The Costs Of A Free Education

Last night saw us at Vee's high school's annual prizegiving. To be honest we were dreading it because the last time we were at one, the then headmaster droned on for almost an hour about nothing in particular before the actual prizegiving. However, this time we were happy to see that the new headmaster was only going to speak for a few minutes before handing over presenting duties to the head girl and deputy head girl (the head boy, who has now left school, was working!) and that there would be a few short pieces by pupils at different stages in their high school education on their experiences. It was really refreshing to see it done this way but sadly the microphone and acoustics were dreadful and I missed most of what was said. It was also good to see that the school hall was packed out with parents, relatives and friends of the pupils. The first musical interlude was a piece entitled "Blues Band" and anyone who has ever heard a high school orchestra will be able to guess that it was heavy on the brass section and played with gusto but having said that it was pleasant enough. A senior pupil also played an accomplished piano solo. Then it was onto the actual prizegiving. This was divided into year groups and further into subject awards and those for "general excellence", which was what Vee was to receive. It was sad to see that, obviously down to school budgets, unlike in previous years where the pupils were given a chit to take to a bookshop to choose a book, this year they were only given laminated certificates. I think it was a shame that they have been forced to do this, as I still have the books I received when I was at high school with their bookplates. Lack of funding or fundraising is a big issue at school - next week Vee is off with her friends to a fairground as a reward trip for good attendance for which we had to cough up £8! At this time of year, there is also talk of the prom (with all respect to any US readers, I mourn the demise of the school dance or disco and the rise of these more showy affairs). Vee will have the first of two senior school proms next year and she said that this year it cost around £40 a head. This does not include the cost of a dress, shoes, hair etc. In this current nationwide economic downturn, where mostly everyone (unless you are a well known TV comedian with a good accountant!) is struggling financially, it seems ridiculous to me for schools to encourage this kind of spending and for firms to make their money from it. As a family on a low income, it worries me that next year Vee might not be able to fully participate along with her classmates because I cannot see us being able to afford a new dress or a night out. And I have told her in no uncerain terms that a limo is out of the question - if she wants to ride in style, she can hitch a lift on the back of the motorbike. While typing this, I had Vee on the phone to tell me that there is nothing available for her lunch, apart from a hard baked potato. Again, due to our family circumstances, we are given free school meals for Vee and anyone who has been following the story of Martha Payne and her "Never Seconds" blog will be aware of the shocking state of school meal provision here in Scotland. As a vegetarian, Vee's choice is limited - her meals seem always to be macaroni cheese, a baked potato with cheese, a cheese sandwich or pizza. This is not the first time she has had nothing or very little for lunch. She called me and I told her to ask to speak to whoever was in charge of the school meals and say she wanted a lunch, which she was reluctant to do, being at that age where she is still shy of speaking out. At the same time I called the school, to be told rather unhelpfully that the school isn't responsible for the provision of school meals but that food is provided by what is called a firm contracted by the education department of the council, which I knew already but still thought that school should have some kind of role in this. The person answering my call seemed unwilling to help but I pressed her and she assured me a depute head teacher would go and help Vee get some food. She was unable to give me a contact number for the company but I found it online and have a left a message so am waiting for them to get back to me. It has concerned me for some time the lack of choice in school meals provision especially for vegetarians. Again, being on a low income, this free meals provision is supposed to help us but I find myself considering going back to giving Vee a packed lunch to ensure she gets something filling and nutritious, as we live too far from the school for her to come home. Anyway, back to the awards ceremony and the additional costs. Another example is school ties - Vee's school requires all pupils to wear a school uniform including a tie. Now, instead of having one tie throughout, there are 3 changes of style and colour. When Vee started at high school, her primary school had a tradition where all pupils were given a new tie. This tie was worn in first and second year. Then in 3rd year, it changes to a different tie. At the time, Vee had a friend who was moving up and she gave Vee her tie. And this year, as she moved into the senior school, it was yet another tie, which had to be purchased from the school for £5. And to top it all next year, it's another tie and another £5. Again, to me this is excessive. The awards evening concluded with the school orchestra and choir (of which Vee is a member) singing "Highland Cathedral". As we made our way out, her pastoral care teacher congratulated us on the award, given for "General Excellence" as opposed to for a specific subject. She explained that this meant all of Vee's teachers had nominated her for this and that she had come 2nd in a lot of her classes. That is good to know, although I did tell Vee last night that, nice as they are, we don't need certificates to know how great she is. On a final note, on the second last day of term (the school closes on Wednesday next for the summer) they have a carnival to raise funds for a partner school in Malawi. As much as I applaud this, again it costs each pupil £3 for a wristband plus additional costs for some activities. Therefore, for this and a trip we have had to shell out £11 at least, which to be honest we can hardly afford, and it worries me that there must be many families, especially those with more than one child at the school, who are having to say no and deprive the child of the experience and stigma of taking part. What happens to them, those who have had perfect attendance but cannot afford the "reward" trip"? Or those who want to take part in the fundraising day for Malawi but for whom charity must beging at home? And those who want to celebrate the end of a senior school year or going on to work, college or university but cannot afford a new dress or suit, a dinner/ dance or a fancy limo? For a country with a free education system, these additional costs are getting out of hand. I remember going to school back in the 1970s with some kids who looked undernourished and for whom their school was their only square meal of the day. I also remember going to school in hand-me-down clothes and the indignity of having to go up and get my free dinner ticket after those having a school lunch but were paying got theirs. I think schools need to take a long, hard look at themselves and recognise that,as nice as they are, things like proms and trips cost money that a lot of us don't have.

