Ah, half-term. Those words which sound so sweetly in the ears of children and
fall like hammer blows of fate on the hearts of working parents. Some of you
out there are good at dealing with half-term. You are the ones who book
bargain-priced skiing breaks, relishing the opportunity to spend time
together - Daddy and eldest son bonding off-piste while Mummy and elder
daughter zip expertly down the black runs in their designer salopettes.
Here in the house of Shilling it is a different story. Which is not to say
that I don't entertain quite complicated ideas for making half-term into a
pleasure rather than a penance. Just somehow they never seem to come off.
Take last week: I had hatched a brilliant plan: a kind friend - a soldier
turned classics teacher who lives in the West Country - had invited my son
down for a GCSE revision course artfully disguised as a holiday. They were
going to spend some quality time yomping across Dartmoor, conversing
exclusively in Latin and Spanish while I got on with my writing. Elegant,
non? Except you know what? The half-terms don't match. Ours was last week,
the classics teacher's is this week. No trip to Devon, No yomping. No Latin.
No Spanish. No writing. Oh, hell and damnation. Personally I blame the Duke
of Edinburgh and MI6.
Instead we sat in the house in different rooms, getting on each other's nerves
and failing to accomplish anything. Or rather, Alexander seemed quite
laid-back about it all - oddly enough, his disappointment at missing the
lovely treat of a study trip to Devon was slightly less bitter than mine on
his behalf. But by the end of the week I was semi-hysterical with the stress
of having failed to be either a good writer or a good mother, and just about
holding it together until Monday, when things would be back to normal.
Except that Monday was an inset day - one of those extra days they slap on to
the end of holidays so the beaks can go off in a charabanc, gowns flapping,
to blow the school fees on Brook No Argument in the 2.20 at Huntingdon,
while working parents take to the gin, sobbing. By the end of Monday the
entire house was sodden with stress hormones. And even the beginning of term
on Tuesday didn't help: so much work was backed up that I forgot all about
an important meeting on Wednesday evening. Now, forgetting is something I do
not do. Ever. Not forgetting things is why I have a diary. And a to-do list.
And a daily sub-edition of my main to-do list. And a list of reminder notes
in black Biro all the way up my arm like one of Amy Winehouse's tattoos,
only more useful. Forgetting things means that my entire system is emitting
the sort of urgent warning shut-down noises that you generally hear from
doomed spacecraft on Doctor Who.
Nor do I take much comfort from reading that my condition of doomed
spacecrafthood is part of a gathering trend. Reports at the weekend revealed
variously that increasing numbers of adults are being prescribed Ritalin,
the drug used to treat children with attention deficit hyperactivity
disorder, the long-term effects of which are unknown. Elsewhere, a
deliciously named psychologist, Honey Lancaster-James, warned of
“potentially serious consequences” if Britons continue to conduct their
lives at their present manic pace. The Brits are known for taking their
pleasures sadly, but, according to Lancaster-James, we take them swiftly as
well, consuming meals in ten minutes and getting sex over and done with in
just two minutes - even less time than they allowed for a brief encounter at
the great Ambridge speed-dating event at the village pub on Valentine's Day.
Oliver James, the psychologist whose thoughts on the horror of modern life all
newspapers are obliged by ancient tradition to print on these occasions,
says that rather than investigating the long-term effects of Ritalin, we
ought to be asking what terrible malaise is making people so unhappy that
physicians feel the need to prescribe the stuff. Myself, I reckon it is the
fault of the Edwardians. A hazy notion of the langorous golden interval
between the demise of Queen Victoria and the outbreak of the First World War
has formed our ideas of what life at its most delicious should be like.
