Noted galanthophile Jim Leatherland opens his private garden in Hollowell, north of Northampton (up Church Hill, follow signs) tomorrow, Sunday February 27, between 11am-3pm.
If snowdrops are your passion, there are over 200 different types and you can also buy some ‘in the green’ to plant up at home. All in aid of the National Gardens Scheme (NGS) charity.
A short drive away over at Coton Manor Gardens, you can catch the last Snowdrop and Hellebore open day with admission at £3.
Filed under Gardening
THOSE who know me will snort loudly when they read this, but I hate to hear bad language around kids. Really.
I add the ‘around kids’ disclaimer because, I know you’ll find this hard to believe, I can be prone to a pressure-relieving, potty-mouthed rant at times, (mostly) in adult company. From my experience, journalists rank high among the most frequent users of caustic language on earth.
But I wince when I hear other adults swear with impunity in front of their kids – or any kids for that matter. 
My own folks were very strict about us not using bad language, even though they were partial to the odd minor cuss, mostly “bloody,” to emphasise a point. They were allowed to swear, because they were adults. We never really questioned it (and made sure we swore out of earshot).
Imagine my reaction when I overheard one of our older children describing something using a swear word. It wasn’t one of the very, very worst words (rhymes with ‘ditty,’ since you ask), but he got sent to his room and reminded at length about his vocabulary.
A few days later I heard our older boys talking with their friends on Xbox Live, where they have a headset and can talk to each other as they play. I listened in.
The language was shocking, and they didn’t even seem to know the meaning of most of the words they were saying.
“Don’t their parents tell them off for that language?” I asked, only to be told that many of their friends had their games consoles in their bedrooms and their parents didn’t know they were playing, let alone who they were talking to, or what they were saying.
This was further confirmed when I was doing my exercise workouts on the Xbox Kinect, after 10pm, over several nights. Every few minutes I’d get on-screen messages from their friends, imagining that either Jed or Dougie was playing, asking them to connect. This was between 10.30 and midnight on a school night!
We may be aware of the risks our children are exposed to over the internet, and monitor their computer use, but do we have clue what they’re doing on the games consoles in their bedrooms?
Filed under Parenting
IT’S Bonnie’s third birthday this week. I know, time does pass scarily quickly.
And in the run-up, she seems to have gone completely bonkers. As well as ramping up her tantrum level to 11, she’s taken on several personas. She’s a hairdresser, a chef, a doctor and Tinkerbell the fairy, whenever the mood takes her.
Bonnie’s use of imaginative play is endless. And for us, it’s all new. The boys just didn’t do it. They’d never have thought to bring you a pretend cup of tea in a tiny plastic cup, or order you to present your ear to have pretend thermometer rammed in to check your temperature.
Yes, they did have a dressing-up box, but usually as an excuse to batter each other with toy swords, rather than actually imagine themselves as an alternate character.
The boys each had a favourite soft toy (Sick Monkey, Hippo and Rescue Bear), but rather than being part of their general play, they were only remembered if they were ill or we were going on holiday.
Bonnie has several soft toys who have to be positioned next to her at bedtime and individually kissed goodnight. Pom the ragdoll, the bears Fluffy and One-Eye, Lisa Simpson, Dora the Explorer and Peppa Pig cluster around her head while ‘Arfur’ Rabbit is her permanent side-kick.
Arfur gets brought to the breakfast table and is allowed to watch TV, while the other toys are left in bed.
I’m not sure if it’s a girly thing or a fourth-childy thing, but it’s fascinating for us as parents because we thought we’d seen it all.
Her favourite phrases at the moment seem to be: “Aww, isn’t that cute?” (something we certainly don’t say) and “You’re my best friend.” This latter one is a little disconcerting for our 20-something babysitter, Dougie’s 11-year-old-friend who sometimes gets a lift to school, and the postman, all of whom have had Bonnie swear her allegiance.
We’ve asked a few of her ‘best-friends’ from nursery over for her first non-family-only party, and she’s madly over-excited. Her brothers are already arguing about who will be responsible for the CD player during musical bumps. I think I may leave them to run the show. It’s going to be chaos anyway. Maybe I should have made it a fancy dress party?
Filed under Parenting
HALF-TERM next week, and unless you’ve somehow managed to ignore the massive increase in the cost of living and booked a holiday, there’s an interesting free event on in Northampton.
The borough Play Rangers will be holding a Pirate Play Day at the cricket club in Wantage Road on February 26, between 11am and 3pm. They are hoping for over 1,000 children to join in with pirate games, face-painting, puppet-shows, climbing and adventures. It’s for four-year-old to teenagers and under 8s need to have an adult with them.
There will be play schemes running in Abington Park (am) and the Racecourse (pm) over half-term, which are also free. Fingers-crossed for dry weather!
AT a time of painful and apparently limitless cost-cutting, the loss of several public libraries might seem easy compared to closing nursing homes and respite care for the disabled.
But we shouldn’t be looking at these cuts as an ‘either/or’ situation, as the politicians would wish us to. We should be finding ways to preserve it all.
I was looking through some photos of the family over the years and was struck by the fact that the few I have of Bloke have a theme – he’s reading books to the kids.
