Is there an elephant in the lecture halll?

I'm not a teacher. Thank goodness - I know my limitations. However, I watched, nudged, worried for and applauded my two children as they found their way through from primary school to degree and I've a surprising number of friends, both in and recently retired from, the teaching profession to have arrived at some conclusions about the furore around the proposed increase in university tuition fees.

Yesterday there were more student demonstrations against an increase in university fees in London and Manchester and apparently without any major incidents of violence or destruction this time. Possibly a result of police identification of the worst trouble-makers, or the use of a new phone app that gives updates on kettling locations, the weather, inertia from some of the original protestors now the bill has passed its first hurdle in the House of Commons 'so what's the point' ..... or a combination of some of the above.

Don't get me wrong. I don't have a problem with protesting. I've been on a few marches, including the one protesting against the invasion of Iraq, but I do feel it's unfortunate that the participants seem unable to see the irony of throwing missiles at and damaging the property of the very people that they would expect to pay for their degrees if they don't themselves.

This isn't intended either as a rant against whether the fees increase is fair or not, nor do I think that kids aren't as clever as they used to be. I do think they've been short-changed by the people in charge, who seem to have been far more interested in manipulating facts about standards, rather than giving them the chance to learn things. The thing is, there's just a chance that the whole thing - the increase in tuition fees and the resulting protests - has been completely unnecessary.

Thankfully, my kids are past that stage, so don't need to take on such large debts, but it's frustrating to think that just maybe, this doesn't need to be happening to anybody.

We fell on our feet with education almost from the start, despite our domestic implosion ... and I mean fell. It was luck, largely down to where we were living, in a village in Somerset.

After a brief foray into a private primary school, I took my son out when it became obvious that one of the staff had close to psychotic tendencies (well, certainly the woman was a bully - responsible in less than a year for crushing the bubbling enthusiasm he'd started out with) and lucky us, there was a brilliant village primary about 300 yards from our front gate. The school had two perfect Heads in succession - the sort of vocational teachers who 'got' the kids and had their respect, while having fun too - who between them managed to restore a large proportion of the son's confidence, stayed long enough for my two to get through and were skillful enough to manipulate the increasingly bizarre curriculum so son and daughter came tumbling out the other end having enjoyed themselves, made lots of friends close by and learned something. Triple bonus. As I say, lucky us.

We were also lucky that the next town has three very good senior schools and though neither child was exceptional, they're bright and both were lucky enough to be accepted to private school .... despite our dire financial state with the soon to be HsW nowhere to be seen, no house of our own and no parent with a sensible income. Call me unrealistic to spend what we had on school, when there were alternatives - or snobbish, or narrow-minded, or any of the other derogatory terms you like - but it was what I knew best and as a newly single parent my instinct was that, in the light of our changed circumstances, they needed to be safe and secure and with the best facilities I could get for them. I never regretted it for a second and I'm still really chuffed that we achieved it between us.

How did we do it? God bless whoever thought up Assisted Places. My daughter squeaked in, two years after her brother, in the last year before the Labour government, with apalling lack of insight into who would be affected by abolishing it, did just that, as one of their first actions. [Thinks .... perhaps that  was why my enthusiasm for what promised to be a fresh start for the country, crashed and burned - the realisation that all the old blinkered class war stuff was still alive and well, despite TB's efforts to bury it]. Yes, I know, they had the philosophical cleft stick of an instinctive loathing of private education, whilst knowing that if it was done away with, the state system would fall over under the strain of those extra kids, but....

We still had to pay, but a fraction of the cost and the three of us were living with my mother by this time, the HtW having climbed into a bottle. The aunts, single and with no children of their own and another good friend helped and we managed.... though it was a weird time for secondary education: League tables, course work that could be re-done with teacher input, emphasis on analysis with fewer and fewer facts to analyse and rampant grade inflation to disguise what was going on.

I'm not sure which came first, though it seems likely that both came at once. At the same time our blessed leader, T Blair, was preaching that 50% of the kids in the country had the right and should go to university, the Labour party introduced the first chunk of means tested fees. No thought was given to what would happen to all those underqualified graduates in the work place.

