Tag Archives: Northampton

April 29, 2012 · 5:22 pm

Are we being ripped off if VAT-free ‘children’s’ clothing only goes up to age 12?

WHEN your children are babies, or pre-school, it feels like they cost more money than you could ever earn.

Nappies, special food, prams, cots, car seats, milk, clothes that they grow out of in a week and then perhaps nursery fees that cripple the family budget – even though childcare staff are among some of the lowest paid workers.

You know that when they come out of nappies, or start school, the bills should reduce, shouldn’t they?

School uniform is an expensive business, even when you don’t have to buy for three (or in our case, four from September). But at least we are told children’s clothes aren’t subject to 20 per cent VAT.

But what constitutes children’s clothes? Under 14, apparently.

Our eldest is 14, his brother just about to turn 13. Still children, right?

Not when it comes to clothing I’m afraid. My kids aren’t enormous, pretty average in height, but the eldest both measure in at size 14-15. Many of their friends their age have been six-foot tall for some time already, and they aren’t even 15 yet. Their parents will already have been doing what we are now having to do: buy them clothes and shoes intended for adults.

Jed and Doug in cheaper attire

The choice of clothes for boys aged 11-16 is very limited. Unlike girls, who seem to have racks of options, few clothing stores seem to cater for teen boys, which seems bonkers to me when they are more fashion conscious than ever before. They are also having frequent growth spurts not seen since they were newborns, and seem to need new trousers and shoes every other fortnight.

Why are the retailers so terrible at catering for them? Surprisingly, Next is rubbish for boys over 10, as are M&S, BHS, TK Maxx, John Lewis, Matalan, Debenhams, Primark, New Look and the supermarkets.

H&M are one of the few places I don’t have a fight on my hands when shopping, but they aren’t well stocked or cheap. As for shoes, they both have bigger feet than me and I have to now pay adult prices for adult-sized shoes (although half-decent children’s shoes are sometimes more expensive than adults’ anyway).

Adult clothes don’t quite fit either. The legs are too long, the tops too baggy, but it’s all we can get.

So who is getting the benefit of this zero VAT? Someone’s missing a trick.

Our kids have always had to put up with hand-me-downs, except Jed as the eldest, but even he has to wear second-hand now. Don’t tell him, but I’ve found that I’ve shrunk so many items of Bloke’s clothes they now fit his sons.

Thankfully, for the kids, he’s not quite got to the elasticated trouser and cardigan stage yet.

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April 24, 2012 · 4:11 pm

Interesting graphic about girls and science

Girls in STEM
Created by: EngineeringDegree.net

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April 19, 2012 · 8:25 am

Fifty things for kids to do? Don’t try this at home

THERE was a report (tenuous press release) this week about the ‘bucket list’ of 50 things children should do before they are 12, which included making mud pies, flying kites and collecting frogspawn. My lot, despite being townies, have ticked off most of the things on the list (except perhaps hunting fossils and ‘geocaching.’)

They take great pleasure in getting as mucky as possible at the allotment, have to camp every year, get let loose in parks and gardens at every opportunity and love beach exploring at their grandparents.

I mentioned to the kids that there were many things I did as a child that I certainly wouldn’t want them doing before they were 40, let alone 12. Then I couldn’t actually tell them for fear it would give them ideas.

However, for your eyes only, (look away kids, and my Mum and Dad) here’s a few things you won’t see on a children’s must-do list:

Make a ‘death slide’ over a fast running stream while trespassing on an angry farmer’s land;

Search the ashtrays in the cars in the village garage for used fag butts – and then dare each other to smoke them,

Remove half bottles of dad’s homebrewed wine and top it up with water, replacing the corks with a hammer,

Accept rides from older teenagers on motorbikes, even if it is ‘just across a field,’ or

Lie under jumps while your horsey friends – on their horses – jump over you.

It’s a wonder most of us with free-range childhoods are still here to tell the tale.

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April 18, 2012 · 4:53 pm

How my garden was obliterated in less than three seconds

IT has taken eight years to develop my shady, urban, child-infested back garden, but it took less than three seconds to destroy it.

