My granddad, with two of his younger brothers, outside their house.

My granddad was the eldest of six children, which meant that my dad grew up in something of a clan – he had two siblings, and ten cousins on his dad’s side of the family, to say nothing of a stack of cousins and second cousins who were from his mum’s side. Families in those days had a lot of proximity about them. They all lived within a few miles of one another, in North Liverpool, and the ones who didn’t, didn’t go too far – Aunty Gwen lived in Parbold, Uncle Alf moved to Rainford, but mostly, they were less than ten minutes apart by car. Also, those of them that held on to the faith of their childhoods, tended to stay in the one church.

My dad’s generation, of course, were the baby-boomers (he only discovered this about himself recently, I can’t imagine where he’s been). They were the ones who did the 11+, and saw driving their own car as less of a privilege than a right, and would move towns for a job, and be the first in their family to own a house. My dad’s cousins were much more geographically disparate. We lived in various bits of East Lancashire when I was growing up, and Tim moved from Southport to Altrincham, and Phil spent about fifteen years in London, which was as close to the edge of the earth as made no practical difference to the rest of us.

Some of the cousins lost touch, at that point. There are at least four or five whom I know I would not recognise if I met them in the street – although one of that group is my “friend” on Facebook, and lives ten minutes walk from my house. I’ve not been round, though. A core, who stayed in Liverpool, also stayed in the church, and helped to create a kind of home base there, that the rest of us came back to, periodically. My grandparents and two of their children went for a communal living approach, pooling their resources to put three generations into a lovely big Victorian house in the suburbs. The house became another sort of base – there was always someone in, there, and when you arrived, you instantly felt part of the big family, probably just because a good proportion of the family were there already.

That house is where the Christmas parties were held (Boxing night, every year), with all the little traditions, including the one where Father Christmas arrived, and handed out presents to everyone (for hours…) in return for a rendition of Away in a Manger. One year, my granddad stood in for Santa by appearing in drag as a Christmas Fairy – drag isn’t something I would ever have associated with him, if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, and as far as I know, it has never happened before or since. Increasingly, for me, part of generation number three of the ever more separated, and ever more numerous family group, the Christmas party was the only time I ever saw most of those people. We have less and less in common, and less and less to tie us together.

And yet, we are still tied together.

I heard a story, today, of one of my dad’s cousins, who’s immediate family had drifted away from the group, and who, now in her fifties, is missing her family, to the point of feeling quite resentful about it. It touched me. I don’t know this woman from Eve, but if she has discovered a need in herself to reconnect with the Family (that makes us sound like the Sopranos, and nothing could be further from the truth), then I’m pretty sure we have space for her. Why not? She belongs with us. She should have been here all along.

My great-grandma, with her grandchildren at Christmas - the generation before mine!

For various reasons, the Christmas party did not happen last year, and isn’t going to happen this year. It remains to be seen whether two years out will mean the end of it, forever. I’m really not sure how much effort is reasonable to expend, in an attempt to bring together a group of people who otherwise get along fine without each other. To bring any real substance to those relationships, I’m pretty sure we’d have to meet more frequently than that, and I’m equally sure that if someone were to do something off-the-wall, like host a family open house once a month, nobody would show up.

The fact is that our family is too big, now. Including spouses, there are knocking on for fifty living descendants of my great-grandma. So, it’s hardly surprising – the family is losing it’s structural integrity, because in modern life, when we live so far apart, and have such busyness to contend with, it takes all our energy to maintain our closest family links. The second cousins once removed are just once removed too far.

That kind of makes me sad. I’d like to find a way to fix it, to make it possible for the group identity to continue, because it’s a key part of my own sense of identity, and I suspect, I’m not the only one. I’m just not sure that it’s possible.

there was some ‘nearly’ classic Winnie-the-pooh on playhouse Disney this morning, which had us all watching, especially as it’s coinciding with the reading of the Winnie-the-pooh stories at bedtime. they where mixing there stories so we had eeyore in the river, then his birthday.

Anyway I was interested to see just when we where talking about, so i did some interneting, and got to a few interesting things, including the fact that disney makes $1 billion dollars a year from pooh! also in 2000 the Canadian Medical journal published a paper about what was wrong with everyone in the hundred acre wood.

Apparently pooh bear has ADHD and OCD, Tigger is hyperactive and owl is dyslexic : yes, but it’s quite depressing to then read that given the chance the people who did the study would be drugging up half the forest – mainly to cure these problems. I don’t see why ?Pooh is perfectly happy with his lot, why does he need drugs, and if you took the bounce out of Tigger then everybody’s life would be sadder.

look - secret signals!

