Ofsted.

I shouldn't be writing this. I should be swatting up on past Ofsted reports about a school at which I have an interview tomorrow. However, having pored over a few going back 16 years, I'm taking a mini-break, with a packet of crisps and a cup of tea. So curious, so careful and sometimes so devastating, Oftsed reports are fascinating to read. They dissect, drip-feed and insinuate, ripping into the heart of schools while interlacing criticisms with crumbs of comfort - often to do with good levels of pastoral care or outstanding behaviour: the reports can paint bucolic images of happy, invisible little faces behaving well and clutching fruit as they go about their day, while being ignorant of the Inspectors' pronouncements on how their futures are apparently being stunted by poor marking strategies, below-par maths lessons and clueless school governors.

My son's school has just been visited by Ofsted. On this occasion, just the one Inspector it seems. 'A glamorous lady in a sports car' was how the Teaching Assistant manning the door of Breakfast Club on the Big Day described her. The school had had two days' notice to prepare - though mentally and emotionally of course, the staff had been gearing up for this monumentally stressful experience for many months. Breakfast Club was a like a fair-ground on acid: instead of a few lego bricks scattered across the floor and a play mat covered in bits of old toast, the place was thrumming with life. The TAs wore bright faces rather than the glassy, resentful stare that usually inhabits the faces of poorly-paid people early in the morning. And they were  dressed like brain surgeons - trussed up in blue plastic aprons and operating gloves ready to combat or contain all manner of childhood ailments - from slapped cheek to injuries incurred during full-on chemical warfare . My son meandered inside, his face awed by the neat, interlocking rows  of tables buckling under the weight of games, books, toys, play-dough and plates of hot buttered crumpets. It was like Milton Keynes hosting the Jubilee in 1977.

Over the last few weeks, downloading and scrolling through many Ofsted reports late into the night, until moths are beating at the lamp on my desk and the dog is pawing my knees busting for a final pee before lights out, I've grown accustomed to their rhythm and tone; the lingo has seeped into my unconscious. In my mind's eye, frantic Heads (who often put their hearts and souls into turning their schools into miniature universities offering rich curriculums, museum trips and phonics strategies that would have a deaf monkey reading Byron in 48 hours,) rush around the building we call school but they call home as they spend so much time inside it putting the kettle on and eating biscuits - straightening display boards and checking that teachers have bulging files of assessments and can explain how they are pushing on more able pupils. Certainly, parents value Ofsted and strongly consider a school's rating when deciding whether or not to buy a house in its catchment area. But inspections can sometimes, perhaps, be askew: I remember last year, ringing a local businessman who ran a successful farm-based B&B and was well-educated, close to a town I was considering moving to, and quizzing him about the local primary which had received a 'Requires Improvement' rating. He said the rating had been a severe blow to everyone involved - parents and staff alike. Both his daughters attended the school and most kids went on to the town's 'Outstanding' secondary. It was, he told me, a lovely little school with a dedicated teaching team and first-class Senior Leadership Team whom, as a result of the inspection, felt they had let down the local community. Nonsense he scoffed gaily.        

     

I am hoping to move house any second. This is exciting. However, it won't be a gentle downsizing so much as a vertiginous drop into Lethe. And I have too many bloody books. So I've been sorting them into piles.

A good number I have been carting around since long-gone Leeds University days when I would return home in the summer and steal a few from the shelves of my parents' second-hand bookshop. Pointless titles like 'Italian Renaissance Sculpture' - a paperback the size of a studio flat in Kensington and the weight of a donkey.

There are 6 copies of Madame Bovary which I can't even recall getting to the end of, three of The Mill on the Floss - which I loved, until a girl who smoked a pipe at Leeds pointed out it was highly anti-women. There are Serbo-Croat dictionaries purloined from an ex-boyfriend, loads of Greek dictionaries and self-teach texts bought during a massive love-affair which ruined me in the 80s, huge tomes about Post-Impressionist painters, books about the Bloomsbury set, sex in politics, English Churches, Frank Capa and Martha Gellhorne and a big, cheerful coffee-table number called The Poster in History. The Times Atlas of the World would easily paper my sitting-room with pages to spare and there are scores of cookery books about meze, tapas, tagines, fondant icing, barbecuing outdoors, barbecuing indoors, how to make mini smokers from old sardine tins and soup cans, brewing wine from stuff in hedges, creating starter doughs and grilling on camp-fires. Not forgetting all sorts of instructional texts about crafting - lino cuts, driftwood trees, mastering charcoal, watercolour washes, felting, freehand embroidery - and quite a lot of self-flagellating holy stuff: Thomas Aquinas, Gerard Manley Hopkins and copies of the Catholic catechism with pages stuck together by snot and tears.  

These ridiculous books all say something about the person I apparently aspired to be in the olden days: a type of frontierswoman in a Habit, burying whole animals in hot coals for my clansmen, brewing moonshine and getting pissed on it while chatting in Sanskrit to lots of foreigners round a crackling beach fire and sketching Tullio Lombardo's Bacchus and Ariadne on the back of an envelope fashioned from a doily. Or some such rubbish.

I don't know who on earth I thought I was back then, but she's certainly only an echo of my current self, such has my life slithered backwards. Having said that, one of them I unearthed is about Christina Rossetti, poetess sister of my hero Dante Gabriel, written by Georgina Battiscombe. In a vivacious hand on the fly-leaf inside, it's signed 'Julian Vinogradoff, Broughton Grange, Banbury.' Tucked neatly between the pages I found a letter from my father saying 'here is the book! It was in a box of books I bought at an auction at Holloway's!'  Julian was the daughter of Lady Ottoline Morrell - surely a woman ahead of her time. What a weird and wonderful life she led. I have Sandra Jobson Darroch's biography of Ottoline too and together they'll go in my 'keep' pile.      

I've spent a good hour this evening reading other blogs by, and about, lone parents in order to get a handle on how they describe the experience.

I've ended up feeling thoroughly demoralised and ashamed as, on the whole, they are very upbeat and positive. I'm neither of those things so am obviously doing something wrong.

Lots of them talk brightly about Christmas on a shoestring, buying stuff on ebay, sewing and how writing lists stops you making spontaneous purchases which blow the budget.  They have links to recipes for slow-cooked mutton and making a carrot last four years.

My problems is, I don't want to make four different curries that will feed two for a generation out of one aubergine, half an onion and leftover tofu. I want to go wild in New York, do a cookery course in the South of France and see the Taj Mahal. I want my son to have a massive horse, a Steinway and piano lessons with Jarrod Radnich.

I need to revise my dreams in a vertical trajectory downwards and get a slow-cooker. This does NOT make me feel upbeat and positive. It makes me want to kick the dog.







 


 

Hello

So this is my first blog post.

The blog has taken me all of 13 minutes to set up.

A spare 13 minutes in between chasing away the cold from the kitchen (drawing the curtains and putting on extra socks) and wondering when hashtag will come back through the gate hungry.