With a bit of great planning by those who decide things, 1st August finds two rather special NATIONAL days.
Swiss National Day . A Nation who brought to the world staggering landscapes, politeness, precision transport, chocolate and Roger Federer.
AND
Rhubarb National Day otherwise known as Yorkshire Day. Yorkshire who brought to the world moaning, rain, wind, rhubarb, chocolate and Michael Palin.
Happy National Day here.
Happy National Day to Switzerland.
No Blue Skies today…. Definitely OUT OF BLUE
Worst link ever……
Today completely OUT OF THE BLUE Hawklad asked
“Dad at mum’s funeral, why did we sit nearly at the back of the church”.
Nearly six years have passed and I had forgotten that I had chosen to do that. Back in 2016, I wasn’t thinking straight. Two closest of deaths within 6 weeks had taking its toll. I wasn’t sleeping, I was lost, I was trying to sort out my mums affairs and house, trying to sort out my partners affairs and funeral, I was trying to be a single parent. When I needed to be at my best, I was a mess. So that was the first thing I replied to Hawklad.
You know I’m a bit of a muppet at the best of times, imagine how much of a muppet I could be at the worst of times……
He knows me so he completely understood that.
I wanted to protect Hawklad. A small, low key funeral had morphed into something much larger. My partners family and sisters needed something different to me. Many more people. Many more strangers for Hawklad to deal with. He was just starting his Aspergers journey and stranger’s eyes could really bother him.
I thought being at the back of the church would mean you wouldn’t feel like you had lots of strangers looking at you……..more space as well.
“Dad wouldn’t they just turn round and look at me…”
I know, I didn’t really think that one through.
The church only had one exit which was at the back. If you needed to get out quickly then we would have had to walk along the aisle past all the mourners.
I thought it would have been easier to get out from the back.
“Easier for me Dad”.
Easier for both of us. Easier for ME. You were dealing with everything better than I was.
“Can you remember who sat near us Dad”
Not a clue, it was just a confusing storm to me. I know my brother sat behind me because I remember unbelievably that he made me smile at one stage with a comment he whispered in my ear. That’s one of the only things I can remember from the funeral. I had even forgotten we were at the back.
Hawklad then described the funeral to me. It was like I wasn’t there, all this detail has just passed me by.
The end of July brings the start of the six week school holiday. Wow was that welcome. School had worn pupil and parent down. I’m sure the teachers would say a similar thing. Why does it have to be such a grind for everyone.
This year school kinda just fizzled out, hardly the stuff of an Alice Cooper epic single.
The work and contact with teachers just ebbed away over the last few weeks. Hours and Days would pass where school made no contact with Hawklad. Occasionally work would come appear on the online system. One subject teacher would send an email before some of the lessons providing a two line guide on the upcoming lesson. Nothing from the other teachers. Work dutifully submitted was never marked. Eventually it all just dwindled away into nothing. Finally the last day came and went with complete radio silence. Around midday Hawklad kinda shrugged his shoulders and whispered
“I guess that’s it then, might as well blast out SCHOOLS OUT FOR SUMMER then”
And with that the school year ended. No goodbyes. No enjoy the summer. No date to return. No plan for September. Is the school signalling that Hawklad is on his own. NO IDEA. But at least Alice Cooper cranked up to 11 never fails to deliver.
SCHOOLS OUT but for how long.
It’s Friday…
It’s Friday in JULY…
It’s the last day of the school year.
And WOW am I going to have a WHINGE. A RIGHT WHINGE. A Guinness Book of Records size WHINGE. Yes a REALLY REALLY REALLY big WHINGE. But this time it’s not about School. It’s not about my so called Football Team. It’s not about the rising price of everything. It’s not about clothes manufacturers making the size of clothes I normally buy, smaller so I don’t fit in them anymore….. It’s not about U2. Its nit about Alvin and The Chipmunks. It’s not even about the incompetent, corrupt Government.
It’s July. I will say it again. It’s Pigging JULY ……
So how come someone sent a CHRISTMAS related email this morning. Castle Howard you have officially made the NAUGHTY LIST.
NO I do not want to buy tickets today for Christmas.
The Elf’s are hibernating. Santa and Mrs Santa are on the beach somewhere in the Caribbean. Rudolf and buddies are busily making little reindeers in a field somewhere hot and steamy. It’s not Christmas for another 156 days, SO WHY have I got a Christmas Email in JULY.
BAH HUMBUG………
Somebody likes a good old water fight. Sends the crazy one even crazier.
Being crazy is hot work, especially when it’s HOT. The little garden weather station reached the big four zero.
That is ridiculous. Maybe not for some places but for Yorkshire, seriously ridiculous. I know it’s unofficial and inaccurate but for what it’s worth, that temperature would have smashed the old UK hottest ever recorded temperature. Many places here officially smashed the old record on Tuesday.