At around 1.30am on Sunday, I was woken by what felt like the house shaking. Or was it just a dream? My nocturnal other-half came to bed a few minutes later.

“The wall in the back garden has collapsed,” he muttered, before rolling over and attempting to go to sleep.

That wasn’t going to happen. I was wide awake. I went to peer out of the children’s bedroom window to see what he was talking about. It was too dark.

Downstairs to the window nearest the garden. All I could see was a sheet of the climber hydrangea petiolaris, hanging forlornly in a sheet, not clinging to much at all.

As I peered I could see . . .well, not the garden anymore. Just a sheet of bricks. It was an extraordinary sight. Like an instant patio.

. . . after

To be honest, I cried. Yes, I know it’s just a garden and the fact it happened in the night meant everyone is still alive (it would have killed anyone in the garden, it fell so fast), but after recent nocturnal misadventures, like the car getting squashed and finding a strange drunk man asleep in the dining room, it just feels like we are cursed by bad luck.

Self pity? Yeah, but it took me eight years to build that garden. I write about it as a garden journalist. So no, I don’t feel very laid back about it at all.

The wall was too tall. A Victorian garden wall, bordering the large garden of our neighbouring house’s garden really, all the way around their’s, just one border on ours. It had stood for over 120 years, and yet collapsed in one devastating sheet of bricks, covering the right hand garden border and our entire lawn. A lawn the kids had been playing on just 36 hours earlier.

The following morning it felt unreal to see it. Huge amounts of brickdust covered all the plants and the neighbours’ outside lights, strung presumably on their side, where the ground is a foot or so higher than on ours. Like a horticultural Becher’s Brook.

I couldn’t even start to organise what to do next, as sons needed taking to rugby matches and general life needed to go on as normal.

Bloke spoke to the neighbours the next day. Discussions, apparently, that involved talking to our respective insurance companies. I rang them, they said they’d get back to us. They did, only to tell us the wall wasn’t covered because nothing had hit it, “like a car or something.” Unsurprisingly, getting cross and emailing them the photos didn’t make any difference.

Since then it’s been raining solidly, and each morning when I get up and look out of the window at the missing garden, a little part of my soul wizens. Under all those bricks, somewhere, along with all the other crushed plants, is a snowdrop named ‘Bonnie Scott’, named after my daughter.

What to do next? I can hardly face it.

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April 18, 2012 · 1:24 pm

Losing the plot over lost property

DO you remember Bagpuss? And how he lived in a magic shop full of lost things? There must be somewhere out there piled high with my children’s belongings.

I don’t know if your offspring are similarly absent-minded, or whether it’s a second-child thing, but over the last 12 months alone, our almost-13-year-old-old son has managed to ‘mislay’ three coats, two pairs of shorts, a mobile phone, school shirts, two pairs of school trousers, a tie, trainers, his watch, a memory stick, three keys, a rucksack, countless woolly hats and gloves, several socks (mostly expensive sports-related ones) and my complete trust in his common sense.

This is not a new mystic ability of his, the vanishing trick. Just about every parents’ evening we’ve attended has involved the sentence: “Dougie does tend to leave things behind quite a lot . . .”

I certainly don’t think he does it intentionally, or simply doesn’t understand the value of things. He’s also not the only one to have lost things – but he is worryingly consistent at it. We were temporarily concerned that maybe he was getting bullied and having things stolen from him, but that wasn’t the case. He just forgets.

He absolutely hates being told off about it, and is always mortified at having to own up to the latest ‘lost’ item and he knows it upsets us. He gets really frustrated and angry with himself and then the following day forgets something else and then is worried to admit it’s gone. He says he gets distracted by the next thing he’s meant to be doing and forgets to pick things up.

It feels like we’ve tried everything: nametags in everything, checklists, alarms – nothing seems to work.  We really don’t want to keep ‘punishing’ him over his absent-mindedness, but in the heat of the moment, I’m fairly liberal with my withdrawal of pocket money, Xbox privileges and later bedtimes. I’ve even made him buy replacements with his own money.

