Tag Archives: Northampton

June 7, 2012 · 9:30 am

What’s more British than queuing in the rain? You won’t get me with your jubilee guilt

There are some marvellous mothers out there in Parentworld. Ones who don’t leave their offspring to get their own breakfast on a Saturday just so they can lie in. Ones who remember to do packed lunches and pick up their children from sports clubs on time.

There are Mums who during the past week have organised street parties, decorated their houses, made Union Jack dressing-up outfits and cooked red, white and blue cupcakes. Ones who remember fondly their own jubilee experience circa 1977.

I’m not one of them.

My only memory of the Silver Jubilee, aged seven, is confused. I think I remember my primary school playground in deepest darkest Devon, on a sunny day, with trestle tables, been given a souvenir mug. But then I also think I’ve seen a photo of that day. Do I remember the event or the photo?

Anyhow, lots of people were saying that we had to do something for the children to remember the 60th jubilee. Thankfully school and nursery had designated Friday as a dress-up and eat picnics type-of day so all we had to do was supply the regal dress-up and some Marmite. Yes, Billy took Marmite.

No perfect crepe paper and cardboard creations in our house I’m afraid. My mother’s talents have clearly skipped a generation. Bonnie wore a blue and white frock with red leggings, and we just about persuaded Billy into some kind of jeans and cape ensemble.

Then on the Sunday, when we’d committed everyone (“we’re going, and that’s final”) to the Delapre Park Jubliee Picnic in Northampton, it peed down all day. Nevertheless, we dragged everyone out on coats and wellies to ‘have a drive around’ with a promise of a fast-food  lunch. Broke that promise by queuing for the Delapre Abbey Cafe and only lifted their spirits by paying £2 for each them to hit a fairground-style test-your-strength-ring-bell thingy and ‘win’ an inflatable hammer.

Home to catch the capital’s chaos on TV for the rest of the bank holiday while two of the kids developed stomach bugs. God only knows how the Queen managed to stay sane, poor woman.

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June 1, 2012 · 12:49 am

Review of Blood Wedding – part of the Festival of Chaos at Royal & Derngate

Blood Wedding Review – Royal & Derngate, Northampton

 

Blood Wedding_Seline Hizli The Bride and Kathryn Pogson The Mother

GOODNESS I love Royal & Derngate. I can’t help it. I’ve seen those theatres going through their ups and downs of the last twenty years and fight and win against the finance-sucking behemoth of the London arts scene.

They’ve been consistently producing attractive and challenging theatre – with the brilliant Made in Northampton branding – while other regionals have struggled to survive.

So when they announced the Festival of Chaos series of plays – The Bacchae (staged in the abandoned Chronicle & Echo press hall), Blood Wedding and Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler – it was further proof of their refusal to allow regional theatre to drop the curtain and bow out.

Yes. Exciting, original theatre in our little Midlands town. World premieres, national arts press heading north to visit, international playwrights drafted in, unfailingly fabulous sets and live musicians; what’s not to like?

I’ve been particularly looking forward to The Bacchae (which I can’t help but pronounce with a Scouse accent, as in; ‘aye, where’s me baccy?’), but couldn’t see it today on the afternoon press show.

So first for us was Blood Wedding, a new adaptation of Federico Garcia Lorca’s tale of family feuds and infidelity set beneath the searing Andalucian sun.

We’re introduced to The Groom (Liam Bergin) and his whining, mourning mother (Kathryn Pogson) as she constantly revisits the terrible deaths of her husband and son at the hands of the vicious Felix family. She’s seeing snakes in the kitchen and hidden all the knives.

But the central setting is not the events of the past but the wedding of her surviving son to the daughter of a successful widower, brought up in isolation on one of Spain’s many desolately dry farms. (So far, so Shakespearean).

While the wedding formalities are arranged we’re presented with the stifling poverty of Leonardo’s family. While his wife (played beautifully by the arresting Amanda Wilkin) and baby wait for him to get work and feed them physically and emotionally, he’s already detached himself and riding his horse into the dust to pursue illicit liaisons with the bride-to-be.

