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The kids broke up today & as July seems to be behaving itself they’ve got nothing to complain about & endless weeks in which to run free. They’ll do nothing of the sort of course & instead will find the quickest route to being bored out of their minds that they can, it’s odd but they manage this every year without fail. I can remember being bored rigid during the long Summer holidays as well but as I recall we didn’t manage this until at least a few weeks had passed & all the bikes were broken. These days it’s something of a criminal offence to not to offer the kids constant stimulation but even here there’s a problem since as soon as a chance to learn something comes up they all moan that they aren’t at school anymore? They don’t make it easy, there are things they want to do but since these things always involve quite a big outlay of cash it can be tricky doing more than one or two of them when cash is tight. You’d expect this point to be appreciated by children who live on a council estate which contains mostly poor people but in all honesty they don’t see it, they just expect it to happen. I’m not moaning about this, I’d like to just whisk us all off on a new adventure every day until they were begging me to be allowed to stay home but it’s simply not possible & what is possible isn’t up to the required standards.

It’s the expectations that get me, like kids everywhere they’ve spent June & July just waiting for school to quit & have built the holidays up into an idyllic episode, what actually happens though is that they wake up one day with nothing to do & then instead of finding stuff to do they find someone to moan at. We had a half hour power cut today & across the estate the children acted as though their world had ended, they were lost without electricity in a way we never could have been, anything we got that took even batteries tended to work once & was then ornamental forever. No more though, used to talking effortlessly with hundreds of peers scattered around the world they howled when their world was reduced to only those few they could physically see. This was half an hour on the actual day they finished school, as to how bad it will be should it happen again in a few weeks time I can’t imagine but I can’t see it being pretty. It’s a problem for them that the real world is so limiting with its’ rules & regulations & the parental fears compared to the online environment which allows them anything & is considered almost safe by parents since it takes place mostly indoors. I can see why the young get annoyed with the older generations but without an attempt to think up activities for themselves that don’t involve parties or lousy tempers they don’t help themselves much, besides, my parents told me ” No ” quite a lot & it did them the same amount of good.

I don’t much mind the big holiday although I’ll be bloody glad when it’s over, it’s like getting into a whole new way of life that contains no free time & the constant need to think for other people, my kids are all bright enough to think for themselves but they let me do it so that I can still feel involved. I’ll spend my time telling them that they’ve got all this time & that they should be using it & then telling them that they can’t spend it doing that thank you very much, it’s a tiring game after a month. On the plus side there will be those days when they forget to be moody, lazy teens & respond to the world as humans, there wont be many of these days but that’s ok, if I get two in a row it tends to worry me, any teen that can’t manage one strop a week should see a doctor urgently. No, the holidays will be tough but there’ll be some good times in the midst of screams of boredom, & if we can’t really celebrate their arrival we can at least look forward to their ending, it’s a funny old world.

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