Sunday Thoughts

Sunday finds me in a strange mood. Yesterday felt more like a Sunday with its torrential rain and dark skies - a nothing day that seems to sap the enthusiasm out of you. As a result, today feels like a Monday with me eager to get on and do things. So far, I have made tonight's dinner (oven roasted ratatouille from Hugh Fearnley-Wittingstall's Veg book and homemade ciabbata bread) and weeded the street side of our house. The weeding was a job that I had been wanting to tackle for some time but had always put off due to my various aches and pains. Today though I set out with a trowel to cut stems and the washing basket to put the weeds in. I must have been a sight, crouching down and pulling up grass and leaves but I got it done. I then went out with a brush and shovel to sweep up all the detritus - cigarette butts, bits of broken plastic and bottletops, along with grit from when we had snow. I then went along with the secateurs and snipped stray and overhanging branches from our collection of trees and bushes - hawthorn, birch and cotoneaster. I wanted to make some effort to tidy up in anticipation of a wee get-together I'm hosting on Saturday. Nothing fancy - just a few mates and some food and maybe a fire, as it's Midsummer this week. Although with the weather this past few days, you'd be hard pushed to believe it! We've had the heating on, it has been so damp and dreich. Anyway, I'm going into a mild and measured frenzy trying to tidy up both house and garden in anticipation of visitors. We aren't a tidy lot, we Andrew-Barrs. My motto is clean enough to be healthy and dirty enough to be happy but I don't want people thinking we live like pigs. For a wee family of 3 people and a dog we sure have a lot of junk. Talking of mottos, I've been thinking about those a bit. Our family motto is "if you're no' fast yer last" - a joking reference to how if there are ever any treats in the house like cakes or biscuits, they disapperar quickly. Another we have is one Gee coined many years ago when we were first together and trying to be eco-friendly and eat vegetarian food on a low-budget - "Find a level of hypocrisy you can live with". By that we meant that as far as possible we would try to stick to our ethics but sometimes you let yourself slacken the rules to fit economy or necessity. In our early days as a family this meant things like not chucking out or buying secondhand a pair of stout leather boots when "vegetarian" shoes were too dear for our budget or buying disposable nappies when we lived in a high rise flat with almost no drying facilities and not enough money to run a drier. As the years went on, we made more compromises - I went from being vegan to vegetarian because I found it was easier to tempt a growing child with meals that contained cheese than not (I'm sure there are parents out there who have managed to raise kids on a vegan diet and they have my admiration and respect)and Gee eats fish now because he likes it. We always fed our cats on a meat-based diet mainly because we accepted that cats are obligate carnivores and don't thrive on a plant-based diet. The same goes for our dog Roxie - although she pretty much eats what we eat at dinner time, we do give her dog meat as well. And I will admit it - I shop at Tesco. I know they are the evil empire but they are my local supermarket and to be brutally honest with their "everyday" range of own label items they are even cheaper than Lidl. We were in the other day and they had massively reduced a load of bakery goods - we got loaves of bread for 10p, pittas for 9p and tortilla wraps for 27p plus muffins for 16p. And I'm not going to pass that up in today's ecoonomic climate! Growing up, my family's motto was "whatever happens stays within these 4 walls" which goes a long way to explaining why we were so f*cked up and why my brothers and I are aren't in contact with each other. I read a quote the other day - “You’d think family would be the one sure thing in life, the gimme? Points you got just for being born? So much thick, meaty stuff bound you to these people, so many interlocking spirals of history, genetics, common cause, and struggle that it should be the most basic of all drives, that you would strive to protect and love one another, yet this bond that should be the big no-brainer was in fact the hardest thing.” from a book called "Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk" by Ben Fountain and that is so true for me. I have said before that it was hellish, so much so that latterly, even after my mother died, encounters with my brothers always felt like a meeting of survivors of some big catastrophe - the only thing holding us together was the fact we had come through our upbringings, albeit badly damaged. So when the opportunities came for us to fall out and become estranged, it wasn't hard. Back to mottos however. One I have is always "Onwards and Upwards" and, fingers crossed, hopefully the reverse of the Starks' one in A Agme of Thrones "SUMMER IS COMING"! x