As the marriage date arrives the (surprisingly large) cast gather to celebrate, but the Bride and Leonardo behave less like star-crossed lovers and more like spoilt teens. The Groom’s mother continues to dominate the play both physically and mentally as she perpetuates the mythology of her victimised family and drives the last good thing in her life away to seek revenge.

As always the Royal’s staging is beautiful, innovative and makes the small stage work like a much bigger canvas.

The cast work most effectively in the wedding scenes, when the swaying choreography and sweet vocals combine to give the audience its only sense of a hot Spanish setting.

There’s also the surreal but effective performance of Robert Benfield (yes, a grown man) as The Girl, a dirty voice of reality who dips in and out of the action and whose purpose lends more to the playwright’s poetic obsession with death than the fluidity of the story. By the time The Cousin turned into The Moon I was truly confused and a little bit bored.

The monologues dragged on, the occasional forays into ‘modern’ humour grated and broke the flow, and the search through the woods gave me no sense of jeopardy, perhaps because I already had no affection for the fugitives anyway.

Seline Hizli as the Bride tried her damnedest to portray a woman who wanted to reject the path chosen for her as a woman, (while looking like a cross between Rose Byrne and Rachael Weiss). Similarly Amanda Wilkin gave the inexplicably rejected wife a life of sorrowful inevitability.

Some of the movement was allegorical and beautiful. It was lovely to watch, but I wanted to feel the oppressive dry Spanish landscape of the 1930s. I wanted to care.

Still, two rather buff male characters got their shirts off quite a lot, which was nice.

 

Blood Wedding runs at Royal & Derngate, Northampton until June 30. You can find out more about the whole Festival of Chaos line-up and book tickets on 01604 624811 or via http://www.royalandderngate.co.uk.

 

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May 30, 2012 · 12:32 pm

Call the suncream police – my eight-year-old is SPF-free

I’m a stickler for suncream. The kids will grumpily confirm this. It’s one of the few rules of ‘proper parenting I stick to.

I’ve done too many features on sun damage and malignant melanomas to be lax on it. Cancer Research UK say a childhood sunburn can massively increase the chance of cancer in later life. How could you let them burn for the sake of a few quid on sun-lotion and greasy palms?

However, I just can’t find a suncream that doesn’t turn eight-year-old Billy’s skin into a burning rash of tiny pimples as soon as he heads outdoors.

It’s not like he’s got any other allergies. We’re lucky. No asthma, no hay fever, no food intolerance. Probably because they’ve been brought up in a house that gets vacuumed when the dirt becomes too visible to ignore and dusting only happens on cakes with icing sugar.

We’ve tried for years with a long list of brands, types, concoctions and SPF levels. Every sunscreen, even the organic, anti-allergy, mega-block types don’t do anything but make him miserable and itchy.

School ask that parents suncream their offspring before school on sunny days and they can bring cream to put on themselves. Although Bonnie has to put up with the morning sticky rigmarole of sun lotion and even the older two have to endure their mother dragging them back to apply SPF before they leave the house – very uncool. (They said today they actually don’t mind, having seen friends enduring the agony of a hearty slap when someone sees a pink neck.)

I’ve stopped sending Bill to school pre-sunscreened. I had to apologise and explain to his teacher when he went on a school trip in blazing sunshine  last week why he wasn’t armed with the obligatory Factor 30. He’s a fan of hats, has floppy long hair at the moment, will wear a coat even when it’s 25 degrees outside and comes back in the house when the sun gets too much so I’ve not had to worry about sunstroke.

This weekend, with the hot weather making us all expose far more skin than we’re used to, and an overdue all-day trip to the allotment planned,  was worried about whether it was better to go with the rash-inducing suncream or leave him without. We decided to run the risk, with the proviso he kept his t-shirt and suncream on at all times.

After a couple of hours he’d abandoned his shirt alongside his bare-chested brothers and Bloke.

