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.

Woke 4.45 to hear the dog downstairs, barking to be let out. This is unusual: he sleeps in our room, and usually gets up when I do. I heard him bark twice, and thought perhaps my husband would get up. After all, I only had 2 hours sleep the night before, because our daughter was ill. But no. So I got up, realising I had a sore throat, and in all likelihood was going to have the thing my daughter had.

Thus it was that I got to see the sunrise, which was for a few minutes, the most amazing sight. In our house, we have brilliant views of the sunsets, but I don't usually get good views of the sunrises. Our hous is on a hill, which is such a gentle slope that until I had children I didn't really realise it was a hill. The back of the house looks down the slope, and there is a good open area where the sunset can be seen. The front of the house is overlooked by houses above, on the opposite side of the road, and they block out the sunrise.

This morning the sky was covered in cottonwool clouds, and it looked exactly as it would if you had taken a rool of cottonwool and eked it out across the sky. The underside of the clouds was highlighted in candyfloss pink all over the sky. It only lasted for a few minutes and bodes badly for the weaher today.

It's warm, and I cam hear the thrum of the fans in the children's rooms. I am sitting here in my dresing gown, but I think I will shrug off the top and sit here naked from the waist up. The heat is oppressive already.

I am drinking Fanta for my throat. I don;t usually drink soft drinks other than water, but we have some big bottles of Fanta bought for the children, and I just fancied some. I am worrying about the effect of this bug on Ali already. His Crohn's disease may flare again if he gets this bug.

Feeling oddly lucky today. I went up to Great Ormond Street hospital on Wednesday with my son, travelled on the underground, walked and taxied around the Russell Square and Tavistock Square area. Fate's an odd thing.

We waited in the Costa Cafe for Ali's x-ray appointment, and the announcement for the Olympics bid was playing on a flat screen tv on the wall. I am renowned for my disdain about sport being the opium of the masses, having replaced religion, and I find it hard to care about sporting milestones, or sporting success.

We say that Sky said that the announcement was imminent, and watched as the two Singaporean presenters awkwardly complimented one another upon their appearance and introduced the announcement. I had bought a sandwich and a coffee, Ali had a soft drink, and we watched as they announced that they would play the promotional films from the five cities remaining in the race.

Paris had a very upbeat film, all primary colours and smiling people, obviously produced by an ad agency.

New York had, by contrast, a very sombre film, all black and white and no sport as far as one could see - sights of the city, a musician, very downbeat and dark.

Moscow's was different again, small snippets of film, which appeared to include thank yous to all of the other cities bidding for the games.

Madrid's looked oddly amateur, with talking faces suddenly projected from the screen, overlaying the city panoramas. We couldn't hear what was being said by the scary big heads.

Although I am partisan, I would have to say that I thought London's was the best of the films. There was music, there was a story which didn't require you to speak or understand English, and there was the idea that ordinary people could do extraordinary things. I thought it stood head an shoulders against all but the Parisian film, and had more heart and soul than any of them.

We were keeping an anxious eye on the time, as we didn't want to have to leave without knowing what had been decided. Then they appeared to announce that the announcement was coming...and then three opera singers started to sing. There was an audible groan from the considerable crowd which had gathered to hear the announcement.

The singers finished, we were on the edge of our seats...and the camera focussed on a girl who was holding a cushion to enable her to carry the envelope with the result to the President of the IOC.

We waited with baited breath as she crossed the stage, and then the President bad her stand by while he said a few words...another groan escaped the crowd.

At long last, he took the envelope, opened it, and announced that the Olypiad would go to the city of...
...London! there was an involutary cry of YES! by all in the cafe, including me, and including the woman who, moments before, had said that it would be a nightmare were the Olympics to come to the town.

We finished our appointments, walked away from the hospital, to find a cab.

The next day, I listened with growing alarm as the reports of a "power surge" seemed to affect moe and more stations...when a bus exploded at about 9.45, it was clear that there had been a terrorist attack. I thought about the people gathered in that cafe, all jubilant that the Olympic were coming to London. How many of them were caught up in the horror, trying to get to work?

