accepting help, is very damaging, I think.

There is a quote from the report, which says it calls for "a radical shift away from the excessively individualistic ethos which now prevails, to an ethos where the constant question is, 'What would we do if our aim was a world based on love?'"

I'd like to know the answer to that question, too.

When I read that Richard Hammond was going to be presenting a programme about science, designed for children, I had high hopes that it might be of the experiential nature of Top Gear. I looked forward to watching him explore scientific knowledge with the anarchic and naturalistic style of the Top Gear programme which, despite not being able to drive and not being interested in cars, I find very entertaining.

What Blast Lab is, though, is as far as you can get from Top Gear without turning into a party political broadcast on behalf of the green party. It is contrived, with cameo characters in the form of a granny and other caricatures, with artificial situations, teams, and a noisy audience, and the prime emotion that it engenders is irritation, not curiosity. The experiments with dropping a tonne on water on a car are recognizable from Richard Hammond's exploits on Top Gear or Brainiac, but there's none of the naturalism or honesty that shines through from that show.

Well OK, I'm a 50 year old woman and not, I agree, the target audience for the show.. but I have never met a child yet who liked the artificiality of these type of FUNFUNFUN shows. Many of them like Top Gear, for all the same reasons that adults like it. It's funny and intelligent and anarchic and honest. It doesn't talk down to them, it doesn't pretend Richard Hammond's granny works in the studio.

Science IS exciting, it doesn't need dressing up with neon and a rabble of excited children. Discovering and exploring IS FUNFUNFUN, it doesn't need to come in an explosion of colourful graphics and a car with a personality.

I'm wondering when children's television will grow up and realise that they have the chance to show how living in an age of information has changed children's - all our - lives. This programme could have been made 10, 15, hell 30 years ago, barring a few of the computerised effects. It's sooooo last century.

As a fat woman, I often feel angry that people assume that I spend my days eating cakes and biscuits and in short overeating. In terms of "normal" eating I do not overeat, I don't binge on rubbish food, I do eat an amount I think most people would consider normal. I don't hide cakes and sweets and gorge on them on my own.

In terms of my level of physical activity, I do not do enough exercise. My terrible back problem a couple of years ago has resolved, but for many months I couldn't stand for longer than five or so minutes. Some people have ssumed that my back problem relates to the fact that I am overweight, but my chiropractor disagreed: while he said that it would probably help to lose weight, he also bade me look around his waiting room to see that there are people of all sizes with back problems. It isn't just a fat person's complaint.

I know that some of you will have raised your eyes to the ceiling on my mentioning a chiropractor, because it is seen as little more than pseudoscience by a lot of people. I can only say that I have been to mine unable to straighten up, walking in extreme agony, and have after ten minutes of treatment been able to walk without pain. When you have experienced that it is difficult to care what disagreements arise between conventional medicine and chiropractic.

That there are bad chiropractors and bad chiropractic method I do not dispute: my really bad session of back pain... when I literally could not move without screaming, was caused by the fact that I saw another chiropractor at the practice I attend, rather than my usual one. My usual chiropractor uses the toggle-reflex method of chiropractic, which is normally very gentle, and I find effective.

The back problem was probably associated with the sedentary life I had been leading, which then became a cause of the even more sedentary life I was forced to lead, making progress little by little, week by week. Thus while I say that I eat a normal amount, I was obviously overeating for the level of activity I had.

The problem I find with dieting is that dieting tends to work for a while, but it seems to have an adverse effect on how fat you will be on reverting to your normal eating pattern. I started dieting as a teenager when I was a size 16 at 16, and could find hardly any clothes to fit, and felt very fat. I'd say that although I have become several sizes larger, I have never felt fatter than I did as a teenager. My impression was tha I was enormous and needed to diet, and thus I began 15 years of dieting and losing weight, only to put it back on again.

Eventually I realised that yo-yoing between fat and thin was not only bad for me in itself, but each time I lost weight I lost less, and each time I went back to normal eating I was gaining more.

I believe that my natural weight was around 11 stone, and because I thought that was elephantine, although I was relatively tall in my age group, at five feet eight and a half inches, I compared myself with girls who were only five feet two. By dieting, I reduced my weight to nine stone, at whic point I looked very slim, but I couldn't maintain that weight, and I soon gained more... a pattern which was repeated often in the course of the 15 years.

I tried diets with milkshakes, where you only ate once a day, diets with weight watchers, where the shame of getting on the scales in front of others was supposed to work the magic, diets based around particular food groups or particular foods.

I discovered what many other have discovered: that calorie intake does not necessary have a direct relationship with weight gain or weight loss. On an Atkins variant I was able to eat any quantity of meat or fat, while strictly restricting complex carbohydrates like potatoes and rice.

I tried diets which combine particular foods and diets which avoided particular combinations of food. I usually used to accompany a new diet with a few days of half-hearted exercises, doing sit ups and bends, and a few yoga exercises. I have swum, bicycled and walked my weight down...only to watch it creep back up.

Eventually I did try an expensive diet doctor, whose main job seemed to be to tease me with the news that he could eat what he liked and never put on weight, and talk about deep fried battered zucchini, while handing out amphetamines, which I never took. Then I took the decision, hard as it was, that the cure being worse than the ailment, it would probably be better for my health, my pocket and my wellbeing to simply try to eat healthily, to walk when I could, and to try to limit my contact with things like smoke and alcohol, than to continue down the path of weight loss and weight gain.

Over the years I have looked at the reasons for my weight, looked at social and emotional reasons, but I honestly do not think that they have a big bearing on why I am overweight. When I look through my family album, I see overweight great grandparents, and great-great-grandparents, overweight brothers and sisters, overweight mother. You could assume that there is a group ignorance about food and nutrition but that isn't so. I believe that there are genetic factors in being overweight, jut as there are in the propensity to be underweight and have to eat to try to put on weight.

For years the news has been bad: indeed the most recent government propaganda decress the increased risk of cardiovascular disease, diabetes and other life-threatening diseases for people who are overweight.

From time to time there has been a dissenting voice, but these are mostly drowned out by the noise from the others who believe fat is bad, thin is healthy. Now research from the American Journal of the American Geriatric Society (reported here) has concluded that not only are overweight and obese adults at less risk of bad outcomes than the underweight, but that overweight and obese people of 65 may actually have better outcomes in some directions... it isn't a simple formula.

I'm not beginning to say that it is necessarily desirable for anyone to be overweight or obese... just that the dangers should not be exagerrated, and people should not be frightened with bad science. There is always a bias among scientists towards logical stuff that is obvious...sometimes though the logical and obvious can be quite wrong.

That there is resistance to the idea that this might be right, is demonstrated by this commentary on the results on About.com

"....Frankly, I’m not sure what to make of this study. It would suggest that being overweight at 65 doesn’t really matter much, though I have a hard time believing that. I think part of the problem is that with 70% of the country being overweight, comparing people to “average” or “normal” doesn’t really work anymore. The study also did not look at people who were very overweight or obese (a whole different set of health issues). What we need to think about is what the optimal, best-case situation is. It could be that weight plays a bigger role in ages 80+ (something not examined by this study) or that that assumptions made by the statisticians were not valid."

You can almost hear this person grappling mentally with the assault on all their assumptions that the research represents. Even worse, in an article reported on the Big Fat Blog, a doctor concedes that the research that they had done showed that your chances of surviving a heart attack were better if you were overweight, but suggests that this is because fat people can make big changes to their lifestyle post-heart attack, while thin people who had heart attacks didn't have the opportunity to do anything about that, and so they are more likely to die. It sorta makes my head spin. Wha-wha -what now?

