I'm full up with education

It's a quote or probably a slight misquote from Bertie Wooster. Thinking about the kids and their exam results this week it astonished me how different people think so differently about this. Most of my friends were working class children who were given grants, having gone to a newly free grammar school which being bright they had passed to attend. In the nineteen forties you no longer had to pay for education, at least most people, I think you still did have to pay if your parents had money but when we all went to university ( I say that generally, I didn't go) we got grants. Every person I know who did that got a good job which lasted a lifetime. They all paid back for their higher education with their industry and I'm sure that their parents were very proud of them. They all lifted themselves out of relative poverty and are prosperous today and have been able to give their children good lives and isn't that what it's all about?
Three of us were sitting in my summerhouse yesterday talking about this and I suddenly realised that my family wasn't like this. We were business people and prided ourselves on being non academic. It was in a sense a let down if you had to rely on education. We were sent to private schools but we didn't go on to university and even if you did you didn't talk about it.
My father went to public school and then to night classes. My mother left school at fourteen and worked but when my daughter turned out to be academically bright not only was I gobsmacked but she was such a little swot! I wanted to keep her off school sometimes for fun but she wouldn't. She used to say 'I can't. I have a test in the morning.'
I remember when she came home and proudly told me that she was being made head girl. I rang my sister and she said,
'Don't tell anybody, for goodness' sake.'  We had been wild children who hated school and teachers and homework. The only time we were happy was when we were on holiday trying to flood the back kitchen or burn the garage down with a car inside or try to derail the local train or chucking big stones across a car outside to see whether we couldn't get them across it.
My daughter was accepted into St Andrews university and I was stiff with pride but my mother said,
'We don't do things like that in our family,' which was not quite the response I was looking for.
I would have loved to have gone away to university but I had no memory and was bored stiff at school. School just doesn't fit all of us. Whether I would have become a writer had I spent three or four years studying other writers ( and for God's sake, a thousand times as good !) is another matter.
Somebody said on Facebook this week that writing for a living was like being given very difficult homework every day.
It can't be or I would have never have lasted this long. Writing is wonderful and awful and as necessary to me as breathing. I love notebooks and pens and have hundreds of books from classics to research stuff and I read and read and read.
I have become an expert on so many things but having no memory when the book is finished so is the expertise. I love the idea of doing research on something new and there is nothing so thrilling as having an idea pop up in my head from a newspaper article, a talk I have been to or something on television. I get that quick fire rush like a couple of glasses of champagne.
So, no, education isn't for everybody, any more than fish can climb trees. I think Einstein said something about that and he was right. We are all clever, we can all achieve but either we have to acknowledge our own strengths and be confident or have the kind of education which suits us.
I don't think you can teach writing but you can give somebody a pen and a piece of paper and some space.
My father bought me a typewriter when I was eleven and I taught myself to touch type. Thanks, Dad, that was the kind of encouragement I really needed and I'm sorry that my eight years of expensive school did not help but I have used it all in my books. When you are a writer everything helps.I'm grateful for the childhood you let me have.  We were prosperous, well loved and made to feel as though we mattered. it made me into the bloody difficult person I am now.

To diet or not to diet, that is the question

I stopped writing this months since, I thought, nobody reads it, why bother but then occasionally somebody does and anyway, maybe it's good for me. As I get older I worry  more about what is good for me which is why I got up this morning, remembered the amount of wine I drank last night and the heaviness of the meal - it was only lemon thyme chicken and a couple of small pieces of cheese, but hey, I was determined to have a bad morning so I did.
I made myself go on the scales. Well, and isn't that the worst thing. it never makes you feel better unless you are eating cardboard and drinking water and that's enough to make anybody upset.
So I thought I won't have toast and jam for breakfast. I had half a grapefruit.
My lovely gardener came to sort out the flowers and cut the lawn and I thought I will make myself a very healthy lunch so I proceeded to make tomato soup, simple, just tomatoes and olive oil and stock but then Elizabeth David said that you need this amazing thing to go with it that bakes in the oven so I duly drenched my two supposedly healthy brown spelt bread slices in butter, slathered them in parmesan and stuck them in the oven.
Then I had to wait so I thought a small glass of fizzy won't hurt so I sat there in my summerhouse and read the Times and did the quick crossword - or tried to and listened to Radio 3 and when I went back and took the crostini or whatever from the oven, it smelled fantastic.
Two big bowls of soup and two lots of whatever it is and a small glass of white wine I was finished. Had to go to bed.
It's now nine in the evening and I am eating salmon with potatoes and salad because having eaten virtually nothing for breakfast and gone mad at lunchtime I am now not that hungry.  I have left off the Hollandaise sauce which usually covers the salmon, so it tastes dry and I don't really want it but I am now two glasses of wine down and if I don't eat that won't be good for me so I'm struggling here and I couldn't help but think that if I had stuck to my slice of toast and jam for breakfast, had a small lunch and not collapsed in the middle of the day and had Hollandaise with my dinner I would be all the better now.  Too late. The salad is thankfully laced with decent olive oil and garlic. Just make sure I don't bump into anybody I know tomorrow of if we embrace they will asphyxiate.
The point of all this is that if I hadn't worried about having put on three pounds I would have had a better day.
The whole thing is ridiculous. I'm beginning wish I had been born sooner, despite bad contraception, the idea that cabbage was a good vegetable and a woman's place was in the home. These days a woman's place is bloody everywhere. I'm not convinced it's an improvement. Nobody ever told my mother she drank too much gin. I can't find anybody to drink with. Please apply here. Nobody eats any more, nobody drinks any more. Nobody dances any more. We have sunk into a Puritan hell.
I have now given up on the salmon and potatoes. It's going in the bin.  And I don't bloody care and I am having another glass of wine and when I get up in the morning I am going back to toast and jam. So there!!