How easily we fall into terrible circumstances, and how easily we escape. A missed bus can save your life...a missed bus can cost you your life. Hitting the snooze button can save your life...hitting the snooze button can cost you your life. And no-one can know which will be which.

I went in to SL to a barrage of IMs asking if I was OK. Made a candle and a poem as a memorial to those who died. I can't bring the candle here, but I can show you the poem.

Spirits rising
They left expecting ordinary days
Instead found they were going on a different sort of journey
They left their cups of coffee and unpaid bills
Stepped out of their homes and away from their lives
And can't return
Instead their souls set free today,
In darkness and confusion,
In smoke and pain,
Soared away from their broken bodies
Into a life beyond
Light a candle for their friends and their families.
Light a candle for their children...
Their wives and mothers...
Husbands and fathers...
Light a candle for the loss
But their souls were set free today
Into a life beyond
The people in real need of light,
Of prayers and illumination
Set those bombs

Today has been one of the most embarrassing days of my life. I have to make a confession, and I am not sure that even now, a week later, that I am equal to making it, because the cringe-making aspects of it linger. But here goes....

We have been living next to some lovely neighbours. They rent their house, which actually belongs to one of the local churches. In times gone by, the vicar or pastor or reverend for the church has lived in the house, but their most recent vicar already has a house fairly locally. So the church has rented it out.

I have to say that the church makes a pretty unchristian and thoughtless neighbour. Where one would be able to ask a neighbour what their plans are, or talk to them about trimming the hedge or killing their vermin, a church is pretty difficult to talk to. At one point they let the house to a pair of drug dealers who roared around town late at night in their flash cars, and had noisy and terrible parties going on into the early hours and beyond.

These neighbours are American and have been understanding about the noise and mess of a three child house. In return, my daughter has regularly jumped over the fence to let them in their own front door, as they have regularly locked themselves out at the front.

We were out on Friday when the family made contact, told my husband they were going back to the States, and said that they had a few electrical things they couldn't take back to the states, would be like them. He said yes, and agreed to go round later than evening, but they weren't there. They came around later with a stereo which the children fell upon with delight.

They told us they would be leaving more stuff, some flower pots, a couple of rugs etc, at the front of the property and we should help ourselves. We said goodbye.

The following day I arrived home to find a rug I didn't recognise on the floor. They had indeed left a lot of stuff out at the front, about 20 black bin bags and some loose things...my husband had said that he would clear the black bags and he took the items they left.

My sister asked what was in the black bags. I told her I had no idea. My son told me that there was something interesting in one which looked like a rucksack. We decided to have a quick look before we took the things to the tip.

We found...
5 laptops, 30 ethernet cards, one leather rucksack, a blow up bed, a battery-powered inflator for said bed, a shoe box full of hotel toiletries, a clip-on spotlight, a table lamp, a door mat, a runner rug, a (new-looking) computer printer, a hold-all and a leather folder with notepad....

There was a lot more, but we didn't want to be intrusive and sort through personal items, at least, I tried not to do anything which I wouldn't like anyone else to do to me. I didn't look at the papers and correspondence, for example.

On Sunday my son went out to War Hammer, and I was typing on the computer. There was a knock at the door and I ran downstairs in my decorating clothes, no bra. I was expecting it to be my son.

The couple were standing on the doorstep. They had a card in their hand. They had come to say goodbye, and were clearly expecting an invitation to come in and have a cup of tea. But I couldn't! in my living room were 5 laptops...30 ethernet cards...etc

As I talked to them from behind the door, I became exquisitely aware that I was standing on a doormat (rescued from their bin bags) with a runner rug behind (rescued from their bin bags) my leather rucksack on the stairs (rescued from their bin bags) and a box of three soaps (rescued from their bin bags) sitting on the hall window ledge.

I nearly died with embarrassment as they told me how grateful they were that John had taken the bags to the tip and they handed me the card. I don't know what I said, I was too embarrassed to make sense. I think I have post traumatic stress disorder now. I keep getting flashbacks.

I muttered, said goodbye, good trip, and shut the door, and sank to my knees. AAARGH

To make matters worse, the card contained vouchers for Marks and Spencers and kind words. I may even be able to look at it without blushing by 2008.