We visit various town libraries once a month or so. It’s not that we don’t have the luxury of books at home, but with four children, they’ve got a little dog-eared over the years. We can’t afford monthly visits to bookshops, but going to the library means they can keep having their passion for stories – ( Doug and Bill prefer non-fiction) – updated whenever they want, for free.
I must confess to being sometimes tardy with my timekeeping. Despite being able to renew books online, I forgot about some which had become buried in the mess of the boys’ room. By the time they were found, I thought I’d be facing fines like those at university: £10 a DAY for late return of equipment, 60p per HOUR for in-demand loans. I think my fine at the library was about £2.50 for books that were weeks late.
Libraries are not just places for at-home-mums to go with their offspring, students to catch up, or pensioners to use the internet. They are storage units for our history. Journalists may rely far too much on Google, but the real research is to be done in the local history sections, where centuries of newspapers exist on microfiche, old photographs and street records are lovingly indexed, and the minutia of our ancestors are preserved. For now.
So, Save-Our-Libraries, find a way. Stick in a coffee shop. Hold celebrity signings if you must.
And fine me more. I have no excuse.
Filed under Parenting
BOOTS the Chemist, despite being a bastion of the British High Street and seemingly as virtuous as its head-girl cousin M&S, is a bit of a gossip.
Boots knows all your dirty little secrets.
As well as providing shelves full of ‘adult toys’, discreet morning-after pills and pregnancy testing kits, Boots will go even further: they’ll tell you who the Real Daddy is.
Actually, Boots will take £30 off you to sell you the paternity kit and whack on another £129 for the processing, but eventually, you will indeed find out if someone was, or indeed wasn’t, there at the moment of conception.
In Britain about 50,000 children born every year are registered without a father being named on the birth certificate. However, unlike pregnancy tests and morning-after pills, paternity testing is not available on the NHS, even if ordered by a court.
The justification, say the manufacturers, is that one in 25 men, according to woolly figures quoted in various bits of research, is not the biological parent of a child he believes he fathered.
Paternity tests are nothing new. You could already get them online, and at some independent chemists.
In no way do I think that true paternity should be swept under the table. And I don’t assume this is just an issue of Men’s Rights – and these days they seem to have fewer. I’m sure there are plenty of Dads who have a niggling suspicion that they are bringing up someone else’s child, or paying for one they never actually see.
But there are also mothers who face accusations of infidelity and for whom such a test would prove a father-in-denial responsibility beyond doubt.
The whole process is undoubtedly painful and has argument and betrayal at its core . And yet at the heart of this venom and bitterness is a child, an utterly blameless child.
The kits at Boots do require the presumed father, mother and children over 16 to sign consent forms (with the mother signing for young children), as well as proof of identification – all measures that can be faked, even though since 2006 it has been illegal to take someone’s DNA without permission.
Growing up in the 1970s, there were plenty of rumours about who’s Dad-wasn’t-really-their-Dad. I know people who knew the truth about their parentage, but felt they’d had a better life with the family they had, even if it wasn’t the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
I heard a heart-wrenching interview with a father who said he’d always had his doubts that his teenage son was really his, but had brought him up and shared custody after a bitter divorce. When the mum lost her temper and blurted out the truth to her son, he sought reassurance from the man he’d always known as his father. ‘Dad’ then carted the kid off to get a DNA test to prove he’d always been right, then triumphantly returned to throw the evidence in the ex-wife’s face. But what of the 16-year-old child, whose life had just been shattered by the two people he thought loved him unconditionally?
The labs say most tests are done on newborns or very young children who are too young to understand the implications. But they will one day grow up. And what about your DNA being taken? Who is responsible for destroying it? Or will DNA labs be able to sell your data without your consent? Will paternity tests be routinely done in the delivery room so there’s no room for doubt? Or trust?
What Boots has done – purely for its own profit – is ‘normalise’ the paternity test as something you can buy along with deodorant and a sandwich.
Jeremy Kyle must be terrified: who is going to watch the results of “My Mum was a bit of a Slapper” if we can all just pop down to Boots and scrape a cotton bud around our cheeks?
Filed under Parenting
WHILE I’m looking forward to our fourth child Bonnie’s third birthday later this month, I’m also getting worried. There’s going to be a fight.
The conflict is going to involve her dummy addiction.
Yes, yes, quieten down all you brilliant parents who refused your offspring the plasticy comfort of a dummy. I thought I’d be like you until about 24 hours after our eldest was born, when sleep deprivation and panic saw us run to the all-night garage to buy one.
Not all our children had dummies. Dougie refused one, having found his thumb just days after birth . . . which he still sucks now at the age of 11.
Jed and Billy had dummies, but gave them up without much fuss on their third birthdays.
And herein lies the problem. On Bonnie’s birthday, she’ll be expected to give up her dummies to the Dummy Fairy, who collects them from beneath pillows to give to newborn babies who need them more than three-year-olds. And she’s not up for the idea AT ALL, despite the promise of payment/presents.
