Goat Notes

It's a beautiful summer's day in London, but I just a couple of hours ago trod on one of my own corns, in the course of writing an article elsewhere about motherhood and apple pie and the pressing need to have Ministries of both.  Which is not even the exact subject I originally intended to tackle.  Suffice it to say that I was suddenly reminded of a remarkable slew of educators and their official auxiliaries from my childhood, who considered any unforced interest in learning a very undesirable deviation indeed from Proper Development, and were remarkably overt about the need to extirpate such elitist and amateurish pathologies wherever they were seen.  I escaped to better pastures: many of my contemporaries were not so lucky.

Even in the better pastures, one teacher actually made the astonishing error of trying to forbid my mother from teaching my brother to read at home - as he was already an inappropriately competent reader, and might have already incurred any amount of developmental damage through such unsanctioned meddling.  The head, a Jamaican schoolmistress of the old-fashioned sort, promptly supplied that teacher with a good education.  Better pastures, as I say.

Goodbye, Ministry for Children, Schools, and Families! *  We hardly cared to know you.  I still feel a strong urge to butt somebody.**

No words this morning, as busy plot-wrangling.  My protagonist has sent me an official protest against insufficiently operatic weather.

* True story: in my last half-finished novel, which is partly a nanny-state satire from a cheesed-off teenager's perspective, I renamed the Department of Education PET (Ministry of Parenting, Education, and Training), in what I thought was a rather cheap sneer at the then Government's octopus pretentions to micromanage every aspect of children's lives.  A few months later, they renamed it that - presumably to celebrate the very same thing...

** This is a metaphor.  I am not a hooligan.  I am not a goat.  My deep and secret traumas have not suddenly re-surfaced to cause me to suffer CRAZY PLOT FLASHBACKS!  What am I doing on this starship?!

'Ello 'ello!

Although my main blog continues here, that's really for articles and think-pieces great and small.  Since I'm hanging out more here now, I've decided to dedicate my LJ account to short informal entries that don't really match the Goat in the Machine style.  Journal entries, like....

Also for posting wordcountery, and other nuts-and-bolts stuff like that about my writing that doesn't naturally turn into an essay all of its own.  The trouble with the essays is that whilst they often help with my writing, they also compete with it for time and Muse's fire.  So this is basically an attempt to supplement them with chit-chat, which is where LJ's connectivity wins out over Blogger.  We'll see how the experiment goes!

With my usual exquisite timing, I find myself going back to work five hours after I finally broke out of my week-long funk on Three Katherines of Allingdale.  Waking up before the dawn did at least give me time to think myself through all the siren voices, and push through a couple of hundred words in the direction I needed to go.  Unless that was the siren all along, but I really think not.  Eh well.

Now it's back to the paying grind for a bit.

Paperwork, paperwork - so good we did it twice!