It’s hard, because if you simply ignore it and replace the items without consequences it feels like he won’t learn to be responsible for himself, and that’s not a great thing for a teenager.

Yet if he continually gets told off, he’ll be too worried to tell us, and will lie about it, which will make everything worse – and harder to retrieve that bag left on the bus, or coat in the cinema.

I read an interesting blog about an adult who simply couldn’t keep track of their belongings. They’d been constantly told off about it by their frustrated parents as a child, but despite stress and upset, still forgot. And as an adult, that meant leaving expensive coats, car fuel caps, handbags, wallets, laptops, work documents and house keys.

The only way she coped was by training herself not to put things down randomly: everything had to have a place she would notice on leaving. And that included wrapping handbag handles around her leg in restaurants, putting keys straight into pockets and jackets across her lap, not on chairs or coathooks.

I try to train our forgetful boy to keep everything in a rucksack, and that a removed coat or hoodie goes in the bag straight away. He went to the cinema with friends last weekend, and had already walked into town, had a burger and walked halfway home before he remembered he’d left his rucksack somewhere. I made him walk back to the cinema each day, and ask at the police station.

It’s still missing .  . .

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April 13, 2012 · 8:12 am

The Family! in an Adventure to the Cinema to see Pirates! in an Adventure with Scientists

AN altogether more expensive trip this holiday was to the cinema, to see Aardman Animation’s new film The Pirates! in an Adventure With Scientists.

This film shows off the stop-motion comedy skills of the geniuses behind Wallace and Gromit, as they take nice-but-dim Pirate Captain (Hugh Grant) on an adventure that kept the attention of our entire family, aged 4 to 43. (Bonnie had to sit on my knee due to Vue’s lack of booster seats, which saw her disappear, bum-first, engulfed by the flip-up seats).

It’s obvious from the off that our ‘hero’, aided by ‘Number Two’ (Martin Freeman), Pirate with Gout (Brendan Gleeson), Albino Pirate (Russell Tovey) and Surprisingly Curvaceous Pirate (Ashley Jensen) are a merry if inept crew who stand no chance of winning the Pirate of the Year Award. After being humiliated by better brigands Black Bellamy, Peg-Leg Hastings and Cutlass Liz (Salma Hayek), Pirate Captain vows to plunder on, only to meet up with geeky failure Charles Darwin (David Tennant) in his pre-beard days.

Darwin, like the audience, spots that Pirate Captain’s beloved parrot Polly is actually a Dodo, long believed extinct.

 

Pirate Captain

The Captain and crew return to London with Darwin and his silent ‘Man-panzee’ Mr Bobo (who uses cue cards and Gromit’s trademark eye-rolling) to try and win a prize with Polly. But a psychotic Queen Victoria has vowed death to all pirates, and has plans for PC’s dodo discovery.

There’s so much to look at that there’s little doubt this will be a film you need to see over and again for the visual puns. It’s a return to form for Aardman, with sequels in the pipeline, thanks to author Gideon Defoe’s series of Pirates! books.

It’s a great family film if you fancy a trip to the cinema, but a word of warning – sneak in your own snacks. The ticket price for six of us at Vue was £30, before we’d even ‘treated ourselves’ to popcorn and drinks, which took the price up to over £65!

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April 12, 2012 · 11:17 am

A quid a kid for train to London – worth it for a wander

IS it just me, or do you feel a pressure to be some kind of entertainment impresario during the school holidays?

After the usual day or two of general slobbing about, I seem to be required to have sorted a daily schedule of Things To Do, and to be frank, I don’t really know why I bother.

We don’t ever tend to jet off on any kind ‘proper’ holiday at Easter, and usually will fit in a visit to the grandparents ‘oop North’ if possible. But that fell through last week when the 15-year-old family camper broke down and needed parts that couldn’t be delivered until after the bank holiday.

So, what to do instead?

You might avoid London in the holidays, what with the massive cost of the tourist attractions and the inevitable extra queuing due to Easter.

But it’s actually quite good fun and value for money if you just get on a train and go for a wander.

We had to get to Waterloo last week for a short appointment, and then had the rest of the day to mooch about.