Is it just me, or is their something strangely unearthing about the green balloon club? I mean all the kids of the country of a certain age, are completely engulfed in everything that goes on, they have – not very – secret passwords. and Skye has quite a command over everything, and just listen to the opening lines to the theme song

“Gather round, one and all. You’ve got to answer the call.”

Just wait, one day, Skye will issue the call, and the under 4′s of the world will rise up against us, don’t say i didn’t warn you.

(To do this, go to “notes” under tabs on your profile page, paste these instructions in the body of the note, type your 25 random things, tag 25 people (in the right hand corner of the app) then click publish.)

1. I am blonde in my head, even though I haven’t looked blonde since I was about seven.
2. I have two degrees, one in Literature and Media Studies, and one in just Literature.
3. I wrote an entire MA dissertation on the Chalet School, and it was a darn sight more fun that Shakespeare or Dickens could ever have been.
4. I’m not sending my kids to school.
5. I have researched my family tree to the point of having 645 names in it. That’s quite a lot. I come from Wales, and Ireland, and Wirral, and Manchester, and Shropshire.
6. The most interesting story I found in the tree was of the man who married one sister, then ran off with the ten-years-younger sister, lived over the brush with her for 30 years, had a stack of kids, and finally married her when first sister died.
7. I didn’t intend to quit work when I had Daisy, but I’ve got no intention of going back, now.
8. My youngest, Henry, has never been in his pram, having travelled everywhere in a sling until he could walk, and even now when he gets tired. He’s 19 months old, now, and it’s looking increasingly unlikely that he ever will. I did toy with putting him in the seat of the shopping trolley, yesterday, but didn’t do it.
9. I couldn’t quite bring myself to get rid of the pram. Might celebrate his second birthday by throwing it out.
10. I make slings for friends, especially pregnant friends, but I could never sell them, because my sewing really isn’t of marketable quality!
11. I think 25 things is a lot.
12. I went to two primary schools, two secondary schools and one sixth form college.
13. I’ve only ever worked for two people – St Rhadagund’s Christian Holiday Centre, and Liverpool John Moores University.
14. I’m better at attention to detail than big projects.
15. I still don’t know if I’ve finished having children.
16. I’m not ready to have another one yet.
17. I’m still breastfeeding H.
18. I play the viola, but not often enough to be any good.
19. It’s so long since I’ve played from music, I think I may have forgotten how.
20. People think playing by ear is clever, and/or hard. Believe me, if it was hard, I’d be too lazy to do it.
21. I sometimes think that someone who studied literature to the relatively high level that I have ought to read more. I hardly ever read novels, don’t buy a newspaper, and search the internet for intellectual stimulation, with varying degrees of success.
22. I wasn’t fat when I was a kid.
23. I don’t eat enough fruit.
24. I don’t eat enough vegetables, either, but I do like vegetables. Sadly, the rest of my family don’t, really. They all eat fruit by the hundredweight, while I just sit here getting scurvy.
25. I am married to the best husband on the planet, which is hard luck on the rest of you.

I think I slightly scandalised my mum, at the weekend, by telling her that I wasn’t particularly bothered about the kids doing GCSEs. The fact is, I’ve become quite hostile to the idea of certification getting in the way of education.  Myself, I’m qualified to the hilt, with no particular evidence of it having done me any good – except in the sense that I really rather enjoyed writing my MA dissertation, and I’m still quite proud of it as a piece of work.  And I think that’s the key.  There are odd essays from my undergrad and postgrad career that I feel almost as proud of – they’re the ones that I enjoyed writing, got thoroughly involved in, and which consequently included moments of utter clarity, when I could suddenly see, and better yet, articulate, what was going on. I think I’ve lost my Freud essay, which is a shame, because I was rather partial to it.

The point is, the best bits of my education were when I stopped being in it for the qualifications, and started focussing on the education. The most satisfying, fulfilling, stimulating parts of the process were about the exhilaration of learning and discovering, for the sheer satisfaction of doing so. It was about intellectual achievement, not about doing the grunt-work towards getting a certificate.

That’s what I want for my children. I want their education – at every level – to be about the joy of doing something you couldn’t do yesterday, of understanding something you didn’t understand yesterday, of making a connection you hadn’t made yesterday. I don’t want it to be about slaving away at something that doesn’t interest you, just to get to the certificate.

