Kettering is...

Apparently nothing.

Even Google won’t auto-complete with anything interesting or amusing.

KETTERING IS OFFICIALLY BORING.

On Wednesday, I have to get up at 4.30am, pick up two colleagues, then drive for 3 hours to go to Kettering. There is nothing nice about Kettering. If you haven’t heard of it, there’s a reason; if you have heard of it, it’s because it somehow manages, simultaneously, to be both horrible and boring.

I am to go to a TEACCH course.  This is a course to teach you all about how to teach children with autism. Something I know a little bit about- I used to be an advisor on autism for mainstream schools one day a week. The other 4 days were spent teaching children with autism.

Not to say you can’t learn more... but looking at the programme- it doesn’t bode well.

“Did you know, some young people with autism don’t like changes to their routines?”

Well fuck me with a brick- I *did* know!

But I am being sent nevertheless. It wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t

a) Miles away

b) Starting at 8.30 in the morning

Also, some friends went and did the same course a while back- said it was good, but they were there in a little group. I’m going with two old ladies.

It is going to be BORING.

Three days!?! 

And after getting up so early and driving for 3 hours (which always wipes me) I’m so going to be zoned out for the first day anyway.

Why can’t they just run the course in London like normal people?

I’m going to have to take secret hotel booze and secret hotel porn with me to get me through the week. Then explain to my old lady colleagues as to why I have no interest in sitting in the dubious Holiday Inn lounge drinking tea because I have massive amounts of pornography to watch.

I don’t want to go to Kettering. 

I want to stay at home and sit on my massive sofa and watch Game of Thrones and drink cocktails.

Fuck the Insanity Workout.

Okay, so I’ve started doing the Insanity Workout. It’s like circuit training at home, doing a ridiculous amount of ridiculous exercises for a ridiculously long time.

It comes highly recommended. Lots of my friends at school are doing it. I can well imagine it does wonders, because if you do anything that intense for that amount of time every day, you can’t help but looks super fit.

Here’s the thing.  I exercise quite a bit anyway- I like to do it.  It feels healthy, it feels exhilarating, and I like to look fit as fuck when I take my clothes off.  So I’ve kept a fairly keen health regimen for the last few years, and kicked it up a gear this year.  I do roughly 200 press-ups and 200 sit-ups a day, most days. Then I sometimes do 8 minutes abs *after* that. Sometimes I do it *twice*...

I’m pretty keen.

But this was something else.  It’s SO FUCKING HARD. And I’m someone who isn’t averse to or unaccustomed to fairly thorough exercise routines.

45 minutes of non-stop, crazy, intense and unforgiving jumping around and pulling bits that shouldn’t be pulled. It really is insane.

And this morning I got out of bed and couldn’t walk. It must be doing me good.

Probably because, despite my good work in recent months, I probably neglect my legs.

I’m doing the next bit now... Wish me luck.

What do you do?

What do you do with a boy who hasn’t been to school in 8 months?

What do you do when he’s sent to your school, to your class, to get him back into school routine?

What do you do when he pretends to be sick, to be sent home, to avoid being in school?

What do you do when he has done this successively, for 8 months?

And what do you do when his mother colludes with him? When she is too soft, too weak, and allows him to be off school for so long? Ignores the faking, collects him from school, keeps him home for months on end, with one pretend illness after another? When she is afraid to challenge him?

What do you do when he starts crying, wailing and whimpering that he’s going to be sick, that he’s so unwell, that he has to go home, that you must ring his mum? When he’s been in your class for a day and a half?

Here’s what you do...

TAKE. BACK. CONTROL.

I didn’t accuse him of lying as such. Not initially anyway. He has used this as an avoidance tactic for months, years even, taking control of his home environment completely, and using feigned illness to completely opt out of school. He’s an anxious boy, and we need to build his confidence and make him happy and comfortable in my class.

But I’m not having that. Not after a day. A DAY!!

So I let him splutter, cry, wail and retch. I let him refuse to eat lunch. I let him moan and whimper and cry. I let him beg and plead to call his mum.