What’s the old Kipling line – mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun.
Well briefly…..
A quick water fight and a well earned ice pop under the shade of the old apple tree, then it was back inside again. NO this is not just a summer thing. This has never been a Yorkshire Summer, not even close.
What have we done.
When are those in charge going to take this seriously.
Our so called Prime Minister skipped an emergency weather planning meeting so he could focus fully on organising a celebration party for himself……. Surely no sane person would ever vote for these self obsessed chancers.
That thought should make all our blood boil. It better do and fast because if it doesn’t then the blood of our future generations will definitely BOIL.
The farmer playing real life MINECRAFT.
Day One of the Two Day Heatwave. Todays garden temperature from our mini weather station hiding in the shade was….
That is ridiculously hot for Yorkshire, unheard of. The forecast is that it goes even higher tomorrow. At this rate I might have to take my jumper off. Unbelievably, it was so hot that Hawklad put shorts on, WOW, the last time that happened was when he was at nursery.
You can only fire water pistols for so many hours. Well if the school doesn’t send any work, you have to improvise the learning day….. So as we sheltered inside for a few moments and dried out, I tried to get my head round the Government’s latest ideas to sort out the Special Education mess. From what I can see it’s about replacing one mess with another mess while saving a bit more money….
Currently parents have to jump through a seemingly never ending number of ever shrinking hoops until their child gets a Plan approved (or mostly doesn’t). It’s a process which forces shellshocked parents to take on the mighty big bureaucracy. The lucky few emerge with a plan that is supposed to identify needs to be met. A personalised budget is then awarded to the child to help fund this. Sounds promising but what then tends to happen is that the big bad bureaucracy then says
You now have to give us that money back and that buys you a place in a mainstream school. No money no place. That money then pays for general teaching assistants who the school then use to help out teachers. They provide no dedicated help to Special Needs pupils. Then the big bad bureaucracy talks up the idea that PUSHY parents get this gold plated education for the lucky child. PUSHY parents are taking money from the majority of other pupils. This sets parent against parent while the special need pupil is mostly left without support. That’s the current system.
The new proposed system seems to be, keep the same nightmare approval process, make it harder but add in a bit of mediation when the application is almost inevitably rejected. If you do fluke it through to getting approval then rather than bothering identifying individual child need, parents are just offered a standard ‘one size fits all’ solution. Doesn’t matter if it doesn’t suit the individual child, at least we are saving money and it’s much easier to administer.
So it’s a mess and if it changes it’s going to be just another mess, but cheaper.
Sigh, breathe deeply and slump a bit lower in the chair. Definitely time for water pistols…..
The farmer is hard at work in the fields. Whatever it takes.
We have a real problem with education in the UK. Too much potential is missed. Too many pupils are served up factory production line schooling which is about the needs of the system rather than the needs of the individual child. If you don’t fit the expected mould then you are discarded.
The farmer chooses to focus on the crops that provide him with what he needs to keep going.
What a perfect indication of the health of the UK’s education system than hearing one of the loathsome, self absorbed candidates standing to be our next Prime Minister talking about a disabled child needing to go to a special school because ‘disabled children are generally aren’t intelligent enough’ to go to a mainstream school.
Unbelievable.
Unforgivable.
Lost for words……
Sadly it’s not an isolated view……
Had a long video meeting with school today about Hawklad. Call me NAIVE but I thought school might have been just a tad POSITIVE. A pupil against the odds teaching himself to read when school told him it was beyond him. From having a reading age of about 6 years behind the expected school standard to now reading History Texts without assistance. All achieved through his hard work in just over 2 years. A pupil who is getting really great marks in the exams and tests he sits at home. Definitely NAIVE I am.
‘We are concerned that his marks aren’t reflective of the true position”
“Are you sure that you are not helping him, or he is using GOOGLE to answer questions”
“He is performing way ahead of his predicted attainment levels”
“So he wants to go to college. Has he thought about some more vocational routes rather than college. He may probably not meet Our College’s entry requirements. College might be beyond his academic levels. Don’t want to disappoint him .”
“Other colleges and places might have offerings more suited to his level and requirements.”
“Unless he can demonstrate he can perform in formal exams then there is little we can do, course work and home work doesn’t really count these days. That’s how the system works….”
SPEECHLESS……
School can’t seem to get their head round the sad irony that he learnt to read and overcome his dyslexia when he was REMOVED from their CLASSROOM environment. Like too many pupils with dyslexia, with special educational needs, they are just dumped into the bottom set with minimal help. Assumptions are made on low attainment levels. To get even the most minimal help they are required to put their hand up in front of the rest of the class and admit they are struggling. That is never going to happen long term, occasionally when Hawklad did that, other kids poked fun at him. The teachers often focusing on those pupils with the worst behaviour so even if the hand went up, help never arrived. So he stopped putting his hand up and he started to fall behind. This is not an isolated case, it’s sadly reflective of modern UK schooling. It’s all about EXAMS. Schools become EXCELLENT because of exam results not because they meet individual educational needs. This school is no different to most schools here.