In our culture at present, fat is seen as a health risk, unacceptable and something to be eradicated. I think that the success of government propaganda means that even if this is wrong, or wrong at least for elderly people, it will take many years for that information to be accepted by the mainstream, or most people.

A typical morning for me at the moment. I wake up at 5.30am with a letter to the Times in my head, spend an hour or so trying to form my arguments against compulsory inspection, and then find it degenerating into so many pieces of information and so many directions at once, that it becomes incoherent.

Find that someone has answered a family history query on one of the boards, and bemoan once again that don't have the money to order all the certificates I need.

I have this fantasy in which I live in an old rambling house which has enough room for me to have a library come study... a place where I have all my books and a big table for to work on and scatter with the results of my research.

I suddenly realised that I have this superstitious feeling that I shouldn't wish for a room of my own in case I get it because my family throw me out or admit me to the sunset home for eccentric relatives. And suddenly I realised that it would be possible to separate my living area from the family with a room divider of some sort, and hmmm I have to go away and think about this. Maybe I should make it so, Captain, and stop dreaming about it?

The BBC have refused to broadcast an appeal for Gaza, on the basis that it would call into question their journalistic independence.

I am rather puzzled by this stance, which seems to be a new idea for the BBC. They have previously broadcast appeals for humanitarian aid (in Darfur for example), without worrying about whether this would affect their judgement or impartiality in news reporting.

In some ways I believe that taking this stance is less impartial than simply allowing the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) to make a judgement about which humanitarian disasters warrant urgent aid. Currently, Israel is not in need of humanitarian aid, and if they were, I hope the BBC would broadcast an appeal for them too. I am not partisan, I would want any country, or group of people in dire need of aid, to receive it.

To be truly impartial the BBC must not make political judgements about humanitarian aid, and should leave those decisions to the charities working in the field.

Caught a bit of start the week on radio 4 while I was rushing around trying to make the house respectable for the district nurses who are coming to dress Ali's wound. The guy from the Grauniad who does the bad science column was there. He's obviously written a book, or brought out a compilation of his columns or something.

I felt like dashing off a really long flaming email to him, but controlled myself. Firstly because I don't think people generally read rants if they're sent to them by strangers, and secondly because there was so much I wanted to say all at once that I don't think it would be very coherent.

He talked about the fact that while there are any number of erudite articles about the arts, science is always dumbed down in the press. You know, or you ought to know by now, dear reader, that I don't like the use of the phrase dumbed down in his context of meaning making content simpler, because it isn't the way that John Taylor Gatto meant it when he coined the phrase. But that's a nitpicking home educator's rant for another time.

One of the things which I have always been aware of is the way that school teachers and parents influence their children's choice of subjects, encouraging them towards science and away from the arts. Ihadn't really realised the extent of the influence until my children and my friends' children reached the age of decision making. Often I have heard parents tell their children that they should concentrate on the science subjects that they are good at and do art or music as a hobby. I can't say I have ever heard of a parent who went the other way and told their children to concentrate on art and do physics as a hobby.

I think it is a shame from all sorts of angles. The only reason arts and sciences are divided is because of the way that they are taught in schools and universities and the way that education is organised. It took several months of home educating my children to realise that the real world simply isn't organised in that way: if you make some biscuits as an exercise one afternoon, there is no-one to tell you that you are doing English (reading the recipe), maths (weighing ingredients), physics (conductivity of heat, reversible and non-reversible processes) and maybe biology, design, and a hundred other subjects too. Life isn't divided in that way.

In the 18th century, people from all walks of life were interested in science and the discoveries that were being made. I investigated the Coffee Houses of London for a project not long ago, and was amazed by what egalitarian and interesting places those were in the 1700s, with scientific experiments, news, discussion going on. People don't seem to have been scared away from thinking that tey couldn't understand science, and it was much more integrated into life... nowadays we have the idea that only people in white coats with complicated degrees are able to understand science because it has become so complex.

I've got a long way off any sort of point here. The chap from the Guardian talked about the MMR hoax, and said that poor journalism and poor understanding of science had lead parents to make ignorant decisions... that's paraphrasing, hope I haven't misrepresented what he actually said, I didn't take notes, as I was washing up.

I saw red, a bit. I am an intelligent woman who takes her responsibility as a parent very seriously indeed. When it came to vaccinations, I read extensively and then made an appointment to see the GP responsible for vaccinations at my local GP surgery. He said, and I quote "If you have been reading up about vaccinations, you probably know more than I do," as his first comment, which was hardly reassuring. He offered me the book that the NHS then sent out to surgeries with the "facts" about vaccination, and told me that his wife, a health visitor, had been against vaccinating their chilren, and so he had sneaked in during the night and vaccinated them without her knowledge or permission. I was more or less speechless by this time.

His main argument in favour of vaccination was that he had seen some terrible cases of whooping cough and no parent would want their children to suffer like that. It wasn't scientific, it was the thing which all scientists seem to deride, an emotional appeal to me based on anecdotal evidence.

I did vaccinate my children and the elder of my sons had the MMR. However, there was then a bit of a furore caused by the fact that a massive number of doses of MMR had to be withdrawn because the mumps element of this particular batch was causing mumps meningitis. Shortly after this, the government sent out a circular suggesting that all children should be given another dose of measles vaccine. Were they going to be given only the measles element of the MMR? NO, they were going to be given measles and rubella - in a booster due to take place shortly before all those doses of MMR without the faulty mumps element, were due to go out of date.

What made me really suspicious, was the fact that the leaflet suggested that rubella was being included with the booster because rubella can be a very serious illness for children too. This isn't true. It can be very serious if you are a pregnant woman who is not immune and come into contact with it, because of the effect on your unborn child, but it isn't a serious illness per se.

I became extremely distrustful of what I was told by the government about vaccines after that, feeling that they would say anything to use up unused stocks of vaccines.

When my elder son had his pre-school boosters a couple of months later, he had a very severe reaction, throwing up repeatedly. I took him to the doctor the following da, and said it was probably unrelated to the vaccines, but.... He said it was probably related to the polio that he had been given, but he didn't report the reaction on the yellow card scheme. When my sister's daughter had a severe reaction to her vaccinations, with high pitched screaming, some years later, the doctor confirmed that he thought that was because of the vaccine, but again didn't report that on the yellow card.

With such a lack of information, and cavalier attitude to the science around vaccinations, I don't find it surprising that parents distrust the information they are given. In America, one researcher has linked the inclusion of thiomersal in vaccinations with autism, but has been ridiculed in a similar way to the doctor who said years ago that BSE could be transmitted from cow to calf, and potentially from cow to human. In their protection of the establishment view, and closed mind to the alternatives, I don't see better science, just a different sort of prejudice.

Feeling anxious and odd this morning. Ali has to go into hospital tomorrow for his reversal operation. His experience in 2005 was so awful, I find it hard to relax and let the professionals do their jobs, because that experience showed me that they don't notice as quickly as I do when he is becoming ill, and they don't do the logical and sensible thing either.

Can't write, can't settle to anything. Have been playing solitaire and stupid internet games as a way of self distracting, just can't be. I don't think anyone reads this blog much (who can blame them, it's three months since I last posted?) but he's in T12 ward at University College Hospital, Euston Road, London NW1.

I've been doing family history research and research for my local Quaker meeting locally. Something that really alarms and upsets me about the state of education in the mainstream, is the number of libraries and intitutions which put gatekeepers on their online information.