Now, there are exceptions to this rule; I’m not sure if that’s because I’m applying it inconsistently, or because life simply isn’t that good. I do still think that learning to read is important, that qualifications in Maths and English are expected by almost everyone you’ll meet in adult life, and that certain goals require a certain amount of grunt-work to get to them. If, for example, you decide you want to be a doctor (example rather than maternal aspiration), you have to study medicine at University, and you have to achieve the minimum requirements to access that course – probably sciencey A Levels, and probably Maths and English GCSE to boot. In order to study A levels, you may be required to take more GCSEs than that, too, and almost certainly, some of that process will be boring – however, if you’ve stepped onto that treadmill with a specific goal in mind, and done it consciously, you’re likely to be less hostile towards the boring bits, because you’re committed to achieving your goal.

A visual representation of the forest that had to be chopped down to support my educational journey, ages 4-28.

It’s not the same thing as studying as many GCSEs as you can fit into your timetable, with very few real choices as to what they are (in my day, the choice amounted, for most people, to History or Geography, and I get the impression it’s even more prescriptive, now), and then choosing the subjects you hate least to study as many A Levels as you can, so you can go to University, because everyone has told you that you simply MUST go to University.

Don’t get me wrong. University is great, not least because it’s the very first time you get a free choice of what to study, and in what depth. Sadly, most undergrads (myself included) take a long time to get out of the habit of studying because you have to, and into studying because you want to. Lots never manage it. Having got so far on doing work, to get marks, to get grades, to get qualified, to have a piece of paper to wave about saying how qualified you are, the joy of learning is so long since squashed that it’s irreparable. But, if you’re careful, if you choose your course properly, and keep your eye out for the bits that are genuinely interesting to you, University can be the place learn how to enjoy learning again – to essentially relearn what came so utterly naturally to you before you ever started school, because young children love learning; nothing gives them greater pleasure.

I coasted for most of my academic career, and actually, that’s not terribly fulfilling.  I was lucky – I was bright enough to get away with it.  My mum is convinced that in a different school, I would have gained straight As at GCSE, but that I lacked the ethos of work around me to get me to put in the effort.  I’m not convinced.  I mean, she might be right, but I’m not convinced it would have changed my life’s direction in the slightest.  Instead, I learned fairly early on how much effort was required to achieve what I need to achieve.  I didn’t get straight As, but I got C and above for all my subjects.  Since no-one ever requires a GCSE A grade, it was perfectly adequate, and since I wasn’t engaged with the process of learning for it’s own sake, I saw no reason to work any harder than I needed to.  But since my desired A level course accepted me, and my desired degree course accepted me (well, my second choice did, and there were extenuating circumstances around the time of the exams), I’m now more or less where I was always heading.  A different environment might have changed my attitude, but not my outcome.

I would much rather my children were engaged with learning, than engaged with gaining qualifications, on the off-chance that they might need them one day.  And on the day that they decide that they want to do X, and that the best way to achieve that is go through the process of Y and Z, they’ll know why they’re doing it, and hopefully be motivated by that knowledge.

my ‘favorite’ two phases spinning around my head today are

“are you read for the learning fun?”

“lets go on a learning journey”

don’t know what you play with if you don’t want to learn anything.

*i don’t want people to think we are ungrateful, for all those who bought us these presents, thank you, really if we didn’t have them our children would be climbing the walls, but still i’m allowed to go mad arn’t I?

Seriously, folks: my kids do not need any more soft toys. Possibly ever again. Also, I think we have all the toy tea-sets we’ll ever need, now. I reckon we had the right number of presents under the tree – sadly, we were three sacks away from having finished, at that point.

I sound so ungrateful, don’t I? It’s just that I’ve spent the last five days looking at the pile of Stuff in my living room, and wondering where I’m supposed to put it all. Fighting the urge to wonder why my friends and family hate me so much as to fill my life with all this Stuff, when they all know that I’ve spent the last five years trying to simplify my life – to live the Flylady way.

And of course, I know. It’s not about seeking to make me miserable, it’s about loving my children enough to buy nice things for them. I do get it, really. But then, that leads back to the guilt. Because we cannot possibly keep it all, but it’s me that has to throw things away, knowing that they were bought with love, for someone who isn’t me.

If I had just one wish, I think it would be for less volume. When I was a child, we never got more than one present from one person, and I was taken by surprise by the literal sackloads that some people sent. We only gave the kids one thing each – and with no particular reference to monetary value, either. One present is one present, especially at this age.

I did my bit – I bought a bigger toy cupboard. Now it’s time for someone else to help me out.

Mostly they sang songs that Neil had written. They used to call it “gospel”, but it wasn’t gospel in a black sense. If anything, it was black gospel meets seventies folk. They even made a couple of tapes which they distributed… well, I’ve no idea how widely they were distributed, but we had half a dozen, on the off-chance that we met someone who wanted one.