In the UK we have a looming food production crisis because we have become too dependent on factory, one big size fits all farming….
The school term finishes in a weeks time. Then it’s a 6 week break. I’m discussing with Hawklad what he wants to do. It’s his future. It’s has to be his call but I know what I would do in an instant if it was my call. Why does it feel like the school system is working against him.
There are the words that no self respecting Yorkshire person ever thought they might have to utter. No it’s not saying ‘Lancashire is actually quite nice’. No it’s not saying that you can get ‘decent beer down South’. And no it’s not saying that ‘cricket is actually really really, mind numbingly boring…..’.
Here goes….. the words we never thought would be uttered here are.
Yorkshire has an extreme heat weather warning…..
Currently we are just about covered by a Red warning. That is ‘Threat to Life and Serious Risk of disruption to essential services.
WOW
This is Yorkshire. It damp here, it’s windy here, it’s a tad chilly here, often nithering here. It’s a two vest and thermal knickers kinda place. Never extreme heat.
We are the top of the purple bit under the top 42C. Ok it’s not the heat that many places regularly get BUT this is YORKSHIRE. The UK’s highest ever temperature is 38.7C
I know it’s a forecast and this is Yorkshire. We could still ignore the trend and pull out a damp, misty, chilly day but it’s a sobering thought.
A really good friend mentioned about not being able to see the stunning Switzerland glaciers in a just a few years time. They will be gone.
What are we blindly walking into. What are we losing for future generations.
I probably don’t do that much for Yorkshire Tourism. Actually I might even kill it off a tad. Face it, just how many times do I drone on about the dreadful Yorkshire Weather and rhubarb. Basically I’m screaming – “if you like Rhubarb Crumble with huge dollops of freezing horizontal rain, then Yorkshire is the place for you. “
Well let’s buck the trend. Time for a bit of Mr Blue Sky Yorkshire in the form of a very warm (YES I did say VERY WARM) walk around the countryside surrounding Castle Howard.
Now let’s rewind the Tourism Promotion clock, back to the mid 1970s. I was living in Redcar, a quirky Yorkshire seaside town, surrounded by heavy industry, it was a place that was sadly in decline. The town decided to run a competition amongst its various schools, let the pupils come up with posters and slogans to promote the area to tourists. The best ideas would get displayed in the town’s public art gallery.
Well guess what, this muppet, was awarded a ‘Runners Up’ badge. Looking back they probably awarded ‘Runner Up’ status to hundreds and hundreds of kids. I can’t remember the winning entry but mine is engraved on my mind. It was a really bad painting of the sea front with my catchy catchphrase painted in black across the top. I captured the essential essence of Redcar in B’s.
“COME TO REDCAR – BEER, BINGO AND BEAUTIFUL BEACHES”
How did that not win………
Yes maybe I do need to work on my Yorkshire Promotional Skills. 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Here’s a little known fact about Redcar. The Oscar nominated movie Atonement was partly filmed here. One of the movies most iconic scenes is of the troops waiting in Dunkirk to be evacuated. That part of the movie was filmed on Redcar Beach.…..
I was just a few steps away from this sea of purple. It’s was warm, yes Yorkshire can do that sometimes. Deep Blue Skies, rare but yes it can happen even here. So I decided to do the morning yoga (yep I’ve gone full on hippy) under the shade of the apple tree. I found a small patch of grass which hadn’t been dug up by our active tunnelling Mr Mole and off I went twisting, bending and groaning.
A few moments later the helpful yoga instructor blasting out of the iPhone encouraged everyone to undertake a form of torture. Wrapping one leg around an arm, doing the same on with the other leg and then balancing on what limbs remained still free to move. I might have misheard her….. Anyways it wasn’t a pretty site. I felt like an iPhone which had just been permanently bent out of shape. Funnily enough we have a story on that one to come…. I thought yoga was supposed to be relaxing, this is just brutal.
Is yoga out to get me….
Yes it is….
A few hours later we were walking the mad dog down one of the narrow village lanes when a car headed our way. Hawklad went one way and I headed towards the other fence. I recognised the driver and waved. Unfortunately at the very same moment I stepped in a rabbit hole and suddenly entered into an out of control stumble, culminating in me trying to fall nose first over the fence. I clearly gave the driver a really good giggle. And here’s the thing. The driver is a yoga instructor. I’m clearly on the yoga naughty list.
Yoga is out to get me.
A Dad trying to cope with the loss of his Partner and becoming a single parent. 