Here I am not talking about new information written by their lecturers or students, but information from books long out of copyright, which the libraries have scanned into their computers and have online as a resource. These are things which cannot be damaged or affected by online access, which they are protecting with passwords, which you have to have in order to gain access to them.

I have often thought about writing an essay from the point of the cliched alien, an exercise so beloved of teachers, but when applied to education, showing up so many nonsensical things. Whose interest is served by blocking access to materials online which can only be of any interest or use to family historians or students of history? Who is being protected when the text is so far out of copright that even if I copied it, adapted it, printed it back to front or at a 90 degree angle there would be no one who could prevent me?

I just can't understand how institutions like the National Gallery or the National Portrait gallery can hold collections which belong to the nation and which are in safekeeping for the nation, can charge people for the privelege of taking photographs or using the image, even though it is lng out of date. How can that improve art education, or give access to the people who actually own the paintings - the people of the country?

Argh. Rant over.

Whe I saw the interactive website linked to the new Merlin series I was quite excited. It seemed like it might be a well-rounded experience.

Having watched the first episode tonight, I'm disappointed. This was drivel of the first order! I am amazed at what low standards the BBC seems to have nowadays. The writing was poor, the direction was poor, the acting was poor despite the inclusion of some very well respected actors.

The production didn't seem to know what time it was set in, having such a variety of inluences that we didn't know whether we were in the dark ages, medieval, later medieval or some magical mystery time which only exists in Disneyland, where you can have early medieval AND pretty windows.

When it came to speech and clothing, the designers seem to have abandoned the attempt to give it any historical period whatsoever and just threw in everything they had.

The music was intrusive and repetitive and heavily handedly indicated whether things were "comical" and amusing or not.

The special effects make up wasn't convincing from the very moment it was seen as the grieving witch confronted the king.

Everything had a plasticated artificial look, which was far too new and shiny and clean for the period *whichever* one you choose - obviously something that the designers found they couldn't do.

All in all I thought it was dumbed down fodder for the under 8s, which was anything but magical. I hate to think of how much money must have been expended on something which is so second rate. I'd rate it 3/10, but only because of John Hurt's voice.

Keep the magic secret? About the most magical thing is the website....

Today is my fiftieth birthday. I've always been quite sanguine about the passage of time, feeling that a birthday was only a marker, another day in a stream of days... but fifty does seem so very old.

The trouble is, I think everyone is born a particular age. I have met eight-year-olds who seem to be forty and forty-year-olds who seem to be eight. I think my perfect age was around 25: throughout my childhood and teens I was constantly told that I seemed older than my years, and since my twenties people have told me I am young for my age; not in appearance but in attitudes and outlook.

That's my biggest problem, I can't seem to feel the way that one expects a fifty-year-old women to feel... I still want to walk barefoot in the park, watching the sunrise, find new things and do them, be silly, wear hippy clothing and dye my hair purple...or blue... or green. Not in a blue rinse sort of way.

I'm constantly mediating between the part of me that fears looking like 50 trying to be 20, in ruffled skirts and knotted beads, and the part of me that wants to say "sod it! who cares what people think?".

I think that once you get to a certain age, you can get away with anything... my mother wears pink and turquoise and looks amazing in it... but I think that there's a dangerous period for women between the end of your forties and the middle sixties where you can definitely look silly if you try to wear clothes or styles that are too young for you.

I was interviewed by an Australian the other day about things I had witnessed in Second Life and ended up feeling as old as Methusalah, even though my avatar is only 4 years old... but it made me realise what a lot I have observed in my life, that my children will never know. Mundane things like the move from black and white television which only broadcast part of the day, to the introduction of colour television, the start of the terrestrial channels like Channels 4 and 5, the change from telephone boxes on every corner to mobile phones in every pocket, the rise of he ATM for cash, the credit card for purchases.

The beginning of the internet... when I started blogging in 1998, I could find fewer than 10 English bloggers, and hardly any English websites apart from the BBC - which took ages to load and quite often failed because too many people were trying to get to the same page. Things have developed so fast, there are millions of bloggers of all nationalities, some blogging to camera now.

Sometimes I think that people are recording so much noise that future generations will find it very difficult to pick out the important stuff from the dross... what will the sum of human experience tell us about when someone's twitter stream really does appear to measure out their life in coffee cups? How many people throw away their email and who keeps their MSN messages. What does the level of recording achieve, except to feed the need we have to make our mark, leave some sign that we passed by and breathed for a while.

I've been considering the nature of fame and the responsibility we all have to do our best with our lives, recently, because I have been looking at the history of Uxbridge Quaker meeting and at the things which it is interesting to learn about that. It is a recitation of the famous people who visited Uxbridge, George Fox, William Penn, Elizabeth Fry, Kathleen Lonsdale, but it is clear from the things which are written in journals and accounts that there were a huge number of other people who contributed to the life of the meeting, who are unknown and unsung, but may have worked more powerfully for the good of the meeting or their fellow Quakers than the ones who are celebrated and well known.

I don't think we are called to become rich or famous or celebrated, and that's beyond the most of us anyway, all we are called upon to do is our best to live the things we believe, within our sphere of influence. If you can do that successfully then I think that's cause to celebrate - it's much harder to do that job if you do it as a housewife or road sweeper, than it is if you are a celebrated author or doer of great good works.

Anyway, I'm fifty. I expect I shall adjust to that idea over time, but I don't agree to put away my ruffled skirts or hair dye just yet awhile.

The BBC website carries a number of stories about girl violence, and the increase that has happened in the last couple of years.

I know I am probably a one track singer, but schools can take the blame for a lot of the changes in our culture. One of the researchers who is quoted by the BBC says that the peer group has a lot to do with it. It's only since we have had schools that there ha been such a thing as a peer group, really. Once upon a time it was what our community and our family did that we modelled in our behaviour, and now it is the peer group that we learn from and want to please.

The Govenment changes to schooling have not had the effect that they wished, of increasing the educational standards of the children who move through state schools. It has had a lot of unintended effects, from a increase in depression and suicide, an increasing number of exclusions and expellings, and an increase in the level of crime and disorder among both girls and boys.

If you look at schooling... REALLY look at it with a fresh mind as though you have been dropped on the planet by Alien Spaceship... you see a lot of dysfunctional social interaction which is ignored by the system. My son was bullied from the age of five until he left school at nine to be home educated. For a while I had to go into the school to put some cream on my other son's arm at breaktime, and I was horrified by the level of violence and bullying that I could see before my eyes on the playground.

There were two teachers, chatting away in the middle of a sea of children, but they seemed oblivious to the mayhem around them. They didn't interfere with children who were abusing each other unless there was blood or a child came to them directly. They were blind to it.

It doesn't surprise me in the least that girls are becoming more violent. It doesnt seem to me that schools particularly value caring and considerate children any more than other teenagers. If a child helps another at school that's labelled as cheating. Schools don't teach children to consider other people's feelings... in general they aren't terribly good at considering other people's feelings themselves...at all.

I'm waiting for the powers-that-be to declare the SATs and National Curriculum a failure and to move onto plan B. One can only hope that one day they might turn to the free and democratic schools to see what they do right, and maybe eve to home educators.

I've found another blog I want to read. I followed a link to a profile on BoingBoing and thence to a blog. I love this writer... he seems to manage to contrive a similarly cluttered squalour such as the one I habitually work in. I too have a desk... ok, not a desk really, a coffee table, which is supposed to be the centre of writing operations and instead becomes a heap of things that were useful to me for a couple of minutes and then just got added to the pile.

