One word? When seven would do…

When I was little my Mum used to buy presents for Frazer and I at Christmas and birthdays and wrap them up and pretend they were from our Grandad – her Dad, Frank. This was because from being an unreliable and rather crap father to her he had continued in a similar vein and was an unreliable and rather crap grandad to us. We weren’t harmed by this – a grandparent is not usually as essential a person to a child as a parent (I say not usually because of course there are plenty of cases where this is not true, but we didn’t feel hard done by as a result of not having him around being a runner for number one grandfather awards) but my Mum struggled with it and tried to compensate for it. He did turn up himself occassionally, always with armfuls of chocolate bars he’d stopped at the nearby sweet shop to buy and as I have later learnt, because he wanted something from my parents but we always called him ‘Frank’ and he was a bit of a curiosity really, and usually welcome because of the chocolate ;).

Anyway, when I was six ‘Frank’ gave me a skipping rope for my birthday. It was green handled and the handles had something in them that made them rattle. It was shiny, unlike any other skipping rope I’d seen any of my friends with and I can picture it to this day. This is back in the day when children were allowed to bring skipping ropes to school, you know for skipping with in the playground. Back before health and safety would forbid it incase of incidents of people getting sued for skipping related accidents, let alone the potential for six year olds to strangle each other or tie up their teacher and go looting the tuck shops in inner city schools! So I took it to school with me. At breaktime I skipped with it – I have a clear mental image of me in my long white socks skipping with my rattly handled skipping rope. I put it in the corridor in my bag on my peg and when I went out at lunchtime it wasn’t there anymore.

I don’t recall all the events after that. Presumably I reported it lost to a teacher or my Mum or someone. What I do very clearly remember is that the next day someone else was playing with a remarkably similar green rattle handled skipping rope in the playground. I’m not sure if I asked them, or my Mum did, or if a teacher did but I recall the child insisting it was theirs. I’m not sure how it got ironed out but I recall the skipping rope was returned to me and the ‘perp’ had to stand up in assembly and apologise. Bizarely I don’t recall the name of the child, or even what they looked like, but I do still remember very vividly that knowledge that someone had something of mine and wasn’t going to give it back easily.

Today at MM we had lots of new faces, possibly too many in some ways as it rather unbalanced the dynamic, although I am enjoying feeling like a real member there, someone who belongs and can have a shared ‘past’ with other members even if it’s just a ‘do you remember back in June when we did X?’. It’s a fairly diverse group of people but in the last week I’ve been struck by how much online debates between members of the egroup have really felt like a community. It’s nice. 🙂 We had a bit of a ‘session’ today where we talked a bit about the group and how it works to the newcommers, answered some questions and chatted about stuff we’d like to do moving forward. I had a couple of chats with 3 of the new ‘mums’ and a couple of chats with other people too which was nice, I like getting to know people below the surface layer and finding out more about who they are as individual people as well as parents who home educated their children – and there are some interesting people at MMs. :).

About halfway through Davies flew into the main room with a barely controlled air of despair about him, which immediately was unleashed as soon as he threw himself on me with heaving sobs. He had lost his sonic screwdriver :(. We went outside and cast about for it with me assuring him it would be there ‘somewhere’ and couldn’t possibly have gone anywhere. He was playing a game where he would throw himself to the ground and then his gaggle of girl mates would try and revive him – he had quite a posse of them bringing him flowers and trying to ‘make him happy’ (ooh er, should probably deal with that – if only for their future expectations of men’s wants :lol:) in the words of one of them. So I assumed it had fallen out of his pocket during one of his dramatic falls to the ground. It was not immediately visible so I enlisted the help of a couple of nearby parents and children and M (another mum) and I chanced upon one of the new lads brandishing a sonic screwdriver. Which he insisted he’d bought from the charity shop next door. 🙁

It was all sorted out, thanks to a very on the ball mother who dealt with the whole issue with tact and understanding for her own son while ensuring Davies and I were both placated (not that it took much, the return of the screwdriver was more than sufficient) and chased it up with me afterwards out of earshot of all the children. I was very admiring of her parenting and general conduct over the whole issue and made sure to tell her so. But for those few moments when it was fairly apparent that the screwdriver he was holding was the one Davies had unwrapped as a birthday gift barely a week before and we were all pretty powerless to do anything about it was a flash back moment for sure to my own seven year old self and that rattly green handled skipping rope. Although I should probably clarify very clearly that it had not been taken from Davies so was not alike in that respect.