Don’t be conned by the ridiculous train fares quoted online. Instead, buy from the ticket desk people at – in our case – Northampton rail station, who seem to know the cheapest way to get you around. As long as you avoid trains that get into London before 9.59am, or back home between 4.45pm-7pm, you can get an adult and four children to London and back, including unlimited bus and tube travel around London, for £31.40.

That’s £28.40 for me, a QUID EACH for Jed, 14, Doug, 12 and Billy, 8, and four-year-old Bonnie travelled completely free. The petrol, parking and congestion charge would have been considerably more if we’d driven.

If you do fancy a trip to London this week, don’t head for the usual attractions without a fist full of vouchers (you’ll find them everywhere online, particularly on transport and tourism sites, but check their ‘valid from’ dates).

Or give up the queuing and go bus hopping instead. This is a favourite with the kids, who aren’t keen on being dragged around the tube network and much prefer the view from the top deck of a London double decker. With a travelcard you can pick up any route, and if you have a smartphone you can get apps that show you where the buses go to and from wherever you happen to be.

I bribe my kids, using the power of sweets, to spot ‘interesting’ things. They spotted Ghandi’s statue, while another saw a plaque about a zeppelin crash. Poor Bonnie, desperate to join in, just kept shouting and pointing: “There’s a house! And there’s a another house!”

As long as the weather is good and you have plenty of food and drink bribes, you can also wander on foot and see lots too. We walked miles along the river Thames, from Blackfriars Bridge past the OXO Tower, along by all the SouthBank theatres, past County Hall and the London Eye, over Westminster Bridge to the Houses of Parliament, then jumped on a bus up Whitehall (as little legs were getting tired). A great view past Downing Street, on to Trafalgar Square, then another bus up to Piccadilly Circus and then Oxford Street, where we browsed in John Lewis, used their loos and went to have tea and cake in a cheapish café.

Next time we’re going to do the river in the opposite direction, past Tate Modern and the Globe Theatre, and then nip up to Stratford to see the Olympic Park before the summer action (which we don’t have tickets for).

We were dawdling by the end, heading on the tube back to Euston to get an M&S sandwich for the train home (after the 7pm peak). We got back just after 8pm, exhausted, entertained, and for once, not feeling ripped off.

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April 5, 2012 · 8:36 am

Princess turns into Dirt Girl as worms become new pets

AS previously mentioned in these ramblings, our four-year-old daughter Bonnie is not absorbing the influence of her rowdy elder brothers and becoming a tomboy.

Quite the opposite. Much to my surprise and bewilderment, she can be the girliest of all girly-girls. She’ll always choose a floaty dress rather than trousers, will chat away about ‘pretty things’ with her pals, the Disney Princesses, and will pronounce, over-dramatically, “I’m scared” about everything from dinosaurs to the dark, (when she clearly isn’t).

However, she did me rather too proud at the weekend when I finally got a blessed hour or two to tackle some over-due gardening tasks.

Worm girl

Turning the compost heap has been on my to-do list for about a year, and as I shoveled the upper layers into a wheelbarrow, she spotted dozens of creepy-crawlies running, wriggling and slithering for cover.

I expected her to decide that she was scared of beasties but to my surprise she delved right in with her bare hands, gleefully collecting fat brandling worms and letting them wriggle about on her palms.

My requests for her to carefully put the worms back because they needed to be away from the sunlight fell on deaf ears – they were ‘her’ worms. They would be her friends. I had images in my head of finding dead worms in her doll’s house or chest of drawers.

I explained that to the worms, she was a giant – “I’m not a giant, giants are big” – and that she might be scaring them. Only then did she reluctantly give them up to go back into the compost heap.

That’s when she spotted the prehistoric-looking centipedes, running for their lives. She jumped, and hid behind me, unwilling to share my enthusiasm for the speedy bugs. “I’m scared of those,” she announced.

I’m keeping quiet about my similar dislike of moths . . .

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April 4, 2012 · 2:36 pm

Students ‘home’ for the holidays need carrot and stick

HAVE you found your usually tidy home strewn with wet towels and dirty dishes, and been unable to find the remote control this week?