There was a lot of justification - how kids from poorer backgrounds were being deprived of their God-given right to further education and the old bollocks about how posh kids, yet again, were getting all the breaks and sauntering into the top universities in disproportionate numbers ... which seemed odd even then, if you think of the people who'd succeeded through their own endeavours and good brains .... Melvyn Bragg for one, but a quick search of the Internet will unearth hundreds of others.

Not only odd, but aggravating in the extreme when the change was passed into law with the help of Scottish MPs, who'd previously refused to instigate a similar system in their own patch, by the same people who'd benefitted not only by having free tuition themselves but, in many cases, being given grants as well.

So, posh-ish but impoverished (and please note, there's a huge difference between posh and rich, though obviously some people manage to pull off the double), I saw it from both sides. I had the university discussion with my kids. We had the conversations about finances. I explained that we just didn't have the money, but if they wanted it enough, got jobs to help with living expenses and faced that they'd come out with debts, then OK.

What interested me at the time was that the Government seemed to have no idea what they were about, but with hindsight, it was one of the first acts of what came to be recognised as spin (or fraud, in old money). It was all about being seen as the government to promote 'Education, Education, Education' (TB) but they had a problem. Increasing numbers of kids were coming out of the school system with higher exam marks, but less and less actual learning. The problem was that at that time universities were more autonomous and slower to react to change and they were knocking back applicants with no real ability to qualify for the next stage. So thousands of kids with 'good' A level results were applying enthusiastically for universities that had no intention of offering them a place. Hence TB's decree that more kids should be able to go to university.

The solution? Well, you have to admit that it was quite clever: encourage the universities (were they were bribed with massive funding?) to add new courses such as media studies, gymnastics and nursing, to give the less able student a chance to qualify for entry. ... And bingo, numbers rose. Unfortunately the original plan proved to be more successful than anyone's wildest dreams and finances began to creak under the strain long ago.

At the end of the nineties did more than half my kids' school mates want to go? No chance! .... and whilst having to pay was a further drawback (so much for making it more inclusive), many of them had had quite different plans anyway. Some carried on as they'd originally intended - setting up their own businesses, going onto the farm, going into local industry, or the local authority, whatever, but many of the others found themselves being swept along in the slipstream of the genuinely bright and the thing took on a momentum of it's own. University was the thing to do and became more so as the ubiquitous youth drinking culture combined with readily available social media to boast about it on.

So here we are with overstretched universities needing more and more money to try to keep on top of things ..... and something has to give. In the short term,  the people who want to go, have to pay.

At least perhaps some sort of natural justice might take place now, in that, hopefully, kids who'd previously thought they needed a degree to work in the local sports centre will do the maths (if they've managed somehow to acquire the skills) and work out that starting on a minimum wage, with very little prospect of earning decent money in the foreseeable future, hardly seems worth the 3 years of partying they'd been looking forward to while they accrued massive, unserviceable debts and decide, after all, not to go.

The question is, if it happens at all, how long will it take for reality to hit, for the universities to start noticing the drop in numbers on peripheral courses, reinstate 'hard' degrees in the sciences and language studies and get themselves back into a viable financial state, turning out well-rounded, well-educated assets to the community and - dare I say it - future government?

The added bonus of this could be that funding might then be available for setting up credible apprenticeship schemes for those vital, unacademic but practical people who'd rather be doing, than filling their heads with facts that they'll never need again. Most of us recognise that a lack of apptitude in one area is nearly always compensated for by a superior skill in creative, athletic or hands-on ability, but it's odd how the balance between the complimentary skills still remains unacknowledged by the powers that be.

Will the elephant currently stalking the classroom ever be acknowledged, or is the question simply too naive to bother answering?

Do word counts count?

I've got fiction writing class again tomorrow. The first day of a new term, in a new year and I'm thinking 'Does it matter that I've written less than 1000 words during the Christmas holiday?' ... and the correct answer is yes ... but it's also no.