Without moving I can see teetering piles of books, a box full of buttons, a mobile phone, a jar of hair wax, two glasses, a cup, a bottle of sparkling water, various family photographs, my blood pressure medication, a book on the mystic Edgar Cayce, an apple core, leaflets about the Wellcome Collection and an A to Z pocket edition, vitamin tablets, caster oil with real lavender in it, a candle in a tin, a large notebook, a stuffed doll, papers, an itouch, cables to attach the itouch to the computer... that's just the coffee table. It's no wonder I never get on with my writing.

I've always thought that the message of all the fairy tales was: be careful what you wish for. I often long for a room of my own, with a desk and either paper and pencil or keyboard and no distractions. I try hard not to yearn for it too much in case I find myself locked into just such a room at same point in the future, with no chance of parole.

Mind you the rate I am collecting blogs I read, I shan't have much time for getting into trouble....

OK, I'm on a roll of housewifely blogs... through a link on the Frugal Upstate blog, I find this scary looking "Home Ec 101". Except maybe I am coming to a time in my life where I really, REALLY need to read this sort of stuff.

You know what? Some people have too much time on their hands. That's all I am saying. Really.

Recommended rice bags to Eelco, and found this great webpage called Frugal Upstate, whch has directions in it, and also a lot of blogs about doing things frugally.

Will be back to read it in detai, but meanwhile, here's the post about ricebags.

I am starting to feel that I am being left behind by the speed of progress currently. BoingBoing links to a blog where patches for clothing are about to be sold, which will allow people to use their shiny new iPhones to scan in your patch and discover your website, or blog or youtube video.

One of the useful things about virtual worlds has been this ability to click on objects and find the link to a company's or individual's website. And here it is, in real life.

I spent a long time the day before yesterday transferring the blogs from my oooold website which I discovered on the WayBayMachine, to a new blog here, imaginatively called MyOldBlogs. I will tidy them up, and add some more explanation... and maybe I will even have the time to add some of the paper diaries which are fading fast too. It was a weird experience going back 10 years in time.

Ali is due to have his colonoscopy this afternoon. He had to take mega doses of laxative last night, hasn't had anything to eat since 4pm yesterday, and now can't drink again until after the procedure. I wish there was something I could do to protect him from this, would take his place in an instant... but I can't.

To keep my mind from obsessing about it, watched Bonekickers from last night on the BBCiPlayer. You know how things can look sooo good on a trailer and then within a millisecond of starting to watch an episode you can tell that they are sooo bad? This is one of those.

The plot is ludicrous... they didn't just invent a love affair between Boudicca and a Roman soldier, but also suggested that the Roman had kept her secretly in a chamber below the Roman baths in Bath, and had invented an incendiary bomb many centuries in advance of their actual invention AND that he was responsible for the burning of Rome in revenge for the death of his mistress.

The acting is poor and the writing too... actually they crammed a whole series worth of plot and backstory into the space of one hour long episode, and in places this required the actors to deliver an incredible amount of completely fantastical information at a rate of knots. There was a backstory element of a romance between two of the characters which didn't ring true... they didn't behave like people with a history. And there was a lot of banter between rugged professor and young student which would have a real student running for the forms to report him for sexual harrassment... it seemed old fashioned, and inappropriate. He wasn't even witty about it.

The sets were so dreadful, I could have done better with a bit of plaster of paris and a roomful of children... in places it definitely won the award for the least convincing rock and stone in the history of television.

You know how sometimes things are so bad, they're almost good? This isn't like that. It's obvious the people involved have no faith or belief in their product, they simply contrived a television series out of a formula. On paper it might have looked good. On the screen it did NOT.

I cannot believe that the BBC has sunk to this level of awful... didn't anyone see how bad it was? You begin to lose faith in the BBC to withstand the commercial pressures upon it when they broadcast something so unremittingly bad that I can find nothing good to say about it.

And if I spoiled the plot for anyone... you can thank me later for having prevented you from wasting a whole hour of your life.

Some weeks ago, BoingBoing encouraged Europeans to write to their MEPs to vote against a new measure which suggested that people should be disconnected from the internet if accused three times of copyright infringement.

As I good Boingette, I wrote to the MEPs who represent me, and I have now had two replies which will probably only be of interest to those who encouraged the writing in the first place! I reproduce the two emails I received in reply below, with my original email below them. I have removed my address and email address.

Dear Fiona,

Thank you for your email. I apologise for the delay in replying.

I believe that you may be referring to two sets of amendments by me and
by my Conservative colleague Malcolm Harbour. My amendments were simply
intended to allow traffic data to be processed to ensure the security of
electronic communications networks, services and equipment. It was not
my intention with my amendments, for "the security of an electronic
communication equipment" to be interpreted as "the security of DRM
preventing, detecting, or intercepting IP infringements" as suggested by
some. However, I asked for legal clarification on whether a possible
unintended consequence of my amendment would be to allow DRM and
interception of IP infringements. Since I did not receive a satisfactory
answer I asked to withdraw the amendment in order to re-introduce it at
plenary with a clarification on the definition of "security". I was
unable to withdraw it, so recommended a vote against. In the event, IMCO
committee did not vote on my amendment.

Malcolm Harbour is very clear that his amendments are not designed to
start a "three strikes and you are out" law. I certainly would not
support ISPs being forced to do the work of law enforcement agencies.
Also, I do not believe in collective punishment where because one family
member has been judged to download illegal material the whole household
loses its connection to essential services such as shopping, banking,
communications etc. Malcolm tells me that "as opposed to the text
proposed by the Commission, his amendments shift the burden of
explaining the law from the ISPs to the appropriate national
authorities. It also broadens the concept so that any type of unlawful
activities are covered, not only copyright infringement. Such other
activities could be for example child pornography. This public interest
information would be prepared by the relevant national authority and
then simply distributed by the ISP to all their customers. It involves
no monitoring of individual customer usage of the internet."

Malcolm Harbour totally rejects the claims that these amendments are
intended to reduce consumer choice and undermine individual freedom. In
particular, the Directive contains no provisions on Copyright Law
enforcement, not does it refer, in any way, to the French Government's
proposed enforcement agreement.

Thank you again for taking the time to write to me.

Regards

Syed

SYED KAMALL
Conservative MEP for London

>Dear Ms Berry,

Thank you for your e-mail concerning the vote on the 'telecoms package'
and the screening of internet connections.

Several of Parliament's Committees have been examining the telecoms
package. The report you are referring to - the universal service and user
rights directive - is being examined by the Internal Market Committee.
The Committee voted on Monday 7th July.

I have been following this legislation closely, although as a Member of
the European Parliament's Industry, Research and Energy Committee, I
wasn't able to vote on the amendments you raised.

I can tell you that I am strongly against the disconnection of internet
connections without any judicial oversight. Internet connections are
often shared and so the disconnection of one internet connection can
often affect other innocent users. The internet is becoming particularly
important for media freedom and media pluralism; as such disconnection
can have a large and disproportionate effect. I believe there are far
more effective ways of tackling intellectual property violations online.

You might be interested to know that the European Parliament voted on a
resolution in April, by my French colleague Guy Bono, which made
reference to the disconnection of internet connections. I voted against
the screening and disconnection of internet connections in this report.

I have spoken to my colleagues on the Internal Market Committee and
thought you might be interested in a bit of background on the vote.

The Committee strongly backed proposals to enhance users´ rights and data
protection in electronic communications networks. There are a lot of
positive measures in this report.