We dropped Ali and Freya home and came home to chase chickens round the garden for a while. We’re pretty sure we have a crower in the crowd, which given they all look so bloody alike would mean that they are all potential crowers and not potential layers which is a bit of a bugger. We’ve spoken to the children at length about this prospect and I think we are all agreed that we eat the cockerels. They (and infact I) don’t want to see the process from clucking to cooking but Ady is capable of that side of things if needs be. If we do have a cockerdoodledoo then I think it had very limited mornings of crowing before it says goodbye as I so don’t want to piss our neighbours off with something we’re not keeping anyway. We’ll have to see what developes over the next week or so. Davies is slightly apprehensive about them now, Ady has running daily battles with Rhonda, they all seem scared of me and run whenever I get close unless I’ve got food in which case maximum respect is offered. Scarlett is so the boss of those chickens though – she totally ‘rules the roost’ and is able to pick them up, berate them, chase them all in for the night and everything. She is the chicken whisperer :lol:.

Once home I was able to give full attention to the issue Chris had alerted me to of Ady’s photos splashed all over the internet credited with someone else’s name. Now Ady and I had agonised over the whole sending to the bbc / flickring photos in the first place. Possibly in the cold light of day we might have made different decisions about what we did with photos but taking them in the first place had been at the urging of a police officer, our first port of call was to contact the police to say we had photos (which they have been in touch with us over today to say air investigation units will be touch and could we please keep the photos safe for their inspection) and then we responded to the bbc call for photos before flickring them. The motivation behind flickring was the same as me twittering to say ‘omg a plane has just come down in the field next to us’ – the same reason I blog or talk to people, it’s a natural human reaction to share experiences, to talk about them, to involve others for their reassurance, feedback, comfort, empathy, whatever. I can’t really defend it or justify it but can say hand on heart there was no ulterior motive or cold heartedness going on, just an overwhelming urge to share and talk about what we’d experienced.

So today we learnt that photos had been taken off our flickr stream, almost immediately, and touted round various places by a freelance photographer, as his own work, for money. So far our local paper and Sky news have removed the credit to the imposter and I have emailed a couple of other places. It would appear that the person in question is one of life’s less nice individuals with a bit of a history of not so pleasant doings. This is one of those unhappy situations where there are no winners, it is off the back of a tragic accident where someone died, our own family’s sad experience of being on hand to record it and perhaps foolishly sharing what we’d seen only for someone else to try and profiteer from it. I know I can be naiive about just how sick and horrible people can be but this has really brought home to me the depths some people will stoop to to make money. We’re being sent a fee from the local paper for the photos – which will go straight to the RAFA charity which Shoreham Air show runs in aid of so there is at least some glimmer of a positive act in all this but the whole episode has been turned from a tragic loss of human life to a seedy example of the twisted side of specific human’s lives.

On more cheerier notes – because sometime over the last three days we have managed to laugh and smile, honest, Davies had a great time at Beavers tonight. They made youghurt pot bird seed feeders and bird spotting charts. We hung the bird feeder straight up on the tree in the garden. I think it was the first time I’d been properly personally spoken to by the Beaver leader who made a point of seeking me out to tell me what a great time Davies had had there today. Next week is a meet up at the local park for them which Ady is going to go along and attend at, Davies seems really pleased to be back into his groups routine although he never really says a lot about what goes on he is always hailed by the other lads coming and going and clearly gets something out of it.

Tomorrow is a rare quiet day at home for us, with just swimming lessons in the evening. We still have plenty of birthday gifts to fully explore, I have mountains of laundry and other home-based stuff to be getting on with and if the weather is ok (and maybe even if it isn’t) I think we might head out for a walk somewhere too. Ady had a 15 hour day today visiting Glee leaving before 6am and not getting back til nearly 9pm which he could probably have done without. Hoping for a less eventful rest of the week really.