A Man's A Man For A' That

As Father's Day approaches, I have to both laugh and shudder at the wares on offer in the shops plied as "appropriate" gifts for that special dad. First off, we don't do Father's Day in our house. Or Mother's Day. One of the few pieces of wisdom imparted to me by my mother that I took on board was that there shouldn't be just one day a year where you were good to your mum or dad - every day should be a special day. And that has continued with my own family - our Vee loves us and we love her. We don't need cards or gifts to tell us that. On that subject, it is the gifts available that irk me. There are racks and racks of football or motoring themed mugs and other accessories, books by Jeremy Clarkson or one of the other buffoons from "Top Gear" and decorated pint glasses. If Vee was ever of a mind to buy a present for Gee, nothing from these shelves would be of any use. You see, one of the things I have always found most attractive about my Gee is that he has never fallen into this stereotyped ideal. He hates football with a passion and all sport for that matter. When we still had the TV, he might have watched the odd rugby match but now he doesn't bother. He has no interest in cars nor the outpourings of Clarkson and his ilk. OK, he has a motorbike but that's how he gets about - he isn't into sports bikes or racing or, as he calls them, "Harvey Donaldsons" and "fanny bikes" - he prides himself on having a beat up but serviceable "rat bike". He seldom drinks and when he does, he prefers a real ale or navy rum to the chemical soups that pass for lagers. He doesn't want to read books by Andy McNab, Chris Ryan or Ross Kemp. He does enjoy books on military history though but he knows what he likes and picks his own from the library. He will play games on the XBox 360 but they tend to be ones like Assassins Creed or Halo as opposed to Gears of War. He loves to work with wood - carving, making boxes or crafting furniture - but again he knows what he needs. I have only ever once bought him tools - one Xmas I braved the confines of Bill's Tool Store in the Barras to buy him a draw knife. It was like stepping into one of those Victorian gentlemen's clubs - I have never felt less welcome anywhere! I made my purchase and left swiftly. It was the same when I was growing up. My dad wasn't really sporty either - if anything it was my mum who followed football, boxing and snooker. He was more into music, sci-fi and tinkering with electronics. I know lots of men who likewise don't fall into these narrow stereotypes that the media and business try to impose on them. My mate Dougie is into martial arts as a participant but he also likes reading fantasy novels. My other pal Anthony likes playing the flute and piccolo and poetry. This doesn't make them any less "men". And what makes a man a good father isn't his passions for sport or drinking or not. What makes him a good father is his love for his children. And you can't buy that in a supermarket. Again as Rabbie said "The man o' independent mind. He looks an' laughs at a' that." x