My mother keeps saying...you never have to see them again...they did say that they wanteed you to feel free to help yourself to anything...you never have to see them again. It doesn't seem to be an effective treatment, I'm still getting the flashbacks.

Up at 5.30am. I just can't sleep, am on worry overload at the moment.

Last week, I was worrying that the hospital were planning on operating on my son without checking how the stricture he has is doing. He was admitted to hospital at the end of May with high inflammatory markers, pain and vomiting. Things had settled down fairly quickly, but not before he had had a barium enema showing a stricture.

He has active inflammation at that point, and so I was glad that the surgeon ordered a barium follow-through, thinking this would show what was going on, whether the stricture was improving or getting worse. Unfortunately, when we arrived at the hospital last Monday, it became clear that they were only going to look at his small bowel, to ensure there weren't any other problems going on, and they didn't plan on looking at the area of the stricture again.

He was really upset, thought that if there had been any improvement, the first time they would find this out, would be when he was on the operating table, and it was too late. I phoned the consultant from the internal phone on the reception desk, but got a very obstructive and unhelpful secretary who was very unhelpful.

"What do you mean you want your son to have other tests? Have you seen the surgeon?"
"Well yes, but when he said that he was ordering a barium follow-through, I thought in my ignorance that this would show the area of the bowel where the stricture is."
"So...does he think the operation is necessary?"
"Well, obviously he does, or he wouldn't have scheduled it."
"So...you disgree with him?"
"No, I am not saying I disagree with him, just that I think it would help my son to be reconciled to the fact that it is necessary if he felt reassured that they had checked that the stricture hadn't improved. We thought they would check that today; they aren't going to."
"So...did the surgeon say it was necessary to check it?"
"No, obviously not, because they aren't checking it. But I would have discussed that with him if I had understood that."
"So...what are you asking me to do?"
"I would just like to ask for some sort of test to reassure him that the surgery is necessary...maybe an ultrasound, as the narrowing has shown up on the previous ones?"
"So...you want me to ask if he can have an ultrasound, even though none of the doctors think that is necessary? I just want to be clear on what you want...."

AAAARGH. She wasn't rude, but she made it perfectly clear she thought I was being ridiculous, and somehow managed to convey a sense that I was being unreasonable and demanding as well.

I waited to hear from them and nothing happened and so I contact the PALS people. These are the Patient Advisory and Liaison service in the hospital. I wasn't optimistic.

I sat on the local Maternity Services Liaison Committee at the local hospital for a couple of years, and also on the Patient Panel locally. A friend was chairman of the local Community Health Council too. I gradually became more and more sceptical that these committees actually achieved anything - I thought they spent a lot of time patting themselves on the back and achieving very little.

An example: the sub-committee which had been formed to look into seasonal bed shortages reported to the patient panel. There was a long report, with a lot of figures, and they declared their committee's investigation a success. I looked at it, and it appeared to show that seasonal bed shortages were worse than ever, and the sub-committee has provided no solutions to that problem, and had effected no change in the situation. I asked by what criteria they judged it a success?

I got some old-fashioned looks and a lot of shifting in their seats. Normally it seemed that they tended to pat each other on the back for a job well done, and didn't consider whether the committee had achieved what it set out to achieve, or had changed the experience on a single patient. They had successfully gathered information and report back with it. That's why they were a success. I found the people generally to be obsessed with their own pet subjects, self-satisfied and unable to judge objectively what was going on.

The only people who seemed to be looking at things the way I did were the Community Health Councils, who did seem to me to gain a pretty good overview of what was going on in their areas, and to be committed to changing those things which needed changing. I was pretty pessimistic when the government disbanded them all in favour of Patient Advice and Liaison Services within hospitals. for a start I thought it was unlikely that the PALS services would have the required independence to be able to investigate internally, and I was also pessimistic that no-one would have an overview of the services in an area any more.

I am still sceptical about that - I think that the government aimed to reduce the amount of critical responses it gets to its changes in health care. But as for the second, I have been pleasantly surprised.

