Well, we're ploughing on with the school holidays. The words "I'm bored" now incur a hefty pocket-money fine. As I told my children, "If I'm bursting a bloody gut organising events for you, the least you can do is pretend to find them interesting". Their response to this was to introduce fines for swearing. I foresee a hefty cheque going to Concern at the end of the holidays.
One member of our family, who shall be nameless, suggested replacing a donation to charity with a family outing. This enabled the rest of us to round on him in outraged tones. The moral high ground is a splendid place to be.
My English friends, whose children had still not broken up for the summer, couldn't quite get their heads around the idea of three months' holiday. "What do you do with them all day?" they asked, bewildered. On the other hand, when I was in Portugal recently a Portuguese colleague said to me: "In my experience English children are better off at school than with their parents." A casual remark which verged, I thought, on the racist.
It's a funny thing, though: anti-English statements don't count as racist, any more than do anti-German remarks. "Why don't people like the Germans?" my half-German son asked me dolefully the other week. Hesitating between deck chairs and the Nazi death-camps, I burbled on about how wrong it is to generalise and the necessity of tolerating people from different countries. Halfway through this edifying speech he lost interest and wandered off. I found myself addressing thin air. As so often happens.
Meanwhile, in England the House of Lords has been debating whether or not the six-week school holidays are too long...
Creeping bureaucracy
People have been giving me funny looks recently. About to start a new job in the autumn, I keep asking, "Where are the forms to fill in?" It is only when you have lived out of England for a while that you become fully aware of the creeping bureaucracy of English life, where every professional decision has to be justified in triplicate and approved by several committees. I can speak at first hand only of the educational system, but from what one reads the same holds good for the medical profession too. English academics have become overwhelmed by the paperwork needed to put in place proper procedures for the numerous external assessments inflicted on them. This has led to several nervous breakdowns and also, just as pernicious, fixed ways of doing things.
"How do you go about teaching this course?" I asked one of my future Irish colleagues. "Oh, don't worry about the syllabus," came the reply. "I have them dancing on the tables." You see, you are just not allowed to do this in England. There is always someone coming in from outside to check up on you. We are becoming a nation of automatons. I fear my courses in Ireland are going to lack a certain joie de vivre. But at least it's something I can now be allowed to work towards.
Even my child is affected. "Why does he insist on setting out his sums like this?" asked his puzzled teacher. "It's the SATs effect," I explained. My elder child has been tested in English, Maths and Science at seven and again at 11. It kills creativity. In theory the SATs (Scholastic Aptitude Tests, on the American model) were introduced to monitor the progress of schools in the "league tables". In practice it has turned out to be the pupils they test, so that some schools now select their intake on the basis of SATs results. The Eleven Plus returning by a different name.
The league tables themselves make very little sense (I see the Welsh have just abolished them). If a school is in a middle-class area where all the pupils have access to a home computer, the school is bound to get better results than a school in a deprived, inner-city area with a Special Needs Unit attached.
So it is pleasing that Irish schools don't have league tables and that particular pressure is off my children. On the other hand... but no, I won't mention the quaint Irish custom of closing schools for staff meetings so that a working parent finds one day a month cut short and her child standing on the doorstep. I won't mention this. I shall get used to it, I expect. In time.
Pretty villages
Living in Ireland, a terrible nostalgia comes over me occasionally for pretty villages with wisteria-clad cottages and duck ponds and village greens. "You're wasting your time. There are no nice Irish villages," remarked a returning Irishman to me recently as I was attempting to make out the case for Adare. He then went on to give the reason for this dearth of picture-postcard hamlets: it is, he explained, the natural result of hundreds of years of under-investment in the Irish countryside. And we know whose fault that is, don't we? So I can't complain. In fact, I daren't.
Black eye
A friend of mine living in the affluent south-east of England recently fell off her bike. She had bruised arms and a black eye. At school prize-giving she was conscious of the other mothers flashing curious stares at her. Eventually one of them plucked up the courage to enquire whether she had had cosmetic surgery.
I find this an interesting indication of the social divide in my country. In the Northern town where I grew up, one knew who was to blame if a woman appeared with a black eye, even if she insisted it was a door she had walked into rather than her partner's fist. Meanwhile, my friend's husband has gout. So he does all the tasks in their house requiring arms and she does the ones requiring legs. That's a successful marriage for you.