When we got home, we checked. Jed had a tiny patch of sunburn on his arm which he’d missed with the cream. Doug, who spent the blazing afternoon in the Franklin’s Gardens stands watching rugby, was burn-free. Bonnie, who had soaked her dress in the water-butt and ran around in her knickers, and a liberal layer of factor-30, was similarly unblemished.

And SPF-free Billy? Not a patch of pink. Completely burn-free.

Perhaps he’s just lucky. I can’t really remember sun-protection being such a massive issue in the 70s and 80s when I was a kid, and my Mum would be horrified that I never used sunscreen over several hot summers growing up on the beaches of North Devon. The first time I ever got sunburn was when I lived in London aged 19. I’ve worn suncream every summer since and made sure the kids have too.

Not putting cream on Billy still makes me paranoid though. Especially when we checked Bloke – who had forgotten to put cream on himself. Lobster pink and stinging, all over his back.

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May 29, 2012 · 9:22 am

Bonnie’s ballet already keeping us on our toes

BONNIE, aged four, has started ballet, and she LOVES it. It’s come as a shock, as I’m more used to delivering boys to various sports fields.

With rugby, football, cricket and hockey, you just have to make sure the kit is vaguely clean and get them to the pitch on time. They have no use for you other than as clothes washer and taxi driver.

Standing in the ‘ballet shop’, the lady behind the counter could see I was struggling. After a couple of weeks ‘trying out’ her half-hour ballet class (ie, checking she wasn’t going to have the screaming ab-dabs or get bored), we were instructed to buy her official ‘uniform.’ Would a pair of tights and a pink dress-up ballet tutu do? No chance.

“Some teachers are stricter than others,” explained the ballet-shop-lady. Is it Miss [So and So] or Miss [So and So]? Ah yes, a leotard and skirt will be fine for a four-year old, you’ve probably got your own tights you can use.”

To say she’s delighted in her ballet clothes is an understatement. She’d sleep in them if we let her. The added bonus is it all cost more than a tenner less than one junior club rugby shirt.

Of course, she’s already showing prima ballerina behavior: “Where are the shoes? I must have shoes! Why haven’t I got ballet slippers?”

I was back in the shop a few days later buying tiny ballet slippers. I’m a pushover.

How long do they keep this up, all you wiser parents of girls?

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May 28, 2012 · 8:07 am

Parenting lessons are about the Nanny State, not Supernanny

EACH time I go to the doctor, I dread the blood pressure test. Out comes the cuff-of-doom, which just about fits around my chubby bingo-wing before the inevitable nurse-inflicted bruising starts.

As the air is pumped in, I try desperately to be calm. Controlled breathing Hilary, nice thoughts . . . ouch! This blinkin’ hurts!

The result is usually “a little bit higher than it should be.”

Anyone who knows me will tell you I’m not the most placid of people. My workmates wince at my noisiness, my sons steer me away from potential confrontation in supermarket car parks, my family eye-roll discreetly at whichever particular rant I happen to be on.

They’re used to it, so they know, that much like the popularity Nick Clegg, it will be over as quickly as it began.

Sometimes though, there are issues that bubble and fester in the back of my head without raising my blood pressure to its usual eye-popping level. They build, ominously.

One such issue is the party politicising of parenting.

This week specifically, ‘free parenting classes’ accessed via vouchers given out at Boots (hey, and make sure you spend, spend, spend while you’re in there!)

There’s even meant to be an iPad app, telling you how to change a nappy or cope with teething. *reaches for blood pressure monitor.*

Bad parenting is blamed for everything. It’s our fault kids are fat, it’s our fault they are unemployable, and our fault the country is in debt because we spoiled them on our credit cards in the 90s.

In a bare-faced attempt to look like they give a toss, the government are throwing good money at this instead of actually investing in more and better social workers and health care professionals who already run these services.  It’s a PR stunt, started by previous governments with ‘tsars’ and ‘initiatives’ that saw money disappearing into some quango or ‘facilitator’.