But he still stayed in school all day.

I even said I’d call his mum, but that I would be advising her that he was fine, that he was anxious and was making himself feel sick, and that we should see the day out.  He refused to eat a thing.

I said fine.

And then I spoke to mum. I said he was faking it. But I said it tactfully.... I said it was an avoidance tactic, and that he was anxious and that we really should not give him control of the situation so immediately, as this is where things went wrong in his previous school. I said that I advised we keep him in school, and that she collect him at the usual time, and that we would keep a close eye, but we should stay strong at this point and make the placement work.

And then she surprised me.

A parent actually took my advice.

So he stayed.  And you know what?  As soon as he knew the gambit had failed, and that he was staying right where he was, he settled down, his anxiety lowered, he joined in, he had a successful afternoon.  He even enjoyed himself, a little grudgingly.

It was a power struggle right from the start. One where he’d always won in the past, because the school and the parents had caved so quickly. All children look for control of the situation, lots of them find ways of getting it and keeping it.

But once we took back control- for him and for mum, he just got on with it.

Fuck me, what child wouldn’t rather be at home? I know I would.

But if you give them a tactic that works, they’ll use it to control everything.

Holidays

I love holidays. Holidays are awesome. I’ve just been on holiday. And it was awesome.

But there’s something pretty wonderful about not being on holiday too. After 5 days I was totally ready to go home. Don’t get me wrong – I had a great time, and I didn’t *want*to come home – but I was well ready to go home. I wasn’t sad.

7 days subsisting purely on Pringles and vodka really does me no favours at all. After 5 days, my body was screaming at me to stop drinking, eat normal food and stay in, have an early night and read a book. All I want is beans on toast.

 

It’s funny though- you could just take it easy whilst you’re away.  But it NEVER HAPPENS. You’ve paid all that money to stay somewhere exciting, where you can go nuts, drink like a fish and dress like a whore... so staying in your hotel for the evening, watching weird Euro TV just seems such a waste.

So we push our luck. Every night. Then feel horrible all day, every day, and struggle to crawl to the beach to lie in the unforgiving sun for the rest of the afternoon.

But here’s the thing. I like to go home because actually, my holiday routine and my home routine aren’t actually that different. I go and sit on the beach, I go out for scrummy dinners, I drink cocktails, then I go and have dirty drinks in some dirty gay bar, then maybe end up dancing in a binty outfit. It’s not that different at all. 

I’m never sad about going home because I like my life at home. It’s pretty much identical to my life on holiday. I kind of feel like some people go on holiday, then HATE coming home because they’re actually not that happy with their normal, day-to-day life.  

But yeah- it’s pretty much identical. With the exception that when I’m home, I can do all the same things, but have a night off and sit on the sofa watching Ru Paul’s Drag Race and eating pasta without feeling like I’m wasting my money.

Long live pasta.

Day 31: A vivid memory (#BEDM).

My Hag Do was one of my best days ever.

Stag + Hen = Hag.

I went to amazing trouble to provide something that was local, cheap, original and fun. Too many stag dos now are really ridiculous: Self-indulgent, expensive, unreasonable and unjustifiably over the top. Bridal couples seem to expect as a matter of course that now, rather than a night out or whatever, you have to go on a short holiday to an expensive foreign country, incurring hotel bills, flight costs without even considering the exorbitant fees for the go-karting, paintballing, food and booze. It’s painful and a little bit selfish.

I wanted none of it.

Hag Day 2008 was a day of fun in Brighton. We met on the beach, in teams of 5-8. I provided each team with a bottle of booze, a disposable camera and a list of 100 challenges. The premise?

Choose 30 challenges and record them on your camera. Easy challenges earn low points, hard challenges earn high points. Combining challenges in a single photograph can win you mega super points.

For example:
Re-enact Riverdance would be low scoring. Too easy...
Remove furniture from a house dressed as a burglar- high points. Much more challenging.
Kicking a cripple, then kidnapping their pet whilst dressed in newspaper clothes... mega points. You could practically win with one photograph if you achieved that.