Bonnie never wanted a dummy for day-time, just for bedtime and car journeys. But since I told her that when she’s officially A Grown-Up Girl, the dummies have to go, she’s become stubbornly attached to them. Tantrums usually end up with her demanding one (and go on for ages when she’s told ‘no’). Her behaviour in the car is completely dictated by whether there’s a dummy available. I’ve tried withdrawal, but I’m just too tired, impatient and weak-willed to try to beat the looming birthday deadline.
Are girls more stubborn than boys, or is this just an inevitable stand-off between the females of the house?
A message from those nice folk at Coton Manor Gardens, just north of Northampton. They will be open from this Saturday (12th) for two weeks until Sunday 27th February, as the snowdrops are now coming into full flower and the aconites are putting on a good display. The hellebores, however, have been held back by the weather. Plants for sale, lunches and teas will, of course, be available. http://www.cotonmanor.co.uk
That is all.
Filed under Gardening
I FEEL for the parents, staff and pupils of Weston Favell School. I really do. I’m sure my fellow parents of Malcolm Arnold-nee-Unity-nee-Trinity pupils do too.
For the last few years, we watched the chaos and disruption wreaked by the Academy steamroller as it did/didn’t/did turn our state secondary school in a disadvantaged, urban catchment area into, well, a school with a new head, a name and new uniform.
Now Weston Favell is going through the same débâcle, as its potential sponsors are named. At least Weston parents are being told straight-up: “You don’t have a choice about this, other than to state a preference for a sponsor.”
Organisations on the sponsor list include The David Ross Foundation, which already sponsors The Malcolm Arnold Academy and another in Grimsby, and E-ACT, whose director general, one-time Northampton School for Boys head Bruce Liddington, also wants to set up a “free school” east of the town. Other potential sponsors are Greenwood Dale School in Nottingham, Barnfield College, Bedford College, Hanover Foundation, Ormiston Trust, Priory Federation of Academies and ARK Schools.
Weston, by all accounts, seemed to be improving of late under their new head Betty Hasler, who told parents last week: “There is no choice not to be an academy. The Department of Education has made it very clear that we cannot stay as we are and if we do not choose are own sponsor then the Government will make the choice for us.”
Similarly, Unity’s previous head Mrs Gwynne had been well-liked and had started to turn the school around. But becoming a ‘new’ academy means a new headteacher is non-negotiable. I’m sure someone will correct me if I’m wrong, but this means Ms Hasler could be getting the boot(if she hadn’t already announced her intention to jump ship).
When Unity/Trinity became Malcolm Arnold Academy in September, I wrote that I would reserve judgement until the school had a chance to settle down. I’m nervously and impatiently standing by that statement.
After all, how do we parents really know what’s going on? We chuck our children through the gates, remind them about homework, wash their sports kit and and hope for the best. I get no feedback from my son who is 13 and only grunts.
At first, many promises were made. Malcolm Arnold Academy, under the David Ross Foundation , vowed to have a well-staffed school with better discipline and beneficial links with public schools.
We were also to be a music and maths specialist, but as far as I’m aware, the school still has no Head of Music (job adverts had stated the position would start in January, five months after the school opened). What I do hear, from fellow parents and staff, is that very little has really changed. There’s still a lack of consistency in teaching and discipline.
There are, however, new opportunities. Our usually mono-syllabic first-born used his gift of the gab to win the chance to have a tour of the Olympic stadium site and visit Mayor Boris at his London HQ. Apparently David Ross won the trip for a handful of his academy students in a charity raffle! Jed’s playing hockey – which he loves – thanks to the efforts of staff who have done a deal with Thomas Becket to share training. This week he went to the theatre to watch Private Peaceful. He’s also taking part in a schools competition to stage a mock Magistrate’s Court trial. All these things make his younger brother, who got into the over-subscribed Northampton School for Boys, green with envy.
The only advice I have for Weston’s anxious parents is: Don’t panic. Yes, it’s a pain to have your child’s education fiddled with at every turn. No, there’s not a lot you can do about it. All we can ever do as parents is to hope that the school does its absolute best to give your child every opportunity to fulfil his or her potential, and that we as parents find the time/money/enthusiasm to support them.
Filed under Parenting
AS the dynamics and discussions have changed with the older boys, so the levels of chastisement have had to alter too.
Our younger two hate being separated from the action. But let’s face it, teenage boys don’t mind at all if you send them to their rooms. That’s where their stuff is (mostly on the floor) and where they can text to their hearts’ content.
One thing that all of them dread is being separated from the real love of their lives – various video game consoles. If you really want them to suffer, take away access to the PSPs, the DSIs, ban Xbox and Wii usage and you suddenly see a change of heart. But you have to follow through with the threats.
Last week, for various different misdemeanours, Billy, Dougie and Jed were all barred from the Xbox on Saturday morning (they aren’t allowed on it on school nights). This was so painful for them, they begged to be allowed to ‘earn back’ their Xbox rights throughout the week.
By Friday night, they’d done the dishwasher several times, sorted and folded several loads of washing, swept the kitchen floor, emptied the car of rubbish, and, get this, cleaned the toilets.
It sounds terrible, but I almost want them to misbehave again this week. . .
Filed under Parenting
Hilary Scott Writes 