Sunday, January 28, 2007

Sons and Lovers (not DHL, though)

Christmas is now history, and Epiphany with the family celebration, is also behind us for another year. Mr Scrabble briefly reappeared between the two bearing his scrabble set and broken heart. His married lady friend didn't tell her husband - but he found out anyway. It was all going so well. She was really, really going to leave as soon as Christmas was over. Until Boxing day, that is, when she told him it was over (again). I feel very sorry for him - he was so very unhappy - but I don't suppose for a moment it's really the end of the saga. Perhaps he'll now find someone who can brighten his life again, but it won't be me, and at last I'm now able to look back on the whole affair with a sense of proportion.

A bout of illness in early January left me rather debilitated for a couple of weeks, and all of a sudden, we're well into term and time is once more whistling past. I'm spending every spare moment marking essays from last term. A pattern of normality, busy but routine, has replaced the welcome disruption of the holiday season. Last week was a bit busier even than usual, with a satisfying conference in Cambridge providing additional excitement at the expense of a very early morning and seven hours on trains.

Youngest son has just gone off to Leeds to do his work experience for a fortnight with a major engineering company. It's quite a shock to think of him wearing a shirt and tie every day, going to work and finding his feet in a new environment, but even the baby of the family has finally grown up and I find myself looking on him with a pride I rarely experience when I'm trying to get him to wash up or feed the snake. Of course, by mid-February, he'll be back leaving socks in the sitting room and collecting all the mugs in his room, but I'm holding on to this feeling while it lasts.

One outworking of the relationship I have with technology is that I do a lot of parenting that way. Second youngest son lives at present with his father in Egypt, and we usually communicate using MSN. It's not very different from the way we communicate when he's home if I'm honest:
Me: Hi there.
Him: Hey
Me: Good day at school?
Him: OK
Me: Any homework?
Him: Maths and Geog.
Me: Well, you'd better get on then. Need any help?
Him: No, I'm fine.

So when I received a phone call via Skype, it meant there was something unusual. When he asked for advice, I had to sit down to recover from the shock. It turns out that the school took exception to the fact that he'd bleached his hair over the Christmas holiday, and had excluded him until he cut the offending yellow curls off. His father had no objection to his new look. Son was incensed at the injustice: nothing in the school rules forbids dyeing hair, and in fact one of the girls had her hair dyed black over the holiday and it passed without comment. The problem was that if he stood his ground, the school had said it would not allow him to complete his GCSE course if he were absent from school for more than two weeks.

After pointing out that he knew the school was, to put it mildly, rabidly conservative, so he shouldn't have been surprised, I offered two alternatives. I'd back him absolutely if he felt that he needed to stand by his principles. But anything worth fighting for has a cost, and the cost to him would be high. He would have to return to the UK and start the GCSE course again in year 10 in September, putting him back two full school years. If he chose to do that, I would support, indeed applaud, his decision. Alternatively, he could consider the fact that the school has all the power, and that even the moral victory of standing by his principles would make no difference to the school or anyone else. A tactical withdrawal in the face of overwhelming force is not a failure, but a sign of strength if combined with strategic planning to ensure a positive outcome. The deicision, of course, was his to make. As his Mum, I would honour whichever choice he made.

So he had his hair cut off. Of course, in a conservative school in England, a child with a very short crewcut might well be excluded for looking like a skinhead, but different cultural values operate!

What really concerns me is the example the school sets to its students by doing things this way. It sends out all the wrong messages: what you look like is more important than who you are; boys and girls are subject to different rules and values; maintaining an arbitrary rule is more important than educational achievement; might is right. I've worked so hard to encourage values of justice, equality and character into all my children, and a school which accepts £15,000 per year should provide the education it is paid to provide.

Meanwhile, an email arrived out of the blue from an Oxford schoolmaster whom I knew many, many years ago when we were both at school and then university: he'd come across my website while looking for theology resources, and I have apparently provided him with an element of street cred with his students who find it hard to imagine someone over forty being geeky enough to explore theology in cyberspace, and even harder to imagine that their chaplain is acquainted with such a person. My kids are used to me knowing more about computers than they do, so I forget that most of my generation are more comfortable with meatspace, hard copy and paper resources. I suspect that at least part of the curiosity value for his students is that "Sir", who is, of course, my age and married with grown-up children, could possibly have an ex-girlfriend in his distant past. I'm just delighted to renew what was always a good friendship, and to find him so much the same - he always was going to be Powlett-Jones from Delderfield's "To Serve Them All My Days"! I think he'd find me more changed - I am reminded of a song from the film "One for the Heart", in which Crystal Gayle sings "Old boyfriends...he fell in love, you see, with someone that I used to be."