is this selfish?

One of the advantages of being alone is that you get to live off pity. In the past three weeks alone I have had casseroles, stews and home baking left at my door regularly and have been invited over for meals seven times by seven different families. See? Pity can be good.

Yesterday I was invited by a couple from Church for Sunday Lunch. They’re a lovely family – they have two young kids of about eight and ten (although don’t quote me as this is a complete guess and I’m really not good at guessing children’s ages)

Gorgeous food, interesting conversation, quirkily entertaining kids – it was a pleasant afternoon in every way – but the highlight was when we retired to the sitting room and turned on the Wii. Now I have never played a Wii before – I haven’t played any games console since I left uni. I am scared of them. I believe they kill creativity and conversation. But this was good. So good.

If anything it improved the conversation; and, although everyone suddenly became frighteningly competitive, I soon found I didn’t mind being beaten by an eight year old at Mario Kart.

But, competitive as the kids were, what struck me most about that afternoon was the effect it had on the parents. Surely not since Scalectrix was popular has there been such a ‘present for the kids’ that parents have bought thinking solely of themselves.
In the old, old days fathers would buy train sets for their sons, spend hours constructing it “together” and secretly long for their kids’ bedtime so they could sneak back to the little trains and make “choo choo” noises in the safety of solitude. Scalectrix was similar, but it involved that other mid life crisis obsession – speed. And now we have the Wii.

As I took on the father in a round of golf, having just beaten him in the shooting gallery, I saw a look of determination that told me that this was his game and he had no intention of losing.


I have no children for whom to buy myself presents, but sometimes I wonder about my motivation when setting projects or tasks for the kids at school. A phrase I tend to use too often is, “I would never set you anything I wouldn’t be prepared to do myself – so here’s an example I came up with to help you.” Let’s face it – I didn’t write that gangster story as an example of writing from another culture; I didn’t write it to provide a guide to how to write creatively for a specific audience; It had nothing to do with me trying to encourage them to structure their work imaginatively – I wrote it cause I like gangsters.

Maybe I am setting work for myself rather than my pupils. Maybe my inspiration does come from within rather than without at times. But, the way I see it, while it captures the pupils’ imagination and leads to creative and original work… then it’s all good.

Having said that there is just a chance that my next homework for my year 9s may involve them writing about a Newcastle United player eating Lemon Meringue Pie while watching old movies and getting beaten at Mario Kart.