Yes, because I feel my obligations to The Book hanging overhead like one of the darker clouds that lurked about as I heaved bags of horse poo around this afternoon. Of course nobody made me start The damn Book in the first place, but I've started and somehow, sometime I mean to finish it. On the other hand, what am I thinking? The power I'm using for my laptop, the ink cartridges in the printer and the paper.... all to please myself. How extravagant. How many thousands of mss end up in the bin or clunking back through letter boxes every week, every year? And how many published books join the remaindered queue, car boot sales and recycling skips? In my favour at least, I did get something down.On the flip side, should I even be trying?

The no answer to the question is because in the last three weeks I've written quite a lot more than that, admittedly on this blog and commenting on others, but I'm reading over what I've read and making attempts to edit and I've been convinced by Sarah (bless her) that it's essential to get words on the page - any words.

Without a deadline I'm hopeless - like a garden to renovate or reconstruct, materials to order, bulbs and plants to get in before the weather changes, a meeting to get to. I need to develop the habit, stop thinking of writing TdB as selfishness, as a luxury. Kids have grown up, dogs have been walked and fed, cat ditto (well, the second of those) and it's a question of sod the load in the washing machine waiting to be hung up, the wobbling heap of ironing, the clouds of dust, mud in the hall  .....So that's that alright then. Now, where did I put that laptop....

Of course, after the first class of the new term tomorrow I might feel quite different. I might feel crushed and humiliated, not by the other people in the room, I hasten to add, but because it'll focus my mind on the reasons I'm there and I'll look back over the weeks of holiday and wonder why on earth I didn't use the time better; think how many pages I could have added to the paltry 61 I've got so far. I'll try not to dwell on the fact that I've written more than half the number I've got in TdB in only 3 weeks, but will I succeed? Maybe. Maybe the exercise we'll be given in class will be an abject failure. An occasion when the words don't come, when everyone else in the group is scribbling furiously throughout the allotted time, while I chew the end of my biro,then listen, entranced and despairing to their perfect, witty, rounded prose. And a lot of them really have the ability to do that, believe me.

It's been like that some weeks in the past, but somehow I feel this time might be different. I might be different, because this time my count's going to be 11000+ words. Never mind that they haven't moved my heroine further along her trek to self-confidence, that the little scenes I've got in my head are still there, rather than on paper. The fact remains that I've got those words and they're out there, published, irretrievable, on the Net.


Question:  Do Virgos over-analyse?
Answer:  I'm still too busy thinking about this one to come to any conclusions at the moment.... natch!

Lazy journalism - or collective memory loss?

I should start by saying that memory loss is a feature of my daily life, so I'm starting this post from a very weak premise, like going upstairs to get something and then ............ Yep! Forgot what it was. The time I lost the cook's matches that live by the oven is the worst to date. A creature of habit when it comes to putting things back so I can find them the next time, naturally I assumed that the son might have borrowed them. Drawing a blank there, I forced my brain to visualise the box (in case I was seeing it without seeing it) and searched all round my minute kitchen. When it didn't appear, I thought I'd try the 'ignore it and it'll come out when it thinks I'm not looking approach' ..... and I was right. I needed something from the fridge at lunchtime and there, sitting on top of the Lurpak, was the box. The son thought it was funny.

"Hah! Guess that let's me off the hook then" he smirked and I suppose he's right. In all conscience I will never again be able to remind him about the time he was stopped from putting his trainers in the fridge when he was 9 and with his mind on higher thing.... (Obviously, something about fridges in our family, though).

Dragging myself back from all that, the thing that I wanted to write about was triggered by this week's journalistic frenzy on the news about the financial state of the country. Now, I'm obviously no expert but when the hacks, in this case on BBC radio and associated politicians, pundits and economists they've found to drag to a microphone, talk about the last quarter being disappointing and how it might impact on the country (ie us) for at least the rest of 2011 I've found myself shouting at the radio in much the same way as my mother used to shout at our ancient black and white TV when politicians appeared that she couldn't stand.