The first tape was called Reason For Living, and this is the one that was an integral part of my childhood. Other children pretend to be pop stars, or cartoon characters. We used to play the tape, and pretend to be Aunty Jan.

We were children, and children don’t analyse things. They certainly don’t analyse for lyrical quality, or musical depth, or significance of meaning. Listening to it again, now, I’m struck by how Neil’s lyrical style probably benefited enormously from the first time he bought a modern bible translation – some of the songs are taken verbatim from scripture, which I’m all in favour of, I just don’t understand what they’re saying. That speaks of my lack of education, I suppose – I bet they knew what the songs meant. More than that, though, I’m bowled over by the sheer optimism of the songs. The open-hearted naivety.

I don’t know how Neil and Carol and Jan look back at Agapé. I suspect that they’re the tiniest bit embarrassed, in the way that everyone is embarrassed when they look at their creative efforts of two or three decades ago. Times have changed, styles have changed, and more importantly, they’ve changed – mellowed, matured, not to be any better or worse, just to follow the normal and natural development of life. They’re no more the teens and twenty-somethings they were then, than I’m the four-year-old.

It’s not mine, so I don’t have to get embarrassed by it. My Agapé tape is a huge part of the backdrop of my childhood, and I hold it in great affection for that reason. I also admire the courage, the vision, and the desperate desire the please God that led them to make it – they had more passion and motivation when they were little more than kids themselves, than I’ve ever had.

Part of our holiday was, for me, a journey of self-discovery (as opposed to the journey of sheep-discovery that was required to get to the house we stayed in) (I’m not calling it a holiday cottage, since it was a house by anyone’s standards, and one that you could have fitted two of mine inside). Self-discovery, in my experience, is not much fun, so to be avoided when you’re supposed to be on holiday. Of course, it is also true that on holiday, you get the chance to depart from the norms enough to discover yourself in the first place, but I digress.I am fiercely competative. I didn’t know. Did you already know that? Because I didn’t. I naturally assumed that since I’m not remotely ambitious, I wasn’t competative either, but it’s not true.

Example 1: we played several games on holiday, and I was rubbish at them. I was rubbish at the dictionary game, in which someone picks an obscure word from the dictionary, we all make up a definition, then vote for the most plausible one. You get a point if the majority of people vote for your definition, and you get a point for voting for the correct definition. Everyone else was giving their vote to the funny ones, in order to bestow a point to the originator as a demonstration of their appreciation. I was voting for the most plausible, because I wanted to win.

Example 2: we also played a game called Take Two. It’s a variation on Scrabble, using the pieces but not the board, and it works best with between two and four players. You each take 7 pieces, and attempt to arrange them onto one interlocking grid, using only valid words. As soon as one person had done so, they call, “Take Two”, and everyone takes two more pieces, which can be a lifesaver, or can throw you into complete disarray. The winner is the first to form a complete grid once all the spare pieces have gone. The thing is, skills-wise, it’s completely different to Scrabble. You succeed with being able to arrange your pieces into small words, quickly. I’m rubbish at doing things quickly (and with the meandering pace of life that Daisy and I lead these days, I’m getting worse), and I never use a small word if three large ones will execute the task with an acceptable degree of adequacy. I was dismal at Take Two, and the humiliation was it’s a word game. I have two degrees in English, Kevin should not be able to beat me with ANYTHING that uses Scrabble letters.

Take Two, logically enough, I much preferred when it was one-on-one – the pace of the game was slowed, so I had a little more time to use all my pieces in a 12 letter word. I’m a linguistic show-off who hates to lose.

Risk, when we played it, I enjoyed much more because whilst I didn’t win, playing with Mission Cards means that the winner usually does so suddenly, and I felt like I was doing well right up to the end.

Now I’ve come face to face with this rather unattractive personality trait, I can quite see that it’s always been there. My sister hated me when we were children, because I derived immense satisfaction from beating her into the ground at any competative game we played, and when that didn’t work, I would hit her over the head with my superior vocabulary (the ultimate fall-back of many an older sibling). At school, I developed an intense dislike for a friendly, personable, and fairly attractive boy called Jonathan Thorpe, because he was always, always, always two points ahead of me in class, making him top, and me second. I didn’t want to be second. I wanted all to bow down to the mighty intellect of Ruth, and for as long as he kept doing ever so slightly better than me, nobody would.

I suppose it’s a variation on perfectionism – the idea that if you can’t guarantee to win a game, there’s really no fun in playing it, though where that leaves the poor souls who are supposed to play against me, for the sheer statisfaction of being thrashed, I don’t know. Quite what I’m supposed to do about this alarmingly self-absorbed competative streak… well, I don’t know that either.