The PALs in the hospital took up our case very quickly, talked to the people concerned and said that there was some merit in what we said. They agreed to cancel my son's operation and to do some more investigations and I heaved a sigh of relief. My son was also more relaxed and happy than he had been since they talked about operations.

So...we are due back for another barium enema, and of course, he has started to flare up again, and now I am worrying that I did the wrong thing. Had I not interfered, then he would be scheduled to have his operation in less than a week. As it is, we are supposed to go in this morning, but if he is flaring again, then the likelihood is that the stricture is still there and as bad as it was before.

It is difficult to know who to go to because he seems to be caught in a no-man's land between medical and surgical which means that he has two sets of consultant, registrar and a medley of House Officers and Senior House officers, all involved in his case.

He is feeling ill, was hot last night, and I have no idea if I will be doing the right thing to take him in for the test or not. He has diarrhoea, and that will make the train journey difficult and stressful. Bloody Crohn's disease...I hate it.

Add in the fact that our financial problems seem to be getting worse and worse, and you will see why I am up and typing into this Blog at this time in the morning. Hell's teeth.

What I love about being online, is the connections that I make. A few days ago, I took on the job of making an avatar for SecondLife of the main character in Cory Doctorow's "Someone comes to town, someone leaves town". In the course of the making, I visited the website of the author, and realised what a very interesting man he is :-).

http://www.craphound.com/
Not only that, he's releasing this novel on the internet for free at the same time as it is published in recycled trees...and there is a creative commons agreement that people in the developing world may take and use his work for free. You can see more in the link above.

I am also very impressed by the artist who made the cover of the book, and have been visiting webpages to see other examples of his work. Dave McKean is his name.
http://www.mckean-art.co.uk/

A couple of weeks ago, I made another avatar, for one of the people attending the Supernova conference...and in looking up photographs of the man, found information about his work into "The Media Equation: How People Treat Computers, Television, and New Media Like Real People and Places (Cambridge University Press). " Also fascinating.
http://communication.stanford.edu/faculty/reeves.html

Unfortunately, I am beginning to feel that my life is going to be too short tobe able to do justice to all the connections and links I am finding to things that fascinate me. I think it is my blessing and my curse, that I am interested in almost everything and can imagine myself working in many different environments. It is a blessing, because I am rarely - strike that - never bored. I always have things I want to do, read, visit in my head, and I am usually very excited by something I have been thinking or reading about.

It's been a huge asset when home educating the children, because there are very few subjects I don't feel interested in, very, very few. It was also an asset when I was working as a writer for Lloyd's Register, because I was able to throw myself into any story I was asked to write about, and find the contents fascinating.

On the other hand, it makes settling into one direction very hard indeed. I played the piano for a party at the meeting house a few weeks ago, and people are still coming up to me to tell me how impressed they were with my music. (I had composed the music which I played). Many of them have said that I ought to investigate publishing it. But I also make jewellery, and have often had people say to me that I ought to investigate having my necklaces made commercially. And I have written professionally. And I love family history research and would love to do that for a living. And I am very interested in health and especially a fusion between conventional and alternative forms of healing. And I am interested in education, and would like to write about alternatives to the current model of state-funded huge secondary school.

When I pick up a paper, to look at the jobs, there are very few I can't imagine myself doing. I am articulate, literate, numerate, have common sense, and I work loyally and hard for any company which employs me. I am intelligent and a good manager, and I love being responsible for a department when I was working full-time, before I had the children. I find that the huge variety of choices makes it hard for me to choose to go in one direction or another... it has lead to an almost total inertia.

Not quite, though. I have been commission to write a guide to Second Life. The company I found produces guides to a large number of games, and doesn't do one for SL at the moment, and so I pitched the idea to them, provided an outline table of contents, and they bit. So that's why I am writing that at the moment and not this blog....

Well...hmmm it has been a little while since I updated this web journal. I see that one of my friends from SecondLife has started a journal, made two entries and run away, and that seems to be par for the course for a lot of Blogs. I think part of the problem is that people realise that if they are identifiable, it becomes very difficult to avoid revealing other people's secrets in a blog. I think a few days down the line is usually when people start to realise things would be so much easier if only their blog was anonymous, or at least unfindable using a search on their name.

