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?!