Then you may have a student home for the holidays.

Yes, you tearfully waved them off to university and then yo-yoed between great sadness at your baby flying the nest and great joy at having your weekly grocery shop last longer than a day.

But now they are back, genuinely happy to see you and make the most of your great generosity.

If you have an undergraduate home for the holidays you’ll find them a different beast than the one you had back for Christmas – this one has Work to do.

Try not to question them too vigorously about why all their work appears to be due now, while they could/should have been studying all year. It’s a fact that universities’ assignment dates all come in around May because they should have been progressively learning throughout the year, ready for assessment at the end of the teaching year.

So they may not be willing to admit to you that they spent most of the year recovering from hangovers or watching back-to-back episodes of Keeping up with the Kardasians or Made in Chelsea, when perhaps they should have been in lectures or the library.

But hey, they’re young, they’re students, and you can be pretty confident that they don’t need reminding that they really need to get their head down and get studying while they are at home.

It’s always been a universal truth that students aged between 18 and 25 and in full-time education have the most time on their hands and the least worries, when you compare them with those who have to juggle work, paying a mortgage and childcare. But don’t think they have it easy these days. Those debts, already a whopping three and a half grand a year just for tuition fees, do make today’s students feel far more pressure than our generation did.

And they’re not daft, they know there’s more of them graduating than there were in our time, and fewer jobs to go around. They know if they fail that assignment, or worse still, the year, they may have the embarrassment of having to sit a module or even a whole year again, PAYING again, just to make it through the three years with a piece of paper that calls them a Graduate.

These days they are far less likely to scream “you don’t understand ANYTHING about me,” but now they have been out in the big wide world, and had to fend for themselves, you may actually be starting to believe it yourself.

They might, possibly, be panicking enough over Easter to tell you they can’t do anything but study; but it is important, mentally, that they have at least a day or two with no books and just relax. Take them for dinner, pay for a hairdresser/barber appointment, but just temporarily take their mind off the deadlines.

But once that’s done, leave them alone and don’t distract them. Be the exasperated parent you used to be and make them get to work. This may be tough, as you’ll want to spend as much time as possible with them because you know in a week or so they’ll be gone again. Back to the place you painfully have to hear them refer to as ‘home’.

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March 30, 2012 · 8:55 am

Get on your bike to Northampton’s new marina

Doug and Bonnie at the Marina

HAVE you been down to see Northampton’s new marina then? Dougie, Bonnie and I got on our bikes at the weekend to go any have a proper look at the project at Becket’s Park, which has cost £2.4million. We may be as far from the sea as it’s possible to be, but we sit on a junction of Britain’s inland waterways.

Getting out on a bike is an interesting way to see parts of your area you may not even realise exist. I’d like to claim we bike everywhere but in truth it’s usually a guilty whizz around the all-too familiar Racecourse for us. This time I plonked Bonnie into the bike seat and persuaded 12-year-old Doug to cycle further than school, and it was worth the tired legs.

While the new marina area, or mooring basin, doesn’t yet look anything like the artist’s impression I keep seeing associated with the project, it’s certainly a vast improvement. The pathways that now run from Midsummer Meadow along the River Nene/Grand Union canal show the potential for the waterways to be a real asset to the town. And a nosy down along the public footpath behind Avon and the old shell of the power station was a real eye-opener – it’s a vast, neglected mess, and you can see why the planners want to develop it.

We returned along the river right through town, avoiding all the traffic on the wide waterside pathways that run all the way behind Morrisons and on behind Carlsberg, right through to the train station and via the road back to Semilong. All the way Bonnie was shouting at ducks and geese and the poor people of Northampton going about their business: “Poo! What’s that smell?” was her shout, mainly as we passed the venting brewery.

If you’re like me and tend to steer your cycling children away from the busy roads onto traffic-free familiar territory such as your local park, it’s certainly worth going a little further afield and trying out the river route. Who knows, if enough people use it then they may even get around to clearing back the rubbish and the overgrown pathways too.

 

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