My point is (and I do try to get there in the end), I'd thought retro was back. It is in gardening for sure: less pesticides and herbicides (until you need to nuke the b*stards) and I can't tell you how much organic horse poo I'm shifting around clients' gardens at the moment... And don't get me started on the nostalgia around sixties clothing, recipes, make do and mend ..... for goodness sake, fondue, snow chains and Clothkits have had a resurgence!

That being so, how come the meeja world has forgotten (a) about the square acreage of print and aeons of airtime they've been devoting to how things are going to be really bad for the next several years, probably at least until the next election? and (b) that ancient and probably rather wise assumption that a new business could/should/would take seven years (yes, years!) to go into profit?

Hearing the Milliband (Imgoingtostuffupmybrother) Child on question time today, it's pretty clear there's been a collective memory loss in that area too. Who worked in the Treasury all those fingers-in-the-sweetie-jar years? Um.... that would be him, wouldn't it?

Don't misunderstand me. I'm not in love with the Coalition. I'm not in love with any political party. I was thoroughly sick of the self-destructive Tory bunch that TBlair outsted all those years ago and for about the first 3 weeks of his reign, I had high hopes..... Obviously not for long though and since then I've been as supine as the rest of us as we've sucked up/tolerated all the vote-buying, play-acting, bad acting, social engineering, over-legislating, control-freaking, education-dumbing, warmongering, prima-donnaring over-spending rubbish that we've been served for the last 13+ years too long.

No, my standpoint is that we have been in deep poo for quite a long time. We did the sensible thing and removed the cretins that were latterly responsible. We've got a new government of mixed attitudes and abilities, but we've got a chance to start fresh and like it or not, the different standpoints (at the moment, at least) are making them compromise ... and we should give them a chance. The alternative doesn't bear thinking about. Sure that means that choices are and will be tough. We won't like a lot of it. Certainly a high proportion of our new leaders are personally rich and won't be affected as much as most of the population. Life's like that. On the up side it means that they should be free to get on with the job in hand. It also means that they won't need to be on the fiddle.

For about the first three days of the Coalition even the rottweilers on the Today programme backed off, as did that very knowing Scotsman on PM. They were rather lost for a while. Out of their comfort zone. They didn't know how to play it, were waiting for us to give them a lead. Then they got bored waiting and went back to their old ways.

I usually listen to Chris Evans on R2 in the mornings (Wogan was so much cleverer and certainly funnier than Today and when he retired it took about 20 minutes to get hooked on his successor) before turning over to R4 for the rest of the day, but Evans was on holiday for a couple of weeks and I can't bear his stand-in, so switched back to Today. JH was interviewing Cameron - well, not interviewing so much as showing off, as usual, asking a question then talking over him, at length, as usual..... and depressingly, the reasons I haven't listned to it for several years all came back to me and I fled to R7. Is the BBC biased? Peter Sissons think so. Not so much in the culture as in it's DNA, he says and if I hadn't spotted the signs myself, I figure he should know. I'm so bored with it and with that whole attitude that anchors (I just can't call them journalists) are the stars and everyone else is inferior. Don't they get it?

There's been a change in the zeitgeist and that includes politics. Yes, I actually believe that. For sure I'm bored with people being patronised and shouted at by lazy journalists who forget their own past stories, take their topics from the newspapers, work from press releases rather than searching out the news for themselves and follow each other in attitude like lemmings.

As TW would say, Is it me?

Yes, I'm a convert!

(following on from my previous post .....)

Another child (a daughter this time) and couple of house moves later and we'd acquired another cat. Well, he was dumped on us by friends emmigrating to Australia, so relieved to have housed him they didn't even kill the engine when they dropped him off in the car. Life went on. We acquired a black lab (HtW) and another spaniel (me), boys this time, again for shooting, so we continued with the medium to large dog thing. I'd never really got small dogs. They were ankle biters, tripper-uppers, yappy, pointless.

We moved some more, got divorced, got older and when it became time to find the next resident, I no longer had inclination or energy to chase spaniels, or running pheasants and realised I'd developed a philosophy against having a working breed that couldn't work. Not so controversial really, because only my choice, for me, but watching the body language of a spaniel on the hunt, the way their rudders change according to the prize they've identified in the undergrowth - the sheer joy they clearly feel in their work .... I couldn't deprive a dog of that. Besides, we'd downsized hugely and I'd felt guilty enough that the lab had to make three-point turns to navigate our small terraced house.

