FraserWords

Well, there they go again: the boys off to school after the morning ritual of feeding, scrubbing, urging, hurrying, arguing, finding, losing, finding again, brushing and dressing completed once more, but with varying degrees of reluctance. Some mornings it’s a full-force hurricane of obstinacy, both boys moving with glacial speed and all the sense of commitment of Nick Clegg discussing his regrets about tuition fees. Some mornings I scream like Jack Nicholson in The Shining, and look like him too.

What a thing it is, having children. I look in on them at night and breathe in the scent of their warm bodies snuggled under duvets, look around at the litter of toy cars, Transformers, soccer magazines, sticks, balls, seeds, wrappers, collectors’ cards and other junk with which they surround themselves and marvel, like every parent, that they should be there at all…. Did I really contribute to this? They snuggle up to me as I read stories, and I feel their little bodies and think how it will break my heart in two when they no longer want to be seen dead with their stupid dad.

It is true that once you have them, it is impossible to look at news reports of suffering where children are involved and not feel an icy shiver, or an insistent tear. It is also true that once you have them, there are times, God forgive me, when you wish you didn’t.

Do they know how fortunate they are? I was thinking it yesterday, a proper Autumn day: rain splashing down, an hour in the pub in a semi-circle round the bar at lunchtime, the reluctantly-turned-on heating taking the edge off the house at last, my eldest and I lassooing fresh conkers from the trees down by the river, the fire crackling in the hearth, shepherd’s pie in the oven, followed by apple and blackberry crumble from our trees and brambles.

How idyllic our life can be in this most comfortable of all centuries, having won God’s great lottery of birth – to be born white and in the west. Some of us can just take that luck and consume, consume, consume…. some can take that knowledge and live in the hope that others, of different classes and colours, can come to share the fortune. And parents look at their children.

I do hope and pray mine grow up to realise just how fortunate they are. I watch them with my father, who’s tiny from under-nourishment as an impoverished child grovelling in the slum gutters of Plymouth, who left school at 14 to work, who lived through a cataclysmic war, who had no National Health Service to help him out in the 30s, whose dad went to prison because he couldn’t pay the rent. My boys, I hope, will know none of that, yet it all still exists. It just exists in different colours.

In a minute I’ll go and get them. They’ll run out of the school door, clutching things to show me, festooned with jumpers and waterproofs which they’ll thrust at me. After a quick hug they’ll sprint off with their mates, throwing a “can we play, Dad?” over their shoulder.

I love them. All I want is for them to be happy.

I mention all these thoughts about the innocence and experience of my children because ‘Sir’ Michael Wilshaw, head of Ofsted, thinks teachers should work harder. Including my and my boys’ teacher, their mother, who works seven days a week, as do thousands like her. I imagine ‘Sir’ Michael wants this to come to pass so the teachers can persuade their pupils to work harder, including those many pupils whose parents are teachers, and therefore strangers to their children.

Well, I think everybody should work harder to ensure that in the world my little boys will inherit, scum like ‘Sir’ Michael Wilshaw, with his “work hard, strive for targets, work harder” ethic, will be locked far, far away from decent people whose purpose in life is to give and receive pleasure, to share, to live.

He wants my little boys to be driven by driven teachers. He wants the majority of their day, their future, to be in the hands of teachers so exhausted they can barely notice them, let alone ensure they are enjoying their childhoods.

I’ve been a writer all my life, and yet I still struggle to find words adequate to express the loathing and contempt I feel for filth like ‘Sir’ Michael Wilshaw.

That disgusting piece of refuse is part of a machinery of government that permits people like Andrew Mitchell, whose Tory contempt for us plebs was so richly expressed in a stirring display of true colours.

They are both part of a machinery that would have us take seriously, indeed respect and listen to, a Mitchell soulmate like Mitt Romney, the ludicrous religious nutter who believes poor people are self-appointed victims, who thinks liberals who live for fairness and equality are dangerous, who thinks people who don’t vote for tax-evading rich guys like him just want to survive on handouts. They’re all part of a machinery that elevates money and the getting of it for yourself and nobody else above any other creed, any other value system.

‘Sir’ Michael would doubtless have us all carry on supporting a system that votes in people like Andrew Mitchell, who can enrich themselves while just about managing to draw a thin veil over their dislike of anything or anybody that gets in the way of their greed and arrogance. Now that’s education, eh? The sort of education that means Gove and ‘Sir’ Michael can toy yet again with an education system where the only consistency has been the abuse heaped upon parents, teachers and students by succeeding generations of politicians and the craven cowards of Wilshaws who lick their fat arses in order to line their pockets and feed their so tragically needy sense of self-importance.

It seems somehow unfair that the air my little boys breathe while reading Cows In Action with me is the same air that is polluted by the likes of these ‘people’, that’s all.

Censored

Apologies for the ongoing failure to improve my service to you (maybe there should be a government watchdog to inspect me?) The Flounder is Flying once more, I am told, and all should now be well.

The difficulties around this website last week meant most of you missed Brother Stents’ pitiful excuses from his French chateau, for failing to share the Duchess of Cambridge’s adorable little puppies with a waiting nation. Something about not wanting to share a cell in the Tower with me. What on Earth would be wrong with that, eh?

Brother Bertie’s e-mail to me allegedly would have struck a blow for the freedom of the press from royal censorship, but that, too, fell victim to the ether.

I’m rather with the commentators who have pointed out the hypocrisy involved in criticism of the French press for baring the royal norks, coming from a British press that merrily salivates over full colour portraits of models with their chests out, of Katie Price hawking her ludicrous false breasts, of ‘celebrities’ getting their kit off in the jungle, of candid snaps of the wind blowing the skirt around the bare legs of Kate M…. oh. Hang on. Isn’t she the one we’re not supposed to be gawping at?

I gather Sister WizardWoman may have a cunning plan, but in the meantime Brother Stents was good enough to share a picture of Prince Harry with us… which I cannot at present upload owing to the improvement of my service to you. I’ll add it on later if I can. I blame the teachers.