Dressed as a monarch, stealing a dog.

Of course, no-one had to actually attack a cripple. You just had to get creative and courageous with your photographs, and simulate each challenge in a pleasing way.

But it was genius. I thought of everything... I even put our local, cheap and student-friendly photography development place on high alert for several rounds of bizarre photograph submissions, primed and ready, for the 4pm cut off.

Blagging their way into the doughnut shop.

Then teams got a text with submission instructions- to arrive on the beach at 5pm with their completed photo-assignment, dressed as... BACOFOIL ROBOTS!

Bacofoil robots convene on the beach.

It was the best day ever. Some people lamed out a bit, and some went completely fucking all out!

Then, to top it off, I hired a venue for a party, where we did an awards ceremony and drank and danced the night away. It was frickin’ awesome.

Collecting stamps and performing a 

sacrifice in a newspaper outfit.

I didn’t even get that wasted, because I was concentrating on seamless organisation and orchestration throughout the day. A bit sketchier in the evening, when i was made to drink beer (bleurgh!) and wear a bra (woop!), and do some challenges of my own.

But so the most awesome day ever.  I loved it and I really should organise another someday soon...

breaking into school in the holidays to make rude art.

***************************************

The challenges? I won’t recount them all, but highlights include:

Re-enact the feeding of the 5000
Simulate sex in a public place
Celebrate Christmas (it was May)
Disgust me
Torture a cuddly toy
Be a gimp
Prick up your ears
Kiss a copper
Impersonate a monarch
Steal candy from a baby
Get a job
Sell something
Make doughnuts
Backstreet gambling den
Play a game with a pensioner
Carry more than 1 passenger
Organise a large-scale piggyback derby
Find your sinister evil twin
Food fight with strangers
Steal a pet
Take something back that costs less than 50p
Dress age-inappropriate
Dance off with a stranger
Food fight with a member of the public
Go dogging
Take something back that you’ve blatantly eaten
Dance with a very short man
Create some art
Pay child fare
Start a band
Dine out in fancy dress
Pour water over a stranger
Hold something dangerous
Eat something horrid
Old lady holding inappropriate sign

Day 30: React to this term: Letting Go (#BEDM).

I have no sense of self-preservation at all when it comes to climbing. I’ve always been a climber.... I like climbing. I used to climb trees and walls and things as a child without hesitation. Then I grew out of it for a while. Then I took up climbing a few years ago as an adult, and – unsurprisingly I suppose –took to it straight away.

I went twice a week for a long time, and got pretty good pretty quick. I have tried to continue in that vein, but promotions and work commitments ate into my time and it dropped down to once a week, then once a fortnight. I pretty much keep to that, and still love it. I can do some pretty tricky moves and walls and climbs now- and the occasional thing that I think “Oooh, I must look way cool doing that!”

And I’ve done Go Ape! a couple of times too, with friends for birthdays and things. I love it, and am equally fearless. I didn’t see myself as fearless until this point - only when my friends commented that I have no sense of self-preservation did I notice.

It’s because I completely trust the equipment. Experience is part of it, definitely, but I suffer no concern at all that it’s high up or dangerous or I might fall. I can’t fall- I am tied to the top with string. Other people were in a state of shock when I leapt off of things in a crazy fashion, or ran full-pelt across tiny rope walkways, falling off and screeching along half way across, or when I let go and dangled off the side of a platform, or shouted down to the supervisors “Are we allowed to jump off, no hands?”

Apparently we were.  So I did.

And you know what?  It’s about letting go. If you jump off a few things, low down if need be, you learn that the rope holds you. It will catch you. You can’t fall because you are tied to the wall. But people don’t like to. But then they never learn how safe it is.

Let go. And trust in your equipment.

Let go. Then you learn how safe letting go is.

Day 29: Five songs or pieces of music that speak to you or bring back memories (#BEDM).