No longer being part of an unthinking, smug-married couple, my life had changed too - I'd become greener, more thoughtful, careful about the resources I used, so I decided to go down the rescue dog route, get something smaller, perhaps a small(ish) spikey mongrel type, like you see in the ads. (OK, so you can be greenish and still be a pretentious airhead).

So, the Digging Dog arrived. Actually, the persona arrived later. To begin with she was a nightmare. A skinny, lookalike, black springer spanial, with a white bib, the size of a rat, a climber and the most destructive, messy individual I'd ever met. She had the run of the kitchen at night and used it as her own personal gym. She found the daughter's school pencil case on the table and demolished the contents, she ate onions from the vegetable rack and handles of kitchen knives from the block on the worktop. One morning I came down and found her with brown sellotape wrapped round her nose - except it was the only film we'd taken of her as a pup and undeveloped. She regularly raided the bin, but not in a subtle way - it was obviously more fun to spread it round the kitchen.

For some reason it never occurred to me to put a house dog in a cage at night. ....And in retrospect perhaps, despite everything, that was a good thing. Matters only improved when a wiser friend, son of a world-famous horse vet, who'd missed his own true vocation by not wanting to be 'son of..', worked out that she was claustrophobic. I should have mentioned that she'd been found, with six siblings, probably about 4 weeks old, zipped in a holdall in the men's loo of a motorway service station..... We put in a dog door, so she could come and go and things improved dramatically. Having said that, until I finally got a Brabantia bin, her obsession with rubbish continued - perhaps the rescue dog code of 'you never know where your next meal's going to come from' - though in more devious ways than before. That time I noticed a chive plant was looking rather sad and found part of a loaf of mouldy bread, still in it's bag, buried underneath it, for instance. With a more careful look at the borders round the courtyard, I found two more stashes, completely hidden in the earth, the only evidence, slight peaks on the surface. It must have taken her hours, but there was absolutely no evidence either on her nose or her paws. What else can I say, but ... Respect!

She changed her act almost overnight in the end, though: I had to go to the States on business, so she was banged up in the nick for a week. When I fetched her, she was perched on top of the wooden wall against the bars, bossing the other inmates around. She'd had a fantastic time, but the dog that came back to us was different. As if she'd made a connection between hooliganism and prison, from the day I liberated her she was ours in every sense.

The first dog shared, the DD's personality is a hybrid of her individual relationships with each of us: with my son she learned to expect games and energetic walks when he was home; with my daughter, less scarey games and going on exercise with the horse; me, she regarded as the main boundary setter, food supplier and the person to relax with on the sofa on Sunday afternoons. ... and the person who needed nagging on Wednesday evenings when it looked as if I'd forgotten that it was her class night. We'd discovered a local dog agility class - aimed at fun (if you wanted to start getting competitive you had to go elsewhere) and she turned out to be a natural - quick to learn, fast and accurate. Her behaviour on those evenings was quite different from any other night. She'd sit on the bend in the stairs, sighing and theatrically tapping the metaphorical watch on her wrist until I got my boots. She loved it. In fact they all loved it ..... and the behavioural problems in the gang that were sorted out along the way were startling. I learned something else too..... that she and I would have to start working like a well-oiled machine or I'd be permanently out of puff .... and after a while, bless her, it was possible to stand in the middle of the course and point where I wanted her to go and she'd do it. .....Except, of course, for the times when she'd already memorised the route and got there before I had time to tell her.

Everywhere I go, she comes too. In the early days that was the office, but for the last 7 years she's been a gardener's dog - the Digging Dog. The soubriquet was earned - that early skill was no fluke. When a difficult shrub needs to come out, I make initial inroads and then call her in for the intricate work round tangled roots. Digging precisely where asked, she's helped to extract countless shrubs in far better condition than would otherwise be expected. The rest of the time she finds the most comfortable spot near where I'm working and with one eye on the action, snoozes the time away.


