Drill 3

Continued blog radio silence, sorry. Mainly I have been skittering along in the trenches of parenting this week, one forgotten gym kit, pustule draining appointment, pool of dog sick at a time. We schlep backwards and forwards from school in a shambolic procession, the dog weaving its lead around our legs, Lashes bashing into elderly ladies and me wearing unforgiving spike heels and carrying both the cartables of muscular-skeletal degeneration. School bags must weigh in excess of a metric tonne otherwise they just fail you automatically, I think. The whole schoolbag thing is a plot by European physiotherapists and orthopaedic surgeons to generate work. I do not own scales in order to do the traditional French tv exercise of weighing the school bags, but I can assure you that each one is fully two weepettes.

The sticky backed plastic film is all finished but there are still new and inexplicable challenges and many of them, distressingly, are maths related. We are labouring under the yoke of the attractively named "Drill 3" at the moment.

I imagine the title refers to some esoteric corporal punishment inflicted on you for having misshapen 6s. I can't imagine why they look so cheery in their train. Maybe they have escaped Robald's clutches. The station is smiling. Unspeakably sordid, I tell you.

"Why" I ask Lashes for the nine thousandth time "Do we have to use a mouth shape to do relatively simple additions? What is the mouth shape FOR? I don't understand"

He just shrugs, dismissively and makes strange hieroglyphic notations on the page in inky, spidery blotches. He does not care, much. I am unable to establish whether they are right or wrong. My rôle seems to be to assist his self-esteem by demonstrating that he is far better at Drill 3 than I am. This I can manage. Just when I think I am grasping the complexities of the single mouth - it appears to be a method for making adding any two numbers take vastly longer than you could imagine - Drill 3 goes all fancy and hits us up with a TRIPLE MOUTH:

The tortoise does well to stand by its abacus. Troisième primaire is shaping up to be a rollercoaster of parental incompetence. I find myself thinking wistfully of the Steiner school in York where you could spend a whole academic year making one candle. I also find myself thinking wistfully of gin.

This illustration on page 15 of Drill 3 pretty much says it all, I feel.

As we grapple with the Mouths of Impenetrability, Fingers sits peacefully in the corner, obsessively copying out lines of zeros and ones, like he has just invented binary. When he is particularly pleased with one of his efforts he sits back and surveys it, Bic 4 couleurs, etiquetté au nom de l'enfant poised above the paper.

"Celui-là, il est bien" he says, without false modesty, pointing at a particularly sinuously curved 2. "J'aime bien les 2".

It would be fair to say he is finding primary school everything he dreamed and more. His pencil case is immaculate, he does not forget where he has left his coat and I have rarely seen him vibrate with such contentment at the utter rightness of everything. At bedtime he requests a pencil and insists on writing his name several times in spidery, old lady handwriting, mouth open, tongue protruding ever so slightly, before he can sleep, curled in a neat ball.

Lashes may find the whole business more, well, frustrating, but at least he and I have been having frat boy style fun with his dilating eye drops. Before anyone gets exercised about that, I promise it was strictly above board and required by both the handwriting gorgon and the opthamologist. If we were going to do something risky and irresponsible, I would at least choose something with FIRE. Or steal a penguin.

We did enjoy it though.

"Wooooaaaah tes pupilles! Go and look in the mirror!"

"Non, take a picture!"

I showed this picture to my friend H, who said "He looks like he spent 1972 up a tree in Windsor Great Park". Indeed.

I have left you too long without news of Robald. He is on holiday, from where this idyllic picture of a Belgian seaside holiday comes.

I mainly liked this picture for the aspirational man demonstrating the correct use of a handdoek, met sigaret, but learning that a seagull is a Meeuw is an added bonus. Meow indeed.