The key rights and improvements include:

* a one day limit, down from up to one month, to transfer your
telephone
number when you switch networks;
* guaranteed information from operators, before contracts are
concluded,
about any restrictions on access to services (VoIP etc);
* information on the cost of terminating agreements early (with such
costs limited to cases involving a subsidised handset);
* guaranteed equivalent access to communications for disabled
users, with
special terminal equipment for their needs;
* information for subscribers in the event of any breach of their
personal data through electronic networks;
* guaranteed access to the European 112 emergency call number
across the
EU; and
* availability of mobile caller location across Europe when emergency
calls are made.

The Committee also agreed on the need to keep the Internet open by
empowering regulators to intervene if a carrier discriminates against a
service provider by blocking or slowing traffic.

To help keep citizens informed online, regulators in each Member State
are empowered to develop standardised public service messages for users,
which could include security protection advice, and advice on harmful or
unlawful uses of the Internet, and their potential consequences. The
information would be sent to all users, not to targeted individuals and
not based on the monitoring of individual's use of the internet.

I am informed by my colleagues on the Committee that this directive
contains no provisions on the enforcement of intellectual property rights
online. The report encourages regulatory authorities to promote
appropriate cooperation to ensure lawful online activity. This does not
seek to promote or prescribe any enforcement regime, which would be
beyond the appropriate scope of the Directive.

However, one amendment by Conservative MEP Syed Kamall does introduce
potentially dangerous ambiguity in the field of privacy protection
online. This amendment was opposed by the Labour Group of MEPs but
adopted by a narrow majority in the Civil Liberties Committee.

Under the Parliament's rules this text dealing with data protection was
adopted without a vote in the Internal Market Committee since it was
already adopted in the Civil Liberties Committee. Labour MEPs have called
for its withdrawal before the final report is adopted by the full sitting
of Parliament in September.

Thank you for raising these issues with me. I will continue to follow
them closely.



Yours sincerely,



Mary Honeyball MEP


>
> This message was also sent to: Syed Kamall MEP, John Bowis OBE MEP,
> Jean Lambert MEP, Charles Tannock MEP, Robert Evans MEP, Claude Moraes
> MEP, Gerard Batten MEP, Baroness Sarah Ludford MEP
>
>
> Fiona Berry
> Address and email removed
>
> Sunday 6 July 2008
>
> Dear Gerard Batten, Robert Evans, Syed Kamall, Charles Tannock, Jean
> Lambert, Claude Moraes, Baroness Sarah Ludford, John Bowis OBE and Mary
> Honeyball,
>
> I am writing to you collectively as my representatives in the European
> Parliament, in order to protest about the "three strikes" rule being
> introduced into the telecoms bill, which would result in anyone being
> accused three times of copyright infringement being banned by ISPs.
>
> As a virtual architect in the world of Second Life, I am only too aware
> of the difficulty in establishing copyright in material online, and the
> ease with which anyone can invoke a DMCA takedown wihout any
> pre-existing ownership or right of copyright. I think this proposal to
> ban someone on the basis of three accusations is ill-founded and
> unworkable, and will lead to a tremendous amount of additional cost for
> the consumer.
>
> I think that universal access to the internet has the potential for
> great and positive steps forward for mankind; I do not wish to see
> restrictions imposed which will limit this. I think the principle of
> universal access to the internet should be maintained. I urge you to
> vote against the inclusion of this measure.
> Yours sincerely,
>
> Fiona Berry
>

I've been pondering on the nature of existence. Virtual worlds have a tendency to make you think I feel... my mother insists that the friends I have there are not real friends because I have only met them virtually... as far as she is concerned only people I have met in real life can qualify as friends.

I tried to explain to her that the people I meet in Second Life may actually be people I know more deeply than in real life; it's hard to say. In real life people are distracted by what they can see of you, your gender, size, attractiveness, age, accent, the way you dress, how you cut your hair, the shoes you wear, the choices you make about the way you look - all those things can attract or repel, interest or bore people.

It is true that people can pretend to be people they are not, and can conceal truths about themselves online or in a virtual space, that would be obvious in real life. My avatar is an attractive 25 year old in Second Life and I would not be able to sustain that for a minute in real life... but she represents a purer version of me, in that in Second Life I can be myself, stripped of all the baggage I carry in real life, and also separate from things that are my roles and responsibilities, like being a mother, daughter, etc.

I love being a mother, adore my children, have deeply enjoyed them and their company while they grow up, but even so, the idea of having a space where I do not have to consider that part of my life, is attractive.

Some years ago, a friend's son was ill with meningitis. While the crisis was going on, they were too taken up with the necessity of looking out for him to involve their friends... and look out for him they did... the father grabbed the telephone and demanded that the pediatrician on duty for the accident and emergency department they found themselves in should come and see to their son: this may have saved his life.

He was ill and they found it hard to trust the hospitals, as I have done. I went to help them one day, just to offer some support, as did others on different days. I felt like I stepped out of my life in that day, and joined them in their world, and at the end of it I was able to step back into my life again.

I think of myself as being basically the same person that I was when young... but then I didn't have or know the children, and many people who were important to me then, bosses and co-workers, friends and people I saw every day, I haven't seen or heard from in years and years.

It's hard to know until they perfect time travel, and even if they did, I'm sure there would be rules against meeting yourself in time... oh ignore me, I've lost the thread of what I was saying.

The nature of being, the nature of knowing people, the nature of knowing yourself... they're all things which fascinate me. I used to explore a lot in Second Life... and learned a lot about myself too. I made the mistake of hijacking someone else's IP before I knew better, and realised fast that I didn't want to be that person (once someone pointed out the error of my ways).

I am more changeable and volatile in virtual worlds than in real life... in real life I have a tendency to let everything wash over me. In Second Life I don't. Which is the real me?

Feeling a bit shellshocked this morning. Got back from the teen challenge to find that various people had been trying to get hold of me and had assumed I was not answering the phone or ill. I felt wrecked, completely wrecked, although I had spent most of my time in a warm art room, silk painting or making hangings for the peace tree.

I have been offered a holiday or a job or both in Turkey. Still trying to absorb that information and to work out if it is the chance of a lifetime or something that I ought to be cautious about. The place looks amazing. I haven't been on a holiday for years... I think Kate was about four or so the last time we went on holiday, and I haven't been outside the country for over 18 years.

Eelco suggests I should meet the people concerned, and offers to take me to Berlin to meet them. So I am reeling from one generous offer to another at present.

Things have been very odd over the weekend. John lost the key to the electricity meter and so we have been in candlelight... it isn't that we don't have power, but we are afraid that it will run out and leave us in the cold if we use it. And boy, is it cold. It's been snowing and sleeting today, although the sun is warm now, I know it will get very cold again once the sun goes down.

So I feel semi-Victorian... realising how easy it is to misinterpret things in amongst the shadows... and how easy to set your hair on fire. Hope we can get a replacement tomorrow or we're really up the creek without a paddle.

The easiest Banana ice Cream in the world
Freeze chopped banana.

Blend it with a spoonful of milk of cream.

That's it! It needs to be eaten quickly or it melts.... If you use ripe bananas, then they taste very sweet. Can be used as a basis for banana milkshake - much MUCH nicer than the commercial types.

You may wish to make a lot of this, and buy ripe bananas when they are cheap. If you do, be sure to layer the banana, if possible with greased greaseproof. DON'T use foil because it sticks to the frozen banana, and you don't want blended foil in your ice cream or milkshake.

The BBC reports on a report from Whistleblower about nurseries, which dovetails nicely with my earlier posting about a woman who couldn't understand why friends thought she shouldn't put her five month old baby into a nursery in order to go back to work full time.