With more time to concentrate on a dog than ever before the bond is incredibly close. She's 9 now and I sometimes wonder if I'll ever have the same relationship again. I mean, I've loved them all, equally but for different reasons and times marches and sometimes I dread the inevitable.... So much so, that about 5 years ago I began saying I needed to get another dog, so that the DD could pass on some of her wisdom. Because she is wise. I'd thought 8 would be a good age - she'd be young enough not to be too fussed by a puppy and old enough not to be too bothered by the competition.

To cut an increasingly rambling story short, I was bullied by a friend into following up one of the ads in our local free sheet I'd read aloud ad nauseam and with one look at four tiny, hairy mites, I fell in love all over again.

Eighteen months and one week ago the Gremlin arrived. One quarter Scottie and three quarters Westie, she was unlike anything I'd ever known, or knew I'd wanted to know, if you like, before. Even smaller than the DD, and - apart from the black coat and white bib, bearing no other resemblance - she burst onto our lives like a small, demented clockwork toy.

This time I'd got wise. I'd watched, counselled and sympathised with my sister, a dog-owning virgin, who'd got her first Cairn in London a couple of years before..... and learned a lot from the experience. She was wise. She swiftly got kitted out with sleep cage and play pen and apart from the time she returned to her flat to see her puppy strolling along the window ledge outside her first floor flat, had made a fairly smooth transition to organised veteran in no time at all.

It worked. The Gremlin was clean overnight in a matter of days and turned out to have no destructive tendencies at all. Perhaps it was the length of her legs (lack of inches multiplying any exercise exponentially), but after days of frenetic activity, she climbed into the bed in her cage and was asleep before I'd let the covers down over her. Dangling wires held no attractions for her. She was far more interested in the cat, who'd stretch out temptingly in the middle of the floor and play dead, while keeping one lazy eye on her antics as she danced about trying to find a vulnerable point. When she did nerve herself to close in, Cat (who could have dropped her with a flick) simply waved a lanquid paw in her direction, causing sufficient breeze to knock her back. Other than that, when toys bored her, she'd find stuff to do .... like spend ages trying to scale anything above her head, which was practially everything.

She hasn't displaced DD in my affections in any way, but said determination combined with self-possession, habitual cheerfulness, loyalty, affection and a peculiarly individual take on life, not to mention how hilarious those radar ears look from behind, have given me more joy and knicker-wetting laughter since she arrived in our midst than I can possibly thank her for.

More about the menagerie another time perhaps, but in the meantime .... Yes, I'm a convert. Small dogs rule!

Do dogs grow on you?

I've lived with dogs pretty much all my life. My mother had a weakness for Dandie Dinmonts and Border terriers, because they were funny and then family dogs from childhood morphed into the Married Dog - the Husband-that-Was was a shooter and got himself a Springer when we still lived in London, which then had a litter of puppies. Another addition to the chaos of two working adults, MD and cat in small terraced house in Lavender Hill? Are you mad? Shortly after that a liver and white scrap became My Own First Dog.

I loved MOFD from the moment she became an individual among the mass of squirming, squeaking, snoozing guinea pigs. Some time on her fifth day she lay in the palm of my hand, eyes still closed, little murmurs and yawns stirring her tiny, silky body, helpless and adorable .... and that was it.

I took her everywhere I could. While I worked she went with her mother, to the minders two doors up, except when they were on holiday, or doing their duty as stand-in caretakers of one of the embassies in Kensington. On those days I took her to work with me. She travelled on buses and tubes and took the Drain to the City. She came to the merchant bank with me, the law firm and the video facilities house in Soho. In between we worked on all the theories I'd developed on dog training and and came to mutually acceptable conclusions. I explained that it was impolite to take sandwiches from coffee tables without being invited and she opened my eyes to the joys and dodges of beating on shoots. I pointed out that trying to crash out of the snoopy house at the same time as her mother led to them getting stuck in the door -  she taught me how to take a bird from her mouth without dropping it. We learned to tolerate each other's mistakes. We were a team and something must have been right because we were in demand. And I liked that she was a proper sized, grown-up, working dog.

