Tax-fayer punded ejewcayshon

This afternoon I have a rare, thankfully, opportunity to spend time in his pompous company because we have The Parent-Teacher Interview and we're going along together. Here's hoping he's sober. Here's hoping I don't lose my temper and assert that the only thing that will rescue her now is a one-way ticket to Australia and any half decent private school over back home. To do so would antagonise him and guarantee that as well as being pissed he'd be pugnacious by the time I got home from work.

This whole parent interview lark is an utterly pointless exercise, conducted once per school year. Whatever pre-conceptions I might have harboured have long since been slayed by the relentless purposelessness of business. I am weary of the ritual, the lack of constructive dialogue, the lack of evidence that anything positive is ever achieved. Nothing has happened in six years now of these meetings to suggest that even one of the teachers has properly heard a word I've said.

Let me tell you know how I expect this thing to run, and I promise to come back and admit if this year turns out to be any kind of improvement on past bitter experience.

The class teacher, this year a lady we've not met before*, will introduce her, she will invite us to express any concerns we might have and raise any other issues, then she will sit across the desk from us, alternately fidgetting with the list of parents to see and looking at her watch; after a short time she will interupt us to deliver a cursory, glib and useless assessment of the offspring's level of attainment and prospects then asks us more or less politely to leave and make way for the next set of victims.

We will leave with little or no idea of her prospects of passing her 11-plus and getting into a half-decent school. We may find that she's in a class with a teacher who is personally opposed to selection and prepared to be actively obstructive. The lottery doesn't start with applying to schools it starts with the random nature of the mind set of each year's class teacher.

We'll receive no guidance as to the support we can and should be providing to develop our daughter, only facile exhortations to have her complete the set homework: the homework set to be achievable by the hopeless offspring of the feckless welfare addicted and the criminal underclass that send their children to the same local school.

Hearty sigh. I picked a bad week to get back on the wagon.

* actually this isn't quite true. I've had to deal with this woman at work. She's neurotic; convinced that we can clone her debit card via the chip and pin device at the tills. Actually neurotic doesn't do her justice. Very quietly she's as mad as a hatter.

A small matter

I have not been keeping the aimless, feckless and desperate abreast of latest developments vis-a-vis the wagon that lurches ever onward, rarely over smooth ground and only infrequently with a tremendous quantity aboard. But ... last orders called prior to turning in on Monday, and not a drop since so that's more than 48 hours.

This is probably as well since I ate nothing last night: came home; the Slug drunk, rambling incoherently and lurching about the place in a very tedious manner; went to bed hungry rather than spend further time in his company. Bastard.

Out of hand

As usual things have escalated from a delightfully low base. In the space of a month I've gone through not remembering when I last had a drink to not remembering how much I had to drink last night. I peer at my face in the mirror the following morning, hate what I see, swear I won't do it again and know deep down that I haven't yet got to the point where I can go through a day without succumbing.

The worst of it is that I haven't bought a drop in all those weeks. He keeps on trotting home with it, even when I don't ask for it. So oblivious is he to the possibility of life without it, he fills what he sees as a gap and almost certainly thinks I should be pleased by his thoughtfulness, flattered by his attention. The scarier possibility is that he knows I'm less able to help myself when I'm helpless.

I had a dream

Last night I had a dream. Obviously not enough booze was consumed before going to bed. But that was because I had elected to treat myself and picked up some Hobgoblin rather than slum it with the fizzy stuff that they're selling so cheap at Tesco at the moment. In fact I've even gone off the Tesco own French wheat beer. So it was dark ale which doesn't seem to hit as hard, probably because I prefer to savour it.

Then I had this dream. Like all dreams, or all mine, it makes no sense. I guess there was loads more I couldn't remember when I woke but I know my sister was doing wheelies in a navy blue Austin 1100. This is the car our maternal grandparents had when we were very young, only theirs as I recall was a taupe-like shade, much more in keeping with the nature of the vehicle.

Quite what she might have thought she was doing I've no idea. The point seemed to be that in her state of perpetual motion she was out of reach. The only other thing I can recall is the little shop on one of the roads forming Camberwell Junction to which our mother took the two of us for early shoe fittings.

Odd to dream about her like that and couple of things from our childhood that were really rather dated even at the time. Our parents were simply re-living their own childhoods in us rather than re-inventing parenthood even slightly.

All this in a week when I've had my first letter from mum in simply ages.