An out of the home paid in real money job.

I guess it was always a possibility what with me applying for them and all, but I’d sort of set my heart on a 9:30-14:30 be home when school’s out sort of job.

But I didn’t get any of those.

They are out there.

I applied.

No luck.

So a 39 hour week beckons.

OMG.

Nine hours a day away from my fridge….. YAY!

Nine hours a day away from the bomb-site of a home I can barely keep on top of even without a job…. oh heck!

Scary biscuits.

I have two weeks to acclimatise the children to a new regime.

Not the laundry though. Never the laundry <sigh>.

Since getting my paws on an iPhone a month or so ago two things have happened. I’ve found myself getting bogged down as a web consumer, less a creator, and I’ve developed “iPhone Thumb”. Why did nobody warn me the excruciating pain that could develop from (constantly) holding one of these monsters?

Bugger I am getting old. I find myself having to manually unbend each of my fingers in the morning, a ritual I only ever needed to go through when I was a pregnant knitter.

On the subject of knitting, I have a accrued what I now know to be called a “stash”.

And here I thought it was a bucket of “unfinished projects” and “wool I dunno what to do with yet”.

But apparently they are “WIPs” (works in progress) and a “stash”.

There’s been a lot going on with the big kids. Formal prelims, course choices, trying to plan for a life they just want to live but that’s not how life rolls is it? It’s all graded and marked, assessed and judged. When one cares a lot and one gives the appearance of not being arsed I have to remember to check I have the right Mum head on when I tackle school stuff since getting the wrong one on can be quite disastrous. For me anyway.

Navigating the nightmare that is course choice for S5/S6 has caused ructions betwixt me and the school. Long term plans are being shot out of the air for both my teenagers and it’s most pissing off. Thankfully the school sorted Kathryn’s S6 and she can now take Advanced Highers in both Computing and English. But Andrew is pretty screwed. He’s had a long term goal and been working for two years towards Higher Italian in S5…. but only two pupils put themselves forward for the course so it’s been abandoned. Two years wasted. Unfortunately we were banking on Italian and now he’s struggling to get more than three Highers from the timetable which just. isn’t good. enough. Not for a smart kid who wants to go onto higher education. And so short sighted not to support foreign languages if you ask me. But nobody does.

They look different again, my non-blonde girl is facially pierced and already planning where to stab herself with a bit of metal next.

We were having a Mother Knows Best night when I took this photo, as in Mother Knows You Really Ought To Slap Some Blusher On If You Are Going To Insist On Wearing Foundation And Don’t Want To Look Like A Corpse. Her rejection of Fake-Bake is admirable but there’s no need to look cyanotic….

I’m not at all sure what Andrew looks like at the moment, his fringe is past his chin. I’ll have to catch him facing a strong wind…

Paul seems to be following the same path his brother trod. I handed him to primary school, a happy, polite, confident, inquisitive child and in a year they have transformed him into everything other than that. I, unfortunately, seem to be treading the same Mum path, looking for any reason other than school to explain his behaviour. Who am I kidding? School is (still) shit for little boys. Education is (still) focussed on learning styles that are fundamentally female. And yes I know that gender doesn’t confer any innate qualities on a child that make them male or female, I am a champion of social constructionism… but fuck it, boys just learn differently OK?

He’s writing comics. Loads of them. And making tiny little paper models. Really tiny and detailed. And school are worried about his fine motor skills.

Whateva.

It’s also been mentioned that his spelling needs working on.

He is 6. In a top OECD country he wouldn’t even BE at school yet.

Or wearing uniform for that matter.

Though he is a bit cute in his shorts.

When he cuddles up with me in the morning I can hear him whispering ever so quietly, reading Arthur C Clarke over my shoulder, so I’m far from worried. We play Boggle. He gets words I miss. Quite long ones.

His teacher also tells me he can start the computer, login, and type sentences in Word. I tell her he jumps between a Mac, a PC and an iPad, can carry out basic web searches in Firefox and Chrome and can diagnose network errors, rebooting our router when we lose access.

Beyond my family bubble I am overwhelmed with despair when I delve into the world of political blogs. Grateful on the one hand that so many people are making huge efforts to shed light on what is being done by those who were never handed the power to do it, but so utterly depressed at main stream media scamming each and every one of us with failure heaped on failure to report truthfully and objectively. I can hardly hold it all in my head. So much beggars belief.

In the good news section I’m back on the red wine. It was getting a bit scary there for a while over the winter. Even a whiff disgusted me. A friend in all seriousness suggested I saw my GP. But the very thought….. “So Miss Hall, what’s the problem?”, “Well… you see…. I’m not able to put away a bottle of the old cab-sauv and well… I’ve always been able to… and it’s a bit worrying…”……. yeah I thought it best not to.