5 songs, not necessarily good songs, that take me back to times past. Some of them in fact, are actually quite bad songs...

Dario G – Sunchyme.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yal9En46tt4

My 16^th birthday: My friends and I went to Leicester Square in London, to the Capital Café. I’d always been a bit worried that I didn’t really have ‘enough’ friends. I know better now, of course. But around 15/16, not only did I suddenly find myself with a nice circle of close friends growing around me, but I actually started to socialise with them, and go out doing exciting things for the first time. And I remember sitting in the restaurant with my friends, this song was playing, and I thought ‘You know what? I’m going to be alright. Life is good, and I am happy.’

And those best friends I had then?  They’re still my best friends now...

Britney Spears – Oops, I did it again.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImIa_5awDFg

University. My favourite club- the illustrious Dynamite Boogaloo. It was an amazing phenomenon that I am happy and glad to have been a part of. It was more than a night out- it was a bit special to the people who went there. And at the peak of my times there, before it moved, evolved, grew, then moved on, we used to do silly dance routines dressed in ridiculous outfits. Everyone did. It was that sort of place.
My favourite memory- a BAD homemade dance routine we drunkenly improvised whilst standing on the stairs queuing for coats, ready to leave as it was crazy-late and we were flagging. But Britney started. That instantly-recognisable first double strike- and we just made up this stupid, crazy, drunken dance there on the stairs.
And then? Everyone started doing it; copying our routine like some glittery workout video. It was the strangest thing, but SO much fun... It reminds me of uni, it reminds me of my best nights out, and it reminds me of everything I loved about Dynamite Boogaloo.

David Essex – A Winter’s tale

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NL6jptOQ84A

So yeah- when my dad left AGAIN, and my mum started perpetually crying AGAIN, mummy and I had to go and watch my brother in his school’s Christmas carol concert. And they sang this, and it made my mum cry. I think she’d been told that day that it was over, or she’d told us that day it was over, or something. And it was just horrible.
And then for years later, she always skipped it on our Christmas CD, or turned the radio off for that song. She said she couldn’t hear it again as it made her so sad. Which was a shame because I sort of like it in a melancholy way. Maybe because of all that?  I don’t know. And then when I had to sing it in my Christmas concert I think I lied and told her parents weren’t invited, or that all the tickets were gone so she wouldn’t come and have to hear it and feel sad. I told you I started taking care of her around this point, didn’t I...?
She can hear it now. She quite likes it now, which is a bit perverse, but she’s very much moved on and is a different person now.  Still gets me every time though.

Liberty X – Just a Little

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bItgfoBl4wE

For reasons unknown, we spent an ENTIRE YEAR singing this song in our final year of uni. All four of us had it stuck in our heads for the entire year, all through all 3 terms, all the holidays and right through finals. You’d walk down to the kitchen quietly murmuring to yourself:
“Sexyyyyyyyyyyyyy... Everything about you’s so sexyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy...”
then as you walked in, you’d find one of the others making dinner, singing:
“Just a little bit moooooooooooooooore.... gimme just a little bit moooooorrrrre!”
At a completely different point in the song.
It was amazing, but so amusing. And that became my uni song, just because it was so impossible to shift. It reminds me of the girls- we were such a happy little group.

KISS – Crazy Nights

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSb4tF1X368

I was going to choose Do Your Thang- the best song ever and our first dance at our wedding, but I can bet Simon will choose it too, and I want to avoid being twee.  Crazy Nights was a song I learned of relatively late in life. It was at the last ever Dynamite Boogaloo in fact- the end of an era, and all the amazing hosts, hostesses and DJs were dressed as KISS, doing crazy stunts and games and the usual stuff. And they closed, after years and years of amazing nights, and years and years of attendance from us with this song, and I thought- Fuck- they WERE crazy nights, weren’t they. It was the end of an era, and so sad, but so much fun and such an amazing way to go out. It was like you were part of a special little select gang, and you’d all shared in something wacky that most people didn’t know about and it felt so special. A sad night, but a happy memory...