It’s a tricky subject, I know. We read about many children suffering neglect and abuse and how their parents had been ‘badly parented’ themselves. And they come from every social class. The courts can already make parenting orders on those whose criminal neglect sees them in front of a magistrate.

Sure Start centres across the country have been quietly getting on and helping thousands of families who really do need help. Those with post-natal depression, in abusive relationships, or whose extended families have rejected them.

But they are also seeing free services being snapped up by uber-parents; those who over-parent their offspring through the neurotic belief that they aren’t doing it ‘properly’ already, (so the State, or Mumsnet keeps telling them).

Some remember their own strict 1950s-style parents handing out more punishment than hugs, and decide to reverse that behavior towards their own brats offspring. The ones who really need the classes would never go whether they are free or not.

The truth is that becoming a parent is a terrifying and bewildering thing. With some common sense, a good health visitor with more than five minutes to spare, some honest friends with children we don’t detest, and memories about the best parts of our own childhoods, we can just about get through it. Without the Nanny State throwing away money that should be spent on services we already have.

 

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May 18, 2012 · 9:55 am

Hamster’s escape act becoming a talent

IT had already been a frantic evening. And then we lost Jemima the hamster, Billy’s most beloved thing in the world.

Bloke was away that night with work, so I’d collected and fed the kids, put Bonnie to bed, and was trying to fit in a quick shower and slap of make-up before I was due to attend a friend’s leaving do.

I was already an hour late, when Billy, who was being put to bed by babysitter Jed, shouted: “Hey, Jemima’s cage tubes have gone.”

It took a few seconds for this to register. Jemima has two cages, one on top of a very tall bookcase that the kids can’t reach, and a smaller one on a tall chest of drawers. The two are linked by a series of interlinked tubes.

If the tubes had fallen off and Jemima was in the top cage at the time, she’d have an open hole to a very long drop (about 12feet).

If she’d been in the bottom cage, she’d have had an open hole to a five-foot drop.

Half-dressed and with wet hair, I checked she wasn’t hiding in either cage. She wasn’t.

Billy hadn’t started to panic, but he wasn’t far off. Our eight-year-old has a habit of going into wailing hysterics around potential disaster so I wanted to get him out of the room in case we were going to find Miss Jemima had shuffled off this mortal coil to visit the cosy shredded paper nest in the sky.

Billy was dispatched on a very-important-task to another room.

It wasn’t looking good. The tubes were in a disconnected mess all over the floor, but no sign of squished pet. Perhaps she’d been in the tubes when they fell, and they’d hit the shelves, breaking her fall.

I always wondered how hamsters managed to ‘escape’ so frequently, seeing as ours is meant to stay in her sealed cage, unless she’s having her fifteen minutes a day roll around the room in her ball.

The last time Jemima ‘escaped’ (the lid was left open), we found her in the most impossible to reach corner of the boys’ room chewing away on some power cables, having already stuffed a tissue in one cheek pouch and a bit of dirty sock in the other.

I’ve heard stories of them chewing through cages, and into wood, make a Tom and Jerry style hole in the skirting, and then living beyond reach in the wall cavity.

A reader told me of her family’s apparently indestructible hamster who had one night been discovered dodging traffic outside in the street before a keen-eyed neighbor had rescued the tiny pet.

The same hamster eventually met her adventurous end after going missing for two weeks. The children had accepted that Hammy had gone to hamster heaven, when she turned up on the back doorstep, considerably thinner, but unfortunately with two broken legs. Presumably she’d had a fight with a cat and had escaped. Amazingly, after surviving all that time in the suburban wild, her instinct had led her home.

Despite the Second Coming though, the poor thing had to be taken to the vet and, as my reader put it to her kids, ‘transferred indefinitely to the lovely hamster hospital’ (where no visitors are allowed).

I was desperately hoping Jemima was not going to end up in the same place. Semilong cats are pretty tough.