The shocking news that children are not well looked after in many of the nurseries around the country is not news. Even if you had the best nursery nurses in the country, a one to 13 ratio between the nursery nurses and babies makes it impossible for them to do anything but crisis control. They can't look after the babies properly.

Any parent knows that it can be a full time job to look after one baby properly and meet their needs. The idea that one person can do that for 13 babies is laughable. All over the country, in nurseries good and bad, children are lacking stimulation, lying in wet and dirty nappies.

My Quaker meeting in Uxbridge leases out the old building to a nursery during the week, and many of the older members regard this as tantamount to a social service. It's a dark building with high windows though. I would not have left any of my children there. I don't know whether the people there are good, bad or indifferent nursery nurses, but the building is totally unsuitable as a nursery. If the OFSTED inspectors were doing what the general public expect that they should, they'd have closed it down.

As a society, children have a low priority for many people, and our society's Victorian attitude that children ought to be quiet and not disrupt life for the adults is pervading everywhere. Mothers are being made to feel that they are odd or even destructive if they want to be with their children and particularly if they wish not to work in order to care for their children.

It's astonishing to me that there are not more tragedies involving children in nurseries. The biggest tragedy though will not emerge for some years, when these children become parents themselves and begin to inflict what happened to them on their own babies.

In a rich country like the UK, we have the opportunity to be giving our children a much richer childhood than their ancestors experienced. Instead, we are giving them money and things bought at the expensive of shoving them into nurseries as babies and schools to be tested to destruction throughout their childhoods. It's nuts.

Bought the Grauniad for the first time in a long time. Found my blood pressure rising: funny how that doesn't happen with the online versions of the newspapers... I supposed that if I come across a view I don't have time for I tend to flee to another page rather than allowing my feelings to build up.

There were two stories that particularly caught my attention... the first was about the lack of parental choice for schools. It's not that I disagree particularly with what is written in the article, it's just that I think it is so shortsighted to think about education in terms of schools nowadays. With the advent of 3D worlds anything is possible - you can make education enjoyable and entertaining, personalise it, engage pupils in it. People of all ages are continually learning and the old fashioned idea of schools as places where children go for six hours a day, which stand idle for the other 18 hours, is such an old fashioned and wasteful idea.

I'd like to see learning centres which can be used by everyone... money going into facilitators for education instead of teachers in the old fashioned sense... children given choices and the chance to do art -- or music -- or mechanics -- or dance all day every day if they want to. individualised, personalised education which can teach children the things they need to know... which isn't a lot of facts and figures, but skills and the use of their curiosity. I truly believe that we are going to think that schools are SO 20th, or even 19th century.

A letter was responsible for my rising blood pressure really. In it a woman says that she is going back to work full time and putting her baby into a workplace nursery and she cannot understand why friends are shocked that she isn't working part time instead.

For a long time I have lived by the premise that we can't tell other people what it is right to do, and I stand by that. I don't wish to tell this woman that she ought not to be putting her child in a nursery and going back to work. Hell, for all I know she might turn into a baby battering horror mother if she didn't go back to work. But not telling other people what to do doesn't mean that I don't have an opinion. My opinion is that if you are all right with dropping your precious baby into the hands of strangers, in a place where he will not get one-to-one care (or even one to two or one to three in all likelihood) then you are not properly bonded with your baby.

It's an unfashionable thing to say, and it conflicts with the idea of having an open mind about such things. But honestly, I DON'T have an open mind about childcare. My minds is made up. Children need a dedicated parent to look after them, especially in the first year. They ought to have their needs met by someone who loves them, not someone who is paid to look after them. I feel angry that government tries to convince parents that it is not just ok but a positive thing to leave your children in the care of others. It isn't.

There is good research available that also shows that later, when children are three or four years old, they do better in more or less every way if they spend their time with a dedicated adult who loves them than in an institution, no matter how good, or how well funded a facility. Two researchers some time ago set out to show how positive nurseries were for children aged four. They studied children in nurseries and those who stayed at home with their mothers and expected to show that the children in nurseries had an academic advantage and a social advantage over the others. In fact, they proved the reverse.

Communication in the home is usually two way, and parent make an effort to put things into context for children, referring to things they have done, or things they have shared in an attempt to give what they are talking about context. Children ask questions, and receive most of the information in the form of conversation.

In schools, children tend to restrict their questions to practical things: Where are the scissors? Can I go to the bathroom? Can I use the paintbrushes? One of the first things they learn in a group environment is that it isn't always safe to ask questions, and they learn that pretty damn fast. Often, even when questions are appropriate they find it hard to speak up.

People, particularly those in the pay of the government, talking of children being independent, as though it were possible to force independence on them before they are ready. You can't. I think the growing incidence of selective mutism in schools which I have noticed through the rising number of questions asked on mailing lists and noticeboards is a marker of the discomfort that many children feel on being forced into a formal learning institution much too early - in most cases nowadays nursery is beginning at 3 and school is beginning at 4 in the UK.

I think that our society is paying a price for poor advice to parents. This can only get worse.

I have always like the clothes made by 1647, which is a mail order company which caters for women of goddess proportions. It was there that I turned to when I needed some special clothes for a presentation a few months ago, when my sister generously offered to pay for them.

I will admit that we may have made life confusing for them, because although my sister signed up for and paid for the clothes, I was the one with the account and the email. However, the clothes didn't come and didn't come, I gave up and bought some elsewhere, and when the clothes eventually appeared, I refused to take delivery of them, knowing that I would be returning them all.

That was when the fun really started. Although the company accepted the return and credited my sister with the money, as they had charged her twice for the clothes they sent, the net effect was a charge on her credit card for the total amount. Emails passing to and from the company didn't help... they just stated and restated that they had provided a refund for the money. Obviously, no one could be bothered to look at the actual information and just checked the one transaction all the time.

I become so desperate to have them treat me like a real sentient human being and not like an idiot, that i even resorted to emailing Dawn French's agent, Dawn French being one of the owners of 1647. I knew it wasn't appropriate, but by that stage I didn't care, I just wanted to get my sister the money back for the clothing I hadn't seen and hadn't had.

My sister got to the point where she had to put it in the hands of her credit card company, and eventually she got a full refund for both transactions. I didn't get a whisper of an apology, and neither did she. In fact the tone throughout was that we were a nuisance.

The episode was over and I let it go, but was somewhat astomished when, as few months later, 1647 contacted me with an email to tell me that they had set me up a new account to coincide with the opening of their new shiny website. I didn't want an account with their new shiny website because, although I hanker after their clothing, I don't trust the company, and so I wrote unsubscribing. And wrote and demanded and then eventually contacted their host company to complain. The nice young man there unsubscribed and said that the problem was that the name of the account on the 1647 mailing list was my sister's name and not mine, and so they had therefore ignored my instructions to remove my email address from the list.

I felt much more antagonistic towards them, but I let it go. But now... now I am receiving spam email addressed to my sister. And the ONLY people who have her name attached to my email is 1647. Obviously, they have sold my details on. And I am not happy about that, not at ALL.

So, love the clothes, hate the company. You've been warned.

I just realised that this blog isn't at all what it says on the bottle... I have hardly written at all about being a home educator, and even less about being the mother of a son with Crohn's disease. Drat it!

I will get around to that soon.

The BBC carries a story that children are damaged by materialism... then when you visit the page, it appears that the story is not that children are damaged by materialism, but that parents think that they are. They blame the advertisers. The people commenting are prone to blame the parents.

