Complaints

I am late starting to write this tonight because I have spent a satisfactory hour composing a grumpy letter to the Deputy Head at Lucy’s school. This is the chap who was booed off the stage at the end of the wicked Fun Song debacle.

He is new. I wrote to him yesterday with a polite request for school to consider repeating the Fun Song event for the benefit of the Upper Sixth, who were feeling sad that their last ever Fun Song had been stopped halfway through, and of course it wasn’t their fault.

Rather to my surprise, he wrote back to say that he didn’t care, some of the Upper Sixth had joined in the unladylike booing when he went on stage at the end, and he wanted them all to suffer.

He didn’t use those exact words, but that is what he meant.

This made me cross.

I wrote an icily polite letter suggesting that he could not run a singing evening at a boarding school for little girls, and that I had no sympathy with his bruised booed ego. I added that I much preferred my daughter to grow up into a fierce woman who could express her opinions about injustice rather than a meek sheep who would obediently suffer the rantings of dictatorial fools. 

I don’t think they are allowed to expel girls for having tiresomely opinionated parents, and anyway she has only got a couple of terms left. I can have a high horse to ride because Lucy is so irreproachably perfect at school that I can in no way be blamed for any mayhem that might happen around her. If it had been Number Two Daughter that would have been another matter. 

I have been feeling grumpy about school in any case, and had some uncomfortable interviews with members of staff yesterday at the parents’ day.

Uncomfortable for the staff, I mean, obviously.

We have been considering Lucy’s career options and as you know, the police degree apprenticeship scheme has seemed like a good idea. 

When I asked why she has not had more support in this the Head of Careers told me, in an offended tone, that no Queen Margaret’s girl has ever, ever gone on to do an apprenticeship. They have always, always, left to go to university.

I might as well have been suggesting that she left school to take up a career in stripping with a minor in shoplifting on the side.

This made me cross as well. 

I have been reading about different ideas for teenagers lately.

I went into some detail about some of the brilliant degree apprenticeship schemes available in the modern world, including marketing and engineering as well as the police, and wondered why school was not offering girls encouragement to investigate these. When I had finished the careers teacher had become very pink and flustered. 

She promised that they would take Lucy’s interest seriously and help her fill in the complicated application form. 

Lucy said afterwards that she thought she would rather the careers teacher stayed well away from her application forms, and could we do it ourselves at home please. 

We did this today.

It took ages. It was about forty pages long. 

We had to dream up some occasions where Lucy had calmed a difficult situation. We thought that she might have been rather better at it than the deputy head. In the end we remembered the time when Oliver stubbed his toe when I was at work, and wrote about that.

She is, after all, seventeen. I don’t suppose they will expect her to have negotiated a settlement to the miners’ strike. 

We affirmed her lack of facial piercings, offensive tattoos and county court judgements several times, listed just about every living relative that she has and promised that none of us had offensive tattoos either. 

By the time we had finished we were both exhausted. Joining the police is jolly hard work, and we haven’t even started on the bleep test bit yet.

It is done, though, and the application has winged its way across the ether to the Northamptonshire Police HR department. They can decide for themselves if they would like an apprentice who is good at reassuring people with stubbed toes.

Have a picture of a brick archway, just like the one Mark is going to build in the garden.

I must suggest it to him.