By this stage I’d forgotten about going out and expected to spend the evening comforting a bereaved, hysterical eight-year-old. Then he wanders back into the room, looks under his bed and fishes out a bewildered but fully intact Jemima, as though nothing has happened. (And yes, we DID look there.)

Perhaps the bond between Child and Pet shouldn’t be underestimated. Now would be the time to get Billy to train Jemima up to do tricks, so they form some Ashleigh & Pudsey-style talent act and perform for the Queen . . .

Or maybe not.

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May 17, 2012 · 8:39 am

We’d decided not to bother with the Olympics, but somehow we’ve got tickets

HAVING decided it was all a big waste of money, how unfair it would be not to take all of the kids and that we’d be better off watching it at home, we’ve actually got four tickets to the Olympics.

We had failed to get any in the previous ‘rounds’, but we’d had an email last week giving a last chance to fork out £20 or more per person to see early rounds of events like cycling, swimming and, er, Greco-Roman wrestling.

Bloke and I had decided that getting up at 7am on a Sunday – again – was ridiculous, and that all the tickets would go to those with faster broadband and an actual interest. To be honest, we didn’t feel was worth swapping a much-needed lie-in for.

Bloke would never turn down the chance to see weird masked figures in white bloomers chasing each other with swords (fencing), and our sport-mad boys really wanted to go, but was it really worth applying when we were limited to a maximum of four tickets, for one single event? Forking out £86 before you even factored in the train fare? Bah, Olympics-shlimpics.

Checking email much later, and quite possibly because I’m too stubborn to admit defeat, I stuck in a speculative request for the hockey, the only sport I thought we would agree on. Four tickets, when we’re on holiday anyway (and not going anywhere).

This time the computer tells you straight away if the tickets are available. After two tries, it let us have four for the earliest rounds of the women’s hockey, on a Tuesday, at 7pm. No idea who’s playing, but we’ll be there. If we can think of a simultaneous adventure for Billy and Bonnie that is.

Tickets for those who missed out previously are on sale until May 17, and if there are any left they go on sale on May 23. You might as well try, as you can always sell them back if you can’t get a babysitter. Apparently.

 

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May 10, 2012 · 8:37 am

Yo! It’s a 13th birthday treat

WE now have two teenagers. Those of you who have read my family saga for several years will be no doubt thinking the same as us – where did the time go?

And we’re also thinking: why can’t we understand a word they are saying? And why won’t they pick up the things they drop all over the floor?

Tuesday was Dougie’s 13th birthday. My cuddly little angel of a baby is now officially mumbling his way into adulthood and reminding me he’s old enough to get a Facebook account.

And my, how the tastes of teens have changed. For his birthday ‘treat’ he asked to go to Yo Sushi. Yes, a sushi bar, with a moving conveyer belt of mini dishes rolling past. A potential disaster with children, as you are charged for the plates you’ve picked.

I had visions of them all grabbing, sticking their fingers in or sniffing, and turning their noses up. Instead they were all fabulously behaved, perched on high stools, eating far more adventurously than expected and having a great time.

I’d highly recommend it just for the fun, although beware the bill – all those fun little dishes are colour coded, and while they all cost between £1.80 and £5, that deliciousness adds up. Limit your pinks and greys!

Oh, and the kids loved the dessert plate called dorayaki, but all hated the pink Mochi. It made a welcome change to one of many Pizza Hut visits.

The nearest Yo Sushi is in Milton Keynes. Perhaps we could get one closer to home . . ?

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May 9, 2012 · 2:36 pm

School applications – with 400 extra applications and over 400 not getting a first, second or third choice place – councils need to do the maths

IT LOOKS like a huge amount of people didn’t get their children into their nearest primary school this year, and will have to start the soul-sapping job of appealing.

Allocations for secondary places always cause problems, but the primary system is now heaving under the weight of requests. There were over 400 more applications than last year.

The number who did not get ANY of their three choices was 476.

That’s a whole school’s worth of reception-age kids, or roughly 15 class-fulls.