Then we moved to Somerset and the Husband-that-Was had to travel quite a lot and it occurred to me that, out in the middle of nowhere (actually a small village outside Frome) spaniels that snored so loudly from their straw-choked kennel would never hear any invaders. I wanted a house dog and Zigi the Rottweiler arrived .... although, bizarrely, I had to go back to London to get her.

Most puppies are pretty and Zig was no exception, with perfect, symmetrical, deep golden patches and huge brown eyes. She arrived when our son was at toddler stage, so fitted into the heirarchy somewhere on a level with him: below me as pack leader and (in her opinion) above the HtW and the spaniels. The cat, as all cats do, carried on doing his own thing, superior to all of us. 

She brought another dimension to the household, particularly in the brain department. She was the first dog I'd known that could make you understand the degree of urgency about going outside. She was exceptionally precise (hoovering up individual crumbs that the spaniels had stamped in in their scrambly way) and gentle in the mouth department and the only thing she chewed was her wicker bed which ended up in two neat pieces - the wall discarded, leaving the base to lie on, splayed on her back like some sort of exotic offering on a plate. Oh, and her own nails. When I tried to trim them for her she insisted on eating the evidence - a throwback to survival tactics - like jumping away from any spot where she'd peed, but really she preferred to do her own. When it became necessary to stop the toddler pestering her, she simply nudged him to the ground with a subtle movement of her back end - and then sat on his legs, until someone came and sorted him out. When my mother came to stay and got out whatever W.I. knitting project she was on, Zig would sit next to her, bum perched on the sofa, front feet crossed on the floor .... and laugh.

A pattern seemed to be emerging. Our dogs, from medium size, were getting bigger......

RIP Archers ........ or RIP Ms Whitburn?

Because I want to start with a clean sheet - and nothing's much cleaner than an empty page - I've got a confession to make: I actually wrote this first post 17 days ago. Not perhaps a major issue, but I think I should mention it. In fact I thought about not using it, but as it describes the event that galvanised me enough to start this blog - and hopefully, keep it updated reasonably often - here it is. I've changed just one or two words  .... 

4 January 2011 :  I've finally become a militant!

I'm more surprised than anyone that it's happened now. I'm as happy as the next person to rant to and with my friends about any of the appalling (political?) nonsenses that have been perpetrated in the last few years, such as a possible reason for the ridiculous state we found ourselves in during the snow last month; education and universities in general; the inability of a huge percentage of the population to put their litter in a bin; ditto people who don't pick up after their dogs; digital radio reception etc etc etc. I'm constantly saying 'I'm going to write to .....', but then never do.

No, the thing that finally got me off my bum was because of a radio soap! Well, not so much a soap as a way of life ....... and perhaps that's it. The Archers was my own personal radio serial, shared with nearly 5 million other people.

Ms Whitburn, the Editor, monopolised a huge amount of air time and media space, prior to Sunday 2nd Jan 2011, boasting that the 60th anniversary episode would be a 'Celebration' and about the mystery story line that would Shake the Archers to the Core, change things for the next ten years, match it's dramatic start with Grace's death in that fire, John's death and Ruth's will-she-won't-she affair, go down in history, blah, blah, blah and when it finally came, what did we get?? A badly written (how long did it take them? 5 minutes? 10?) out of character, nonsensical scene on the roof of the ancestral home between the slightly dippy, but charming, cheerful and very dear Nigel and sensible NFU-trained David, fiddling about with a banner that could have stayed where it was until daylight, the wind dropped and the ice melted. For reasons beyond me and to make the Celebration complete, someone had to die and Ms Whitburn chose Nigel.

Not too life-changing you might think? Actually it was and is, hence the new-found militancy. Yes, it's fiction, but the whole point of the thing IS - or to be accurate, WAS - my personal involvement - without that and every other fan there IS no Archers. The extent of my militancy might not go beyond writing on the Archers' blog and ranting here, yet, but it's a start.....