I don't have any excuses really...i just forgot. Things have been a might stressful around here, and so I haven't updated...and now there is a lot of catching up to do....

Perhaps I should just start where I am at the moment. OK...my son was due to have surgery at the beginning of July, but that has been postponed in favour of further tests. My husband, after not drinking for a year, has decided this means he isn't an alcoholic and he can drink again. I found the half empty bottle of gin, and we had a short conversation before he poured it down the bathroom sink. I told him I wasn't up to a full-on row while we are so worried about our son, and so he has agreed to stop drinking for three months so that we are past this difficult part.

Our financial situation hasn't improved in a year, and is exacerbated by the fact that along with the gin bottle, J has been concealing the post. I borrowed some money from my father which helped pay off the worst in the past couple of months, but our financial situation is not helped by the fact that the company that J does most of his work for tend to be rather backward in paying up the dosh. They have excelled themselves this month by not only not paying up on time, but by deducting costs which have been paid to barristers which ought not to have been and deducting a larger percentage than had been agreed.

It is really getting to the point where we might be better off on benefit. I have applied for some jobs, but the logistics of home educating, and being there for my son if he does have to go into hospital, have made it quite difficult to see how I can do it.

I also feel quite resentful that J has a profession and qualifications and yet seems content to sit around waiting for work to fall into his lap.

Got to go - I am being pushed off the computer. Will try to do this first thing in the morning in future, which should prevent interruptions :-).

Aaargh...the day from hell. It started with the dog suddenly barking at about 7am, so I staggered from bed, tripping over boxes of books, to let him out. It was cold, and the overnight freeze had turned the snow of yesterday into iced granite.

I tidied, did some washing up, looked at email. Day break was bright and clear. Heard a bark. The dog for some reason I couldn't fathom, was on the patio table. And seemed to be unable to get off it again. He was sitting in the ice and melting snow, and needed me to stagger over there and get him down again. I did.

Kate, who is nine, got up first. She wanted something nice for breakfast, fancied french toast, but we only had two eggs, and Alistair always has first dibs on those as he is on a special diet. We decided to go to Sainsburys to buy some more eggs. As Kate didn't want her brothers to come, they were passionately keen to go. They got up, got dressed, and argued amongst themselves about whether they were coming or not, and what we would buy.

Frantic barks from the garden. Dog on patio table for the second time, unable to get off. The children used treats and cajoling, but it wasn't working, so I had to go out and lift the daft animal off the table again. What the attraction was is beyond me, as he was plainly terrified once he was on the table.

Taking no chances, Alistair and I turned the patio table over and rested it on its top. We usually do that anyway in about November, as strong winds have carried away more than one patio table. The weather has been so mild until now, that we hadn't bothered with it.

Went to Sainburys, bought eggs and a lot else besides, and was cross questioned by nosey cashier..."your children not in school today then?" followed by - when I had explained they are home educated - "You a teacher, then?" and a loud sniff when I explained I am not.

We took four boxes between us for packing books into, and marched off home, an icy wind blasting round corners at us all the way home. The children were keen to watch neighbours over lunch, but Greg Dyke's resignation was all over the tv. We watched, I gnashed my teeth and then visited the BBC website to make my opinions known.

How the government can have cobbled their intelligence dossier from one thesis and a couple of other sources, provided no evidence that any of the things in it were true, and then act in this way towards the BBC is beyond me. I visited the Number 10 Downing Street website yesterday and left feedback there to that effect too.

Oh rats, dropped pomegranate bits all over the keyboard. Read somewhere that for women of a certain age, pomegranates have something in them that nothing else has, and have been eating them a-go-go ever since, hoping that whatever magic they do, will work for me. I've been feeling fit to strangle someone. I expect it is my hormones if I have any left.

Pomegranates don't help with frustration - they are the most infuriating fruit to eat. The have the bizarre capability of producing an unfeasibly large mound of debris which appears to defy the laws of nature by exceeding the size of the original fruit, even after you have ingested several thousand small pockets of juice...and spat out the pips. They are so bloody fiddly
and they make the keyboard sticky.