Trouble is, of course, that the leisured existence of the Edwardian haute
bourgeoisie was predicated on the exertions of an army of cooks, scullery
maids, boot boys, tweenies and so on. Which in our case we have not got. Or
rather, we are our own tweenies. We live these peculiar schizophrenic lives,
our days filled with precisely the sort of relentless drudgery to which our
ancestors stoutly declined to return after the First World War, in the
seductive belief that at the end of the to-do list there lies a golden dream
of blissful leisure, filled with languorous sex on lavender-scented sheets,
while bees murmur in the tidy herbaceous borders and our children e-mail us
from the Russell Group universities to which their exemplary education has
secured them admittance.
I am, myself, a sucker for this dream. I cling to a belief in the
perfectibility of my life. In mitigation - before anyone sends for an
ambulance - I should add that I know that some of my stress is
self-inflicted. If I wanted to reduce it, I could abandon domestic
fastidiousness: buy Delia's new book and cook with tinned fried onions; give
up housework and adopt the guilt-free parenting style of my own parents'
generation, who assumed that it was their children, rather than they, who
were at fault. But I choose not to, because the precarious tightrope dance
between career and domestic life seems - still, just - more interesting and
exhilarating than the alternative. Though I must say that the fragile grip
on sanity of many working parents would be greatly strengthened if only
Prince Philip and MI6 would agree to synchronise the half-terms of schools
across the country.
Classroom tip: don't mess with the chairs
A chap called Tom Wates - a teacher from my own manor of Blackheath - has
invented an untippable school chair. A boon, he says, to kiddies and
teachers alike. But hang on! My own treasured childhood memories include the
inimitable sound of my stout chum Robert Dammers enlivening endless dreary
maths lessons by falling off his little wooden chair. I was, myself, an
inveterate chair-swinger. Indeed, I date the end of childhood to the moment
when, at a dinner party in St John's Wood, I was sharply told by my hostess
to stop swinging on her gold-plated, chocolate moquette-upholstered dining
chair. Ah, Mr Wates, tread softly, for you tread on our childhood dreams
with your untippable chair.
Rural peril
From imagined peril to real: as I write this, Jillie Rogers, my riding teacher
and the heroine of my first book, is seriously injured in hospital and the
horse she loved is dead. All this carnage, all this breaking of bones and
tearing of flesh and lying at the side of a road in clear view of the
stricken horse, waiting for an ambulance to arrive, happened because of a
momentary encounter with a car on a narrow country lane. I remember being
told that you should drive on minor roads as though you knew a cyclist had
fallen off his bike around the next corner. The advice stuck, and I do. It
maddens the motorists behind me. When I pull over to let them pass they zoom
off at twice the speed. But I don't care. Doing 25mph on the back lanes I
have contrived not to run into a half a dozen loose sheep, innumerable
horses, a pony and trap, a gang of boys out for an afternoon's rabbiting
with lurchers and terriers milling all over the road, and goodness knows how
many walkers, invisible in dark clothes at twilight. I'm relieved for them
that I didn't run into them. And I'm even more relieved for myself.
I know of a narrow by-way with tall hedges on either side, very narrow, where people walk their dogs, and occasionally ride horses. It has a very rutted surface, tarmaced once only in the 1960's, and a zig-zag on a 1 in 4 hill (2 right-angle bends). Once, 40 years ago, I remember a small car trying to negotiate it; it got stuck. Tractors are too wide to use it.
Yet the local authority has seen fit to put a speed sign at the end. For traffic emerging(!) they have to slow down to 30 mph before joining a main road. For traffic entering (!) they are told the speed limit is unrestricted (ie 60 mph). Total idiocy.
Dave, Wrexham,
Awful news about your riding teacher Jane. I do hope she recovers. The pain of losing the horse must be dreadful.
Anyway - a beautiful column as always and I loved the allusions to Henry Reed's poem 'The Naming of Parts'.
Margot, Toronto, Canada
I'm with you on the slow driving in the back lanes. I have narrowly avoided several accidents by doing just this and come close to several nasty accidents with people who drive like maniacs on the back roads.
Neil Murphy, cromer,