100 Days - day one and twenty

Not nice: many dead trees on Alison Street:

Nice: Dunk walking:

Three cootlings:

Three cygnets:

Thirteen on the iPlayer, and Tish, Monkey and Toby talking over it most of the evening because the plot had so many holes:

Hope your day had some nice to balance out the not nice.

Stay safe. See you tomorrow.

#100DaysToOffload

Damn hippy home educators

We sat at Julie's the other day and watched the pilot episode of 'Raised by Wolves' on 4oD (available for another 17 days, and a somewhat pretentious Guardian review here); it is written by Caitlin Moran (no relation to Dunk) and her sister Caz and is based (loosely) on their own childhood being home educated in a large family living on a council estate in Wolverhampton. It is being cheered in home ed circles purely because it contradicts the notion that all home educators are middle class hippy types (for visitors from America please read that as 'all home-schoolers are fundamentalist Christian types'). It doesn't make a big issue about them being home educated, though the scene where they watch from the garden when the school kids come past was excellent, it is more about family relationships. Certainly hoping they make it to a full series, the two young women playing Germaine and Aretha are wonderful.

And it ties in quite nicely with my Christmas listening which was 'Wild Abandon' by Joe Dunthorne (who also wrote the book that became the film 'Submarine'), which is about a bunch of home educating hippies. It is the story of an intentional community, started by Don and Freya and Patrick but enlarged over the years by a motley collection of drifters and WWOOFers. The story follows the disintegration of relationships as people begin to change their ideas of what they want in life and Don desperately tries to hold the whole thing together; daughter Kate goes off to college and meets a young man who's home offers all the comforts of modern life that their farm lacks, Don and Freya's marriage crumbles and their son Albert is left feeling abandoned and turns for companionship to Maria, who has all sorts of wacky ideas about where the world is headed. The relationship between Kate and Albert was lovely, siblings who grow up quite dependent on each other for company. Albert remains embedded in his experience of and love for commune life while Kate, out in the 'real world', makes a conscious decision to avoid discussing her childhood experiences. The story build towards the 'Results Party' that Don throws to try and tempt his daughter home. I liked the way that the character's little dramas were going on while the rest of life carried on regardless. Don is not a sympathetic character but he spouts some well reasoned arguments against formal schooling which are randomly scattered through the story so I felt that was his redeeming quality. I think the story succeeded because although it is witty and Joe allowed himself to gently mock some of their efforts it manages to avoid tired clichés, it created real people and a community who were trying to live their lives outside the accepted assumptions and values of society, and I can't help sympathising with people who try, it was hard and they made compromises but they didn't stop trying. 

What is the world coming to!

All sorts of things have happened since my last post but the thing that left us speechless at the weekend was the eviction of Aiden from X Factor. Well, I say speechless, but M was shrieking at the telly in disgust.

So here we are in sunny Manchester.
I won't bore you with the trauma that is moving three people, a cat and their possessions over 100 miles using only a small van and our own blood sweat and tears, needless to say I am glad it is all over. In between moving furniture, carrying boxes, cleaning (and yet more cleaning) and going to work I have done a bit of reading, so I will try and write something later about David Nicholls 'One Day', which was much hyped but left me a bit cold. Am currently reading 'Notes from an Exhibition' by Patrick Gale.

Erasing David

I received an e-mail from David Bond back in September of 2008 when he was researching the documentary film 'Erasing David'. The film is an investigation into the amount and nature of the data held about individuals by government and all sorts of other sources, and his plan (as it unfold in the film) is to try to 'disappear' from the system for as long as he can while some specially hired private detectives will attempt to track him down.

I had written to the local paper about the fingerprint registration scheme that M's school were intending to introduce and he had tracked me down (via the internet, see how easy it is) to see if we would be interested in being involved in the film. So he came to our house and interviewed M and myself about the whole fingerprint thing, though he was really lovely and interested and we ended up talking about home education and all sorts of other stuff too, and about the film and his interests in 'personal data' issues. And we had a 'small world' moment as he had also interviewed Terri Dowty at ARCH (Action on Rights for Children) who I know from being involved in EO (Education Otherwise).

I had forgotten all about the film it was so long ago and then Dunk spotted it on telly last night (and will be available to watch on 4OD)

M and I didn't make it onto the small screen, our little interview was edited out, though they did show the interview with Mrs France at school. However we did get a credit at the end for participating in David's research so we felt like we had been part of something very interesting.

He has his own website here (but it is not responding at the moment), you can see a little intro clip here on Youtube and a very interesting article on Spiked here.