The peasants were revolting this evening. One son decided to clear out the sofas in the hope of striking gold, and lo! he found a ?2 coin and the other son instantly claimed ownership of it. It seemed wrong to deprive the one who had bothered to search the sofa, but on the other hand wrong to deprive the rightful owner as he had been discovered, so I made him give the ?2 back, and gave him ?2 to replace it.

The other son then started throwing a teenage tantrum about it being unfair to reward someone for stealing his money. After some swearing and shouting, I sent him to his bedroom, and he refused to go. Thus I could be seen womanhandling him up to his bedroom, much to his amazement and disgust. We had another shout at each other in his bedroom before I left him to it, only to find that in the meantime Kate and Thomas had had a fight over a piece of bubble gum, and Thomas had deliberately sabotaged the bubble gum as he knew it wasnt his.

Kate was demanding 20 pence compensation and I fel as though my head was about to explode. I would like to have a husband to call in at these points, but J is an all or nothing sort of guy - either he ignores it completely, or he goes so far over the top, that he is in outer space....I sent them to bed and stormed off downstairs.

I did some ritual banging things about in the kitchen, finished the washing up and then treated myself to a couple of squares of stale chocolate, a pomegranate and a cold cup of tea. Boy do I know how to live, or what?

Things are getting worse again. Telephone calls from credit card companies that haven't been paid...husband with blank expression when asked why...aaargh.

We have made a plan for moving and releasing the equity in the house to buy a new house somewhere else...but it is going to take quite a lot of money to bring this house up to saleable standard. I am packing our books away in boxes - we have thousands - to store at my mother's, while we decorate. J seems to think this can be achieved while lying horizontal in bed. As Del Boy would say, he suffers from sticky sheets....

I have never been able to stay in bed once I am awake. I have to get up and get going, can't lie about snoozling and sleeping. If I go back to bed, I am either VERY tired, or ill.

J on the other hand, can easily sleep until 2pm if he has no committments, and then get up and lie on top of the bed while he watches TV or reads papers, or does the crossword. That would drive me crazy. It's fine if we have nothing that needs doing. But when we have 101 things that need to be done, it is infuriating.

I have lots of things I can get on with, but I can't transfer all the books to my mother's, and I can't do all the things he can do. Our house is stuffed with Do-it-Yourself equipment I have been struggling to live with for the past 20 years - we have a tool for every job you might like to mention. This should be a positive asset in the current situation, but strangely it isn't. Aaargh.

In the general sort out I am coming across diaries I wrote when the children were babies, and which are written in fugitive ink. One of the diaries is barely readable now, in a couple of years it will be unreadable. I should type it up, because I feel sure that Ali will love it when he gets a bit older...but how to find the time?

I want to stop the world for about a week to give me time to catch up. Oh well...maybe when we are out in the sticks and J is working back here during the week, I will have time to do things like that.

Haven't looked at this for a long time...which will be evident by the long gap in entries, of course. have been meaning to go back to regular diary entries for ages. Now I have paper diaries, diary entries in my word files, diary entries all over the place.

Things are changing - I suppose that's why I want to be writing a diary. We are looking to move, and are preparing the house for the possibility that someone else might come here and see it as somewhere they might want to live. This is the other reason to be writing a diary - avoiding getting into the loft to see what a quantity of rubbish needs to be shifted when we move.

The children are all being horrors this week - maybe the idea of moving has unsettled them..I don't know. Currently I can hear Delta Gudrun at maximum volume fighting with something else.

The dog is helping by redesigning the garden for us in the current wet weather.... He has carved a new path for himself in the lawn, and brings a quantity of mud in every time he comes in.

We are looking to move to Norfolk or Suffolk, as the moe might allow us to be without a mortgage. It would involve a lot of very real changes - I have lived in this area for thirty years, and I know a lot of people locally. One of the things I like is the feeling of belonging that it gives me - I can find a house of someone I know in most streets in my area, which isn't something that many people can say in a commuter belt where there is a high turnover of families.

Still, it would have a lot of advantages, especially for the children. And if I manage to write for a living, it would mean that I could work more or less anywhere...in theory.