I feel particularly for those who live near a school and haven’t got their eldest child in because they don’t already have a child in the system. But there’s no arguing with the priority for sibling link. It would be heartbreaking, let alone a logistical nightmare, to drop a four-year old off at one school and bus across town to get a six-year-old to school somewhere else.

I know that sounds biased because all four of our offspring have been at the same school since our eldest got a place ten years ago. But I can’t apologise for that. Back then the school wasn’t oversubscribed, as very few schools were. Now it has a waiting list. It is also one of the few that has a nursery and afterschool attached, which means people further away have to choose it.

The plain fact is that the county council has a responsibility to find places for all children and they knew full well the population was rising. They are allowing new houses to be built which are meant to attract families. But new schools are not being built as swiftly as new housing developments.

Since the move from the middle and upper school system almost a decade ago, many schools were closed down, as pupils were crammed into the remodelled primary and secondary schools. The end result is that there simply aren’t enough primary schools in Northampton. There are plenty rotting away in a state of desperate disrepair waiting to be sold, but not enough to house children nearby.

There are lists of all the schools in the county on the county council’s website. They break down how many places were allocated by what criteria. In Northampton there are only two schools that are marked as having places left. The village schools have LOADS with places. But how many families with young kids can afford to move to a village? How long before a village school with spare places is deemed uneconomical and closed too?

Idiotic and largely misleading league tables, coupled with the maddening fiction of ‘parental choice,’ and financial cuts that are seeing fewer teachers employed when there should be more, are all having a detrimental effect on education as a whole.

Investment in nursery places is great but what if there’s nowhere to teach them locally when they actually get to compulsory schooling? Why give parents the chance to go out to work if they’ll have to give up that job in order to get their children to a school half and hour’s drive away? It’s a ridiculous situation.

It is essential that you look at the county council website to work out what to do next, as different schools have different procedures.

If you didn’t get ANY of your choice, I would advise that you ring your three schools and get on their waiting list. You may find that a school has held back places for appeals, and most importantly, when everyone responds to their allocations, more places become available. Which makes it very important that you respond QUICKLY to accept a place if you DID get what you wanted.

Any extra places are re-allocated on May 30, June 20 and July 16, or you may find you get a call literally at the last-minute. A friend’s son had actually been bought uniform for a school further away and the day before term started she was told a place had come up at her nearest.

You should also contact your local councilor, because they should be the ones working to get more schools built-in this town, not sitting back while the weeds and wildlife take over the ones the politicians chose to close.

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April 30, 2012 · 8:29 am

Why a scar on a girl’s face is different to a boy’s

OUR boys are always nursing some injury or another – stop! Don’t ring social services, they are boys, and they play sport.

I wouldn’t want to generalise and say boys get more scrapes than girls, but having three sons one after another it seemed from the moment they could walk they were scraping knees and elbows. While we’ve been lucky enough so far (*touches wood) to avoid any broken bones, Jed has a large scar on his elbow plus one on his eyelid, Dougie has several on his knees, plus one on his eye, and Billy Whizz seems to be attempting at every opportunity to get a scar of his own.

But while the boisterous boys will expend their energy on the rugby pitch, their self-appointed princess of a sister has her own daredevil streak and is constantly trying to climb things that shouldn’t be climbed or stand on tall objects.

However it was rugby that gave her a major cut recently, not playing it yet, but falling flat on her face while we were watching Dougie play. For some reason she didn’t put her hands out to stop herself and ended up with a cut on her nose and a grazed chin and lip.

While I was obviously concerned, I found myself fussing about potential scarring, and guilty that I was more worried about our daughter having a scar than I’d been about our sons. Boys can wear scars and scabs with pride. Girls get neurotic and self-conscious about them. Especially when they are right in the middle of your nose.

She’s not bothered, although when I said she mustn’t pick at it or she’d get a scar on her nose, she was instantly concerned. I’d forgotten that to a four-year old, Scar is the baddie in the Lion King . .

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