I don't feel this is a new story. We have a mess of cultural values and society isn't any surer about what messages should be conveyed than schools or parents. Often, the message which gets conveyed isn't one which is agreed and disseminated, it is the spirit of the age which comes across.

In my teens, the message appeared to be "Don't be just a wife and mother! Don't work in Woolworths!" I thought I knew all about being a wife and mother: my brother and sister we 13 and 15 years younger than me respectively, and my mother was ill forsome years after my stepfather left. It was years before I discovered how fulfilling children could be, that it is a two-way relationship with a lot of love in return, and how challenging and how amazingly interesting it can be. And I worked out that we needed shop assistants and road sweepers just as much as we needed professors of English or Physics.

As a society we pump children with the idea of aiming for academic success from the moment they step through the door... and we quietly ignore the fact that people are complex organisms with complex talents and abilities, in favour of a world where only your academic ability is important. Children and teenagers are given a one-dimensional rule to measure themselves against, and no matter how loving, creative, helpful, astute they are, if they do not attain in that one area, they are made to feel like a failure and on the road to ruin.

Children adopt their own measures of success, and those generally are materialistic, because they measure their own happiness and success in materialistic terms quite early on. They are deluded of course, because being given what you want when you want it doesn't turn out happy human beings, it turns out spoiled ones. Being given what you need doesn't necessarily equate with what you desire. Often the opposite is true.

Children though, reflect our values and we all have to take the blame for that. The heroes who are revered in our society are generally not the people who are up in the night looking after the elderly, or the people who visit the sick. They are footballers and film stars and rock bands. They are people with money, and things.

The values of our world are not something separate from us: become the change you would like to see in the world, as Ghandi said. There is no way of imposing what you think children should be like, if you cannot attain that for yourself. That's how it appears that what our society says it values and what it actually values are two different things.

To change the way things are, we actually have to value everybody, and to recognise that not everyone will be an academic success, but that doesn't mean they can't be a success. We are rapidly evolving a world where lack of academic success will prevent a child from achieving success in every arena, because nursing, and art, and even becoming a mechanic or a plumber have been woven around with so many academic requirements that people with a vocation for nursing or art or mechanics or plumbing will be prevented from achieving success in those areas too.

Changing society's attitudes means acknowledging everyone as important to the whole, and recognising that the most important, most effective and most valuable member of an organisation may just be the cleaner and not the managing director. Who would want to use a hospital that wasn't clean?

My feeling is that we sleepwalk our way through life, unaware of the influences upon us, and accepting as our own beliefs things which are only propaganda. In many ways I see mass schooling as an essential part of that process. Much of what it teaches has nothing at all to do with qualifications and fitting us for adult life. A great deal has to do with striving to be somewhere else, able to consume more, constantly wanting to be better and more than we are at present. In moderation that can be positive, in excess it leads to people burning themselves out in the city in order to make ever more money.

In the end money has been the aim and end of education for a very long time. Why not work in Woolworths? Because it is a waste of talent and you don't earn much. It is like working at McDonald's, shorthand for a dead end job. This assumes that everyone is equally able, and everyone should be equally ambitious for something other than working in Woolworths... as does our school system.

We'd need to work on some fundamental assumptions to be able to overcome the drive to attain and the drive to be more, earn more, get more than other people. We'd need to understand that people are all different and have different roles to play, and we'd have to acknowledge that academic ability isn't the whole story. I don't know that we're ready for that yet. I don't know if the educational experts we've put in charge of education are ready to acknowledge that yet.

I do believe that the rise of virtual worlds will lead to a shift in our values and I think this is already reflected in the virtual worlds that exist today. People are surprisingly helpful, generous and kind. People can be individuals and pursue their own type of world (as long as legal). Helping others is seen as positive, rather than cheating by the person being helped. I think we are more ready to acknowledge the differences between people and to be tolerant of them than in real life. My hope is that as the virtual worlds evolve, in a place where material goods can't help or hinder, people will wake up to the sort of place we are making in the real world, and change it.

It's such a beautiful day today. The sky is a bright pastel blue with fluffy white clouds, just like the beginning of the Simpsons. The snowdrops are out, the crocus are through and shiny green leaves are growing in our terracotta pots. It looks as though it may be the calm before the storm, however, with storms and snowfall predicted for the end of the week.

Apart from a brief flurry last year, my children have begun to suspect that all predictions of snow are lying or mistaken, at least for our part of London. For years they brought out our two sledges and polished the runners when there were forecasts of snow... and for years the sledges went back into storage, their runners still pristine and shiny.

We see the snowfalls in other parts of the country, watch the news bulletins with roads clogged by skidding cars, or lorries stuck in snowdrifts, but generally the most we can expect are a few flurries and then wet pavements underfoot. I'm sure I am going to get to the age where this is a blessing... but they aren't ready for that yet.

It's the reason why, having promised my daughter faithfully that I would wake her up if there ever looked like a chance of snow settling, I found myself on a walk through Uxbridge at about 4am on the one day last February when, for a short while, snow settled in any quantity. If the snow settles here over the weekend, I shall no doubt find myself on a similar walk.

It's easy to moan and complain about the cold and the snow, but there is something very special about going out into a world made new by the white covering, making new footprints, and having those disappear as new snow falls on old.

There is something magical about the way that the sound is deadened, and things seem quiet and still under new snowfall. I still remember the winter of 62/63 with the heavy snowfall, and I have pictures of myself returning from a walk with my grandmother after particularly heavy snow. I remember going for a walk around the Green at Croxley Green, and falling into ditches where the snow was deeper than me. I had a wonderful time, aged about four, though I remember getting very cold and wishing that I could be warm and out in the snow.

On September 11th, what else would I think about but the anniversary of the destruction of the twin towers? I remember Thomas was ill and we'd just had lunch, being in the UK. The children loved Neighbours, an Australian soap, and so I allowed them to watch it while we had lunch. I used to find that though the acting and plot lines were terrible, the one useful thing about Neighbours was that it often dealt with difficult moral issues, like lying or cheating, or stealing, and we could often have a useful family debate about the rights and wrongs of a character's actions by using the series.

Downstairs, we turned off the tv the moment Neighbours finished, but upstairs Thomas continued to watch tv, and came hurtling downstairs a few minutes later to report that the first plane had hit the twin towers in America. We watched the smoke and heard inane commentary from journalists who couldn't work out what had happened and had little information to go on.

My initial thought was that it was a tragic accident. I thought maybe the pilot had lost concentration, and had crashed into the tower. I was aware of the tragedy for the people in the plane, and those killed or injured in the tower, but I thought that the Americans would mobilise the emergency services, and... another plane crashed.

The commentators still wittered on about the possibility of accidents, having no confirmation about terrorist attacks, but it was obvious to anyone that this was deliberate. One tragically distracted pilot was unlikely, two was just not possible, on the same day in the same place.

Even though I lived through the time of the Irish bombings in London, indeed, my sister was at Harrods and assisted people at the scene when it was bombed in the 1980s, 9/11 changed things for me. If terrorists could hijack and fly planes to the heart of the richest, most technologically advanced country in the world, then where could they not hit? For a while, they achieved their aims of invoking terror, because I was terrified... I felt that planes could drop out of the sky any where, any time.

The children, once they had established that the twin towers were not in London and that it was a long way away, drifted away from the television, but I stayed and watch ed, and didn't know what to do. I longed to talk to the people I loved, to share my fears and compassion for the people caught in the towers, but I didn't want to drag them into this feeling of fear and anguish that I found myself in.