When I was young, naive and knew next to feck all about politics I admired the (then) Liberal Party. David Steel always struck me as a shrewd but honest man with his political heart and mind in the right place; a decent chap who could do a good job given a chance. Who did indeed do a fine job as Presiding Officer of the Scottish Parliament.

The Liberal Party was the sort of party I might vote for when I was old enough.

Back in my formative years Labour were in chaos, the Gang of Four were on the march and for a while it was quite exciting waiting (as I was too young to vote) to see where it would all go.

In the end it fizzled out and we were left with the Liberal Democrat Party, the self styled new “force” in British politics.

Not so much a force as a leaning, if you ask me. And I did vote for them (once) in a local election.

As the party of protest, the bi-election babes, they had a place in the UK political scene. The “not all that alternative” alternative. But as Labour emerged lost and veered further and further right, the traditional Liberal Democrat middle ground was squeezed out of existence.

Desperate to remain an alternative to the hegemony of the new nu right, they cast their policy net further into fantasy land. Suspecting, you could even say knowing, in their heart of hearts that they’d never actually have to implement anything,  they could say, claim and promise whatever they liked! Abolition of the House of Lords, Proportional Representation, green renewable energy by next Tuesday, electric cars and a monkey servant for each household. Who cared what they promised? Who was ever going to hold them to it?

Very few, given the AV referendum result, gave a shit what they promised.

People don’t vote en masse or change their vote because of Liberal Democrat policies, they do it because they are pissed off with Labour and/or the Tories.

And in 2010 a lot of us were pissed off, with both of them.

The problem is Nick Clegg and his buddies are under the illusion that the swing in their favour did have something to do with their policies. As are a lot of deluded Liberal Democrat supporters, especially on Twitter (oh the lolz).

They often claim that 75% of their manifesto promises have been implemented but can anybody name me a few? I don’t consider a review of Trident after the next general election as implementing non-renewal of Trident. And I’ll believe the £10,000 tax threshold and mansion tax when I see them – as well as the minimum wage promise. How about votes at 16? That’s caused a bit of a spin here in Scotland where they rigorously OPPOSE it. Apart from scrapping ID cards (which we never had anyway), some databases and CCTV and clamping regulations…. well I’m baffled. Dare I mention university tuition fees?

But then 75% of nothing is pretty much…. nothing.

For the last two weeks I’ve watched them slap themselves on the back, first in Scotland then this weekend nationally. They have rattled around in nearly empty conference halls, whooping it up like hosts of a party that nobody bothered to RSVP, congratulating themselves for tempering the excesses of David Cameron’s Conservative party. More than I care to count are the times I’ve heard how much more awful the Tories would be without them, the reasonable face of the coalition, there to influence, nay CONTROL them.

I say to each and every one of them – BOLLOCKS.

If the Liberal Democrats had an ounce of integrity, a single gram of morality, a modicum of political astuteness or even a rudimentary understanding of the British electorate, they’d have refused to enter a coalition with EITHER of the main parties. People voted Liberal Democrat because they supported neither Labour nor the Conservative party, and every one of those voters has been cruelly betrayed.

David Cameron heading a minority Conservative government would have had no choice but to temper the more radical and destructive Tory excesses. He would have had to seek support through co-operation, compromise and negotiation. He would have had to be a politician within the constraints of the votes he actually got – which by any measure was not enough.

The Liberal Democrats don’t temper Tory policies, they facilitate them.

And the truly pathetic thing is that the only people who don’t realise this are Liberal Democrats. Even after their disastrous results in the 2011 Scottish elections they continue to kid themselves that they have any political worth. They don’t just have their eyes squeezed shut, they have their fingers in their ears and are singing “LA LA LA LA LA LA I CAN’T HEAR YOU!”

All those people who voted for them as an alternative back in 2010? They realise it.

All those people who voted for them in protest against Nu-Labour? They realise it.

All those people who voted for them because they could not bring themselves to support David Cameron as the alternative to Nu-Labour? They realise it.

A fair whack of life-long Liberal Democrat voters? Yeah even they realise it too.

And I suspect, when it suits them, Nick and Vince and the whole sorry lot of them will also realise it.

But it’s too late, the party is already toxic.

They are finished as a third, fourth…. tenth rate force in British politics.

They are finished.

Thanks to the introduction of fixed term parliaments (yeah thanks for that one) we have to suffer their posturing until 2015.

Come then I’m sure I won’t be alone, cheering loudly as they skip, clap and la-la-la their way to oblivion.