Nigel, the most popular character in the programme? Who knew? I certainly didn't, until now. I know I'd always liked him and appreciated his ability both to come up with some new plan and to dilute the bile his wife Lizzie is prone to spew, but I never had to consider whether he should live or die. He was so likeable it would have seemed ridiculous, pointless. It's TV soap villains who fall off roofs or get shot, not Nigels. Now I have had to think about it I realise that he was the only ancestral toff in the village (which could have made him a target for chippy writers), he had a happy marriage and children, he played a blinder in the panto, he was a mate for Kenton to play with, he'd matured into a good natured and articulate bloke and whilst not central to every plot it was always a relief and interesting when his turn came. What I realise now is that we won't hear him as a lovely old buffer, the only credible foil to Eddy or anyone else with character. His absence will be like a large hole blasted through the fabric of the programme, the edges of which will inevitably begin to split and fray under the strain of melodrama and doom, until the whole thing disintegrates into nothing more than a dusty heap of fibres.

I and millions like (and unlike - that's the beauty of it) me had tuned in every week for blahblah years, the majority probably most weekdays and again for the onmibus on Sunday mornings. We liked it for all sorts of reasons that to a non-afficionado sound as ridiculous as those put forward by people addicted to one of the TV soaps, but the difference between us and them - the TV soapers - is that they presumably like the dramas, the shouting and regular disasters used to mark uplifting occasions, such as Christmas and the New Year. We, on the other hand, would rather not get involved in any of that and many of us choose not to watch them for that very reasons. We liked the fact that ordinary but real things happened. Of course the Archers has it's dramas, deaths and disasters but the underlying thread was always a combination of gentleness and humour and it was nearly always in keeping with intricate plot lines unfolding over time. Annoying characters come and go, but baddies get their comeuppance in the end and life flows on. That doesn't make it lightweight, unimportant or in any way inferior to it's visual cousins. Solid can be good - particularly in dark times and with good writing, it's been superb in the past.

Such a cruel end and yes, shocking as Ms Whitburn wanted, but not for the reasons she kept spouting. Cruel to both character and player and shocking in it's stupidity. Where do we go from here? (please let me know from time to time, because I won't be listening): Years of (i) Lizzie hates David (ii) Lizzie's children grow to hate David (iii) David hates David (iv) Shula and Jill flounder around in the middle (iv) Ruth says 'Oooooh NOooooo!' even more than usual (v) Future of Lower Loxley is in doubt (vi) broken-hearted Lizzie sells to Hedge Funder who uses it at weekends for a hobby farm and / or Matt Crawford who builds weekender houses on half the estate and lets Centre Parcs use the rest (vii) Other cast members tiptoe around, not laughing or joking because he was too nice to die .... with the exception of, possibly, Susan who might mutter about irresponsible behaviour 'never would have thought it of someone like David'... (viii) Lizzie hates David some more (ix) David loses Brookfield and so on and so on round and round. People (both characters and listeners) will move away. Depression is a killer and the death of a good person is a permanent hurt - it can never be made better. I'm guessing that Ambridge will end up a soulless commuter village - no shop, no pub, no church, no stables no........ Is that Ms Whitburn's plan?

Just think what opportunities to celebrate have been missed. How many story lines could have come from the Grundy's winning the lottery, both drammatic and funny? And there have been many, many other suggestions in the last few days, better by far and more imaginative than the poop Ms Whitburn and the writers came up with, but I think I came up with the winner (and I haven't been the only person to say this, which proves it's a good idea): Yes, TA is fiction, so, in that knowledge, the last couple of weeks should simply be wiped from the record. We can take it. We don't need any dream sequences or magical appearances of twin brothers. BBC management could just announce that, having read all the blogs, messageboards and newsgroups they've decided to listen and as a result are VERY SORRY, JUST THIS ONCE, WE'VE GOT IT WRONG, then roll TA back to Friday 31st December. I can guarantee that both the unheard of apology and the fact itself will be remembered for as long or longer than any other major happening. Oh, yes, and they could also announce Ms Whitburn's resignation as the icing on the cake..........