Make Do And Mend

I had a funny day yesterday - not as in "funny ha-ha" but funny peculiar, at least for me. You see, one of the upsides of this current peak of fitness, stamina and activity alongside less pain/ swelling is that I am able to tackle tasks that would normally have been left to one side for an indeterminate time or totally disregarded. Couple this with my desires to a) save money and b) re-use and recycle and yesterday evening became "Manic Mending Monday". I had started out in another pique at the state of Vee's room - I am increasingly frustrated by the mounds and piles of clothes that litter every surface and often the floor. Even for a member of our often cash-strapped family, Vee has some amazing clothes - stuff I could never have dreamt of when I was 15, jackets, dresses, jeans, tops - all in her own unique style. And all in heaps. I sorted through them, putting things in the washing basket that I had just emptied into the machine, back onto hangers in the wardrobe or into drawers. I even sorted out her drawers into undies, socks, tights, etc. She had a pile of clothes earmarked to go out, be it to a charity shop, one of those "cash for clothes" places or the rag bag. I went through it and found 2 pairs of jeans with rips in them. I asked her if she would wear them again if I could fix them and she was OK with it. The first pair had a rip right across the leg so I just sewed that up (by hand - I used to have a sewing machine and when I was ill I stupidly gave it away! Boy, do I reget that now.). The other pair had one of those holes that we women often get near the crotch where the fabric has worn through then ripped. I had a pair of my own that needed the same repair so I fixed both using my mother's tried and tested method of sewing a square patch in the inside(I have a pair of my old jeans set aside for that very purpose)then sewing round the edges of the hole on the outside. It felt nice in a way to make that connection back - I know I give my mother a hard time in this blog but one thing she did well was patch trousers - in fact she used to buy patches and sew them onto my brothers' new trousers to save her the job later. I remember many times when she would have is stand on a stool (or as we called it "the pouffe" - can you say that now? Too late!)with new trousers or jeans on inside out as she pinned up the hem - she hated turn-ups and would be tutting at me now as I sit here in my flares with theirlong, frayed hems. We also got a lot of clothes from jumble sales or older cousins which required mending or altering. Anyway, after the jeans I moved onto cannibalising 2 underwired bras of mine with broken or uncomfortable wires into one servicable one (and kept one underwire for when it happens again!), sewed a torn neck on one of Vee's school cardis and changed the buttons on another from horrendous big brass anchor ones to smaller neat black ones. And do you know what? I enjoyed it - sitting up at the table with my wee sewing kit, listening to Janey Godley's Podcast and then my iPod. I have ones of those wee Ikea 6-drawer boxes with needles (in a pincushion that my youngest brother made at school), threads, thimbles, a stitch-ripper, one of those wee things for threading a needle plus a drawer filled with buttons that came down from my Nana and my mother. So the shout has gone out - I want Gee and Vee to give me any items they have that are ripped or torn or need a new zip. I'm even looking at darning socks as we go through so many. After I post this, I am going to head to the space under our stairs where we have several bags of clothes for "out" (to one of the aforementioned paces that take clothes - never the bin)to see if there is anything there that can be mended or cannibalised for zips or buttons. It may sound really mumsy and domesticated but, dammit, if it means we can get another wear out of things or can do a wee bit more to recycle, well that can't be so bad x

Updating...

So, what have I been up to since I last wrote on here? Well, I took part in our show "We Are All Just Human Beings At Different Stages In Our Lives" and it was tremendous. I met a lot of wonderful people and learned a great deal. We are just waiting now to get together again to look back at what we achieved and where we can create the magic again. I've signed up to take part in a physical theatre summer school and performances at the end of July. I've also applied to be a community participant in another dance performance, this time with choreographer Michael Clarke. I've become obsessed with Tumblr and Matt Smith. I've been poorly - my thyroid went into hypodrive, giving me a massive goitre. I stopped my meds and it seems to have normalised. I'm feeling better now than I have in over a year - I'm out walking again, I'm gardening and I'm cooking. Basically doing all the things I love plus the acting and performance. I completed my second session of evening classes in "Writing For Film", which was really enjoyable and am waiting to apply to do the advanced course this Autumn. I've lost weight too - not a biggie but I feel better for it. And I changed my name - I've moaned for over 40 years about having a name that people pronounce incorrectly. I also felt that I wasn't happy being named after two women - my mother's mother and sister - who I feel did my mum more harm than good. I also wanted a name that is easy to say in terms of my getting more involved in performing again. I also wanted to name myself after one woman who did have a positive impact on my life and who I still feel a lot of love for because she made me the woman I am today - my dad's mum, my nana. So I'm now Jay Ellen. And I like it. Things are a wee bit better on the homefront - Gee is getting regular work with an events company who put up and take down seating for arena shows so we are a wee bit more secure financially. He also got a wee bit of money back from a PPI claim so we were able to treat ourselves. Vee is now in her 5th year at high school - she has done all of her Standard Grade exams and is now studying for Highers. The play she was in earlier this year - "The Grandfathers" is on at the Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh next week and we are going to see it with her grandparents. She continues to blossom into this amazing, funny, beautiful and talented young woman and I am so proud of her. Roxie Ribbons is fine too - still as mad as ever and enjoying being part of our wacky wee family. My head is bursting with things I want to write about from the sublime to the ridiculous. I have opinions on the Jubalympics, Scottish politics, music, films - you name it. But for now I'll just say it's good to be back and I hope you'll come and join me gain in my mental meanderings xxx

I'm Baaaaaaaaaaaaaaack

What do you know? After months of not letting me in, Blogger seems to have marmalised whatever gremlins that were shutting me out and it seems I can post blogs again. I'll still be keeping my Tumblr because it's fun but hopefully this means I can get back to writing again x