I thought that bombs had been set inside the planes, when the towers collapsed. I felt angry at the wickedness which would put them into planes knowing that good and courageous people would be trying to rescue the people in the towers, to kill them too. Of course, we didn't know for some time that the first events had destroyed the towers, it wasn't clear. I was hungry for news and for information, partially for selfish reasons, I wanted to understand and to know what the danger was. Initially I thought the planes driven into the towers were light planes, with suicide bombers on board. It quickly became clear they were hijacked passenger jets though.

The horror of being able to empathise with the people became almost unbearable... the people trapped in the tower, their friends, their families, the firemen and ambulance men and officials who went to the scene, their families, their friends, then realising that there had been people in the planes, their terror, their friends and their families.

The same images, over and over, gradually joined by others, over and over, the planes into the towers from different angles, the people jumping, the people running from rivers of dust and debris, the desolation.

I have wondered why it has such a huge impact on the world, because there have been natural disasters, earthquakes and hurricanes, which have caused bigger destruction and have hardly made a ripple. I think the immediacy of the news coverage was one thing - we were experiencing the event just as vividly as most Americans, watching it on tv.

The second thing was the number of people involved in such a concentrated area. The third was that with an earthquake, there is little warning, one minute you may be asleep and the next under the weight of your house. For a lot of the people involved in these attacks, they had to live for some time with the knowledge of their impending deaths, and everyone can empathise with the idea of a mother, son, husband, grandfather, trapped in a situation like that and wanting to reach out to the people they loved.

In an age of mobile phones, a lot of them were able to do that, to share the last moments of their lives, tell people they loved them. Many though found answerphones and unanswered phones... we can all feel the tragedy of that, too.

Most of all, it was the fact of being face to face with the evil which would allow a human being to plot the destruction of so many others, deliberately. That would allow them to ignore the ties of love which fanned out from the twin towers into homes all over the world, proud parents, brothers and sisters, who saw their relatives trapped and then die.

Finally, and I am ashamed to say it, it was the vulnerability which it exposed, the feeling that all over the world planes might drop out of the sky and exterminate the people in any famous building or landmark. When news of the plane which hit the pentagon, and the other which was heroically crashed into a field, came, it began to feel as though no place was safe. It seemed incomprehensible that the Americans could not protect these places, initially, but of course when it became clear that the planes were civilian commercial aircraft, with innocent people on board, it was obvious that the authorities had been put into an impossible situation.

Later still, I began to wonder if it was compassion or incompetence which had stopped them knocking those planes out of the sky, but really, there was no way that they could have done the right thing, in the circumstances. Would it have been right to bring the planes down somewhere else? I don't think it would, really, have been a decision that could have been taken, or could have been easily lived with after taking it.

In the years since the attacks, I hav begun to feel that we have lost sight of the things worth fighting for. Freedoms are taken away easily, and clawed back with difficulty. Tales of American airports refusing entry to people, or demanding access to their email and mobile phones before allowing them into the country, strange behaviour at airports, detainment of people in the UK and US without charges.

Most particularly, the detainment camp at Guantanamo Bay is a symbol of the loss of all idea of right and wrong on that part of America. It is a symbol of repression, tyranny and lack of respect for human rights.

The fact that people are detained there without right to an opportunity to prove their innocence, overriding the development of our judicial system and that of the Americans, expunging it even, to withdraw the right of habeus corpus to people "we know" are guilty... is an affront to the whole idea of liberty. I am now more scared of America and her warped idea of right and wrong than I am of terrorists, and more scared of a future in which our rights to be left alone unless we have committed a crime and can be proved to have committed a crime, have vanished almost entirely, already.

I think most people love their families, have compassion for others, and want only the opportunity to live their lives in peace. To run western countries as though everyone is a potential terrorist is absolutely wrong.

So in the six years since 9/11, my feelings have changed from overwhelming sadness, compassion, empathy for the people caught up in that event, and their friends and families, to horror at the reaction which tries to protect us from future terrorism by removing our freedoms, to hatred for Guantanamo Bay and the people who maintain it. And I am a white, middle-aged woman from London. I can imagine how much more strongly I would feel if I were the brother of a detainee.

I can't finish this post without drawing attention to Project Hamad, campaigning to get someone who has been incarcerated at Guantanamo Bay released. Read it, and if you feel able, join the project and campaign.

Wow it has been a long time since I posted to this blog - over a year! The trouble is I am writing so many blogs at once, that I lose track of them. Really I should just amalgamate the lot into one enormous blog.

I can hear Ali playing the guitar. He has taught himself, with a bit of help from his friends, and is playing amazingly well as long as he has music to follow.

I'm just about recovered from having a few of Thomas's friends over for a party. He was 15 the other day, and wanted friends who live some distance away to come and play cards and eat pizza... so he invited them to stay over in the garden. They were supposed to sleep in the tent, but stayed awake all night, playing tag at 3am.

I like the idea of tents and camping, but really in a last days of the Raj, have the servants bring another footstool sort of way. It's just bloody hard work lugging everything you need, putting up tents, taking down tents, and the whole process of living.

I love the idea of a spherical treehouse. I have seen this website mentioned a few times recently, and it looks amazing. I'm just not sure I'd have the courage to put it too far up. 5 metres seems far enough to me!

Went to Camp Mohawk, to the Home Education group, with my mother and the children. The children took off straight away for their friends, and my mother and I stayed talking in the car, eating our lunch and chatting. Although we felt like a bit of a lie down, we decided to go for a walk, in the beautiful countryside on Crazies Hill.

The Camp is at the top of the hill, and we walked a little way down to get to a meadow, and took the public right of way across it. Almost immediately we came upon a scattering of primroses, followed by wild violets. A peacock butterfly fluttered past.

The weather was warm but dullish, and we took the left hand path, which took us through the woods.

The woodland is ancient, but has been scarred by a lot of plantations. You can see the difference immediately. The deciduous woodland has scatterings of violets, bluebells, wood anemones, lesser celandines, wood sorrel, there are birds and insects buzzing around. We took a small path off the main woodland path, because my mother was feeling adventurous, and gradually the path disappeared, and we found ourselves picking our way down a hillside covered in bluebell plants, although there were very few bluebells in evidence.

My mother is 68, but was forging ahead, and took me through some spongy ground, past a dead fox, and proposed that we should make our way over the trickle of water below by climbing across a fallen tree trunk, which was covered in moss. I declined to make a fool of myself falling 12 feet into the boggy mud around the water, and retraced my steps, but she was determined to explore and struck off to the right up the other side of the valley, which was pine plantation.

Here, it was very very spooky. There was no undergrowth at all, no birds singing, and even the wind seemed still...the trees didn't move at all. Many of them seemed to be dead, and there were a large number fallen over, prevented from rolling downhill by the fact that they were caught against other trees.

What was really odd was that many of the upright trees appeared to have had fires lit beneath them. There were signs of camp fires against the different trees. I began to sonder if someone had tried to set the trees ablaze....

We ploughed up the hill to an area where there was no discernible path. Oh my mother was convinced she had one, but as it inconveniently passed by every hawthorn bush in the vicinity, I was sure that only four legged creatures 2 ft or less in height could possibly have used the path regularly.

Eventually as the bushes and trees became more dense, and it seemed we weren't going to find another path, we again retraced our footsteps. As I passed down the hill I picked up a number of stones that were very smooth and almost shiny, and realised that they seemed to be sea washed....

When I got home I started looking at information about the area, and saw that they were likely to be sea washed...as the area around Reading was under water for a large part of its geological history. We are going to go back next week.