The stereo wars upstairs are getting louder, and the pasta is ready, must go. I won't leave it so long before I return.

Woke up this moring with a crick in my neck, having spent the night on the sofa. Kate started throwing up at 3.30am night before last, and the impossibility of looking after her on her cabin bed when she needed to rush to the bathroom meant that we ended up downstairs, plastic wastebaskets in hand.

Monday October 28
We travelled to Suffolk to see Matthew Manning. I had been intending to travel by train, but at the last moment John's interview was cancelled and so he was able to drive us. Thank goodness that he was, as there was total choas on the train system, following the storm the day before. My mother came and picked up T and K and then we set off at about 10.30 - only half an hour late. The journey was fine, although there were a lot of trees knocked down by the wind, at the side of the road. We arrived very early, and decided to have lunch in the pub. Hartest is a very olde English type of village, with a green, lots of old cottages, and a proper pub with nictine yellow walls and horse brasses. It must be popular in the summer and at weekends, as there were vast rooms of empty tables, and a very comprehensive adventure playground in the garden.

We sat and ate green lipped mussels while Alistair sipped a glass of water. He was quiet and a bit apprehensive, never having visited a healer before. We went for a short walk around the village and then arrived for our appointment fifteen minutes early, as instructed.

Sturgeon's hall is a yellow painted substantial house overlooking the village green. There was an instruction to enter the house using the stable door, and so we found ourselves in a large waiting room with a big fireplace, lots of paintings and comfortable sofas. We were greeted, and then sat on the sofa. There were some interesting books, including a What Doctors Dont Tell You publication about different diseases. I quickly looked up Chron's disease and scribbled down some recommendations about alternative treatments. MOst of them I knew about, but licorice root was a new one on me.

The previous patient made his way painfully out of the treatment room, assisted by Matthew and two helpers, and two sticks. I thought initially that he was an old man, but he didn't appear to be. I was afraid of seeming to stare, so concentrated on returning the book to the table, and getting our things together. We were called in.

I have read so much about Matthew Manning over the years, seen him on television, followed his career with interest. I wondered if I would instantly feel a bond, or feel the power of his healing ability. I warmed to him immediately, he was very relaxed and friendly. He talked to us quietly about what was wrong, told us that treatment might not make any difference, although the other people he was treating with Crohn's had responded to treatment.

The treatment room was a lot smaller than I was expecting, with a warm yellow decor and little stars. Matthew put Alistair on a chair in the middle of the room, and gave him some cushions to put under his feet. Matthew put on some music and then just placed his hands on Alistair. I closed my eyes and tried to meditate and "hold them in the light" as Quakers say.

The time seemed to pass very quickly indeed. It seemed like only a couple of minutes, but must have been half an hour. We came to, said goodbye, and then made our way back to the car.

I must say that I felt very relaxed and calm. I had been suffering from a headache and feeling very stressed out, but as I walked back to the car I could feel how much tension and anxiety had disappeared. The effect is still with me three days later.

Tuesday, October 29
We had to go into town for a number of errands. I needed to pay in some money to my bank account, we had to buy a birthday present for my niece, and pick up a prescription from the doctor's surgery. On our way back from the doctor's, Alistair and Thomas were having kicking competitions, to see who could kick the highest, and I suddenly realised that Alistair was running and jumping - something he hasn't done for months and months.

Wednesday, October 30
Started several hours earlier than planned, as far as I was concerned! I heard Kate make a funny noise at about 3.30am, and called out to her. She woke, ran to the bathroom and started throwing up. She was sick every half hour for the next few hours, and we decamped to the living room. She complained of bad stomach pains, and was yelping in pain - to the extent that I thought she might have appendicitis. She slept fitfully on the sofa, as did I. Alistair woke up at about 10 am, and was bouncing about in a way that I can't remember him doing for years. He was very happy and seemed excited too.

Kate was very disappointed that she wouldn't be able to go to her cousin's birthday party, but didn't want to because she was feeling so poorly. She seemed to improve in the middle of the day, but was feeling ill again by the time that the boys had to leave for the party at 4pm. I gave her some paracetemol for her headache, and stopped worrying that she had appendicitis and started worrying that it was meningitis....