Tonight:
5°c
As a parent, I often feel baffled by the Government's approach to education. Only last week, the Department for Children, Schools and Families was at its micro-managerial best, saying, "No more teaching 'i' before 'e' except after 'c'", followed on Tuesday by Schools Secretary Ed Balls heralding the end of the central literacy and numeracy strategy in primary schools.
This must be sweet music to teachers - but it also gives the impression that the Department's right hand has no idea what its left is up to.
"Education, education, education" was Tony Blair's central promise in 1997 and there was plenty of investment in the fat years.
Twelve years on, with money scarce, the Government seems to preside over an almighty muddle in schools.
That impression is not improved by Balls's new White Paper and his somersaults on previous policy.
Having two children who are both nearing the end of their schooling, I am, for example, often exasperated by the preoccupation with grades and modules and their resistance to "collateral" learning.
Whenever I suggest books or articles related to their subjects, their knee-jerk response is, "There's no point if it's not in the specifications."
The rot started way back in primary school, when freewheeling creativity got sacrificed for obsessive testing and league tables that suck the joy out of learning early on.
Yet now ministers admit that it doesn't work anyway. Last summer saw the multi-million-pound marking system for Sats collapse in chaos.
In October, Balls finally decided to abandon Sats for 14-year-olds - long seen as totally needless by teachers and us parents alike.
Meanwhile, the new White Paper promises that if schools fail to make the grade, parents can complain to the school, the local authority and the ombudsman - as if these options didn't already exist. It adds that, in extremis, parents will be able to take a failing school to court, which sounds like litigation lunacy.
Then Balls wants to introduce teachers' licences, with five-yearly reassessments, a sort of Mr Chips/Wackford Squeers winnowing system.
He also wants more reports on both the schools' and the pupils' pastoral, as well as academic, achievements. It's all a lot more bureaucracy - when the box-ticking already thrust on teachers is so excessive it's a wonder any of them has time to actually teach classes.
There are also fuzzy promises about one-on-one tuition for children falling behind. A lovely idea, but how can we afford such a mammoth expense?
If Ed Balls needs to make cuts to raise money for all his plans, I suggest that on top of 14-year-old Sats, he scraps AS-level exams.
Introduced with the fine intention of bringing broader learning to A-level, in reality they have had the opposite effect.
GCSE pupils learn and regurgitate, while A-levels demand discursive essays with properly underpinned reasoning.
Teenagers once had two years in which to make the adjustment without the bondage of interim exams. But the AS syllabus begins in September and by March - a mere six months later - pupils are into revision ahead of early-summer exams.
It is hard not to be suspicious that Balls's promises will turn out to be another mirage - especially when the Government refuses to conduct a spending review.
Like "i" before "e" except after "c", there will be no transparency in the budgets to pay for this wish list of a White Paper - until after the election.
Warriors of Wimbledon
My son is a huge fan of the film Gladiator, so when it was his birthday recently, I gave him a cake that read “Are You Entertained?”, a quote from the hero Maximus Decimus Meridius after he has slain all-comers in the arena.
Yesterday at Wimbledon, under a baking sun, in the beautiful No.1 Court, I witnessed something grippingly gladiatorial.
Roddick the lightning server, against Hewitt the star returner in the quarter finals.
The crowd was a sea of pastels, waving fans and partisans catcalls.
The theatre of the main protagonists was ably assisted by the corps de ballet of linesmen who bent their knees in perfect unison for every point and ball boys performing their tasks with such military precision they looked like Super Mario characters.
It was war, but it was also art. Were we entertained? Yes we were.
Zealous police aren't fooled by a cover-up
This winter, a family friend bought me a woolly poncho from Greenwich Craft Fair. I was touched by their generosity but its thick shag pile set my nails on edge.
It went into the boot of my car, in case I ever got stranded in a blizzard.
Last week, a bike overtaking a long traffic queue I was stuck in failed to notice the lorry ahead was turning right. He ended up crumpled in a doorway.
Several of us ran over to help. Someone called 999; I realised I had found the perfect use for the poncho. I grabbed it from my car and folded it under the man's head.
Emergency services arrived and I left thoroughly pleased to have offloaded the ghastly object in a jammy act of good citizenship.
On Monday, my doorbell rang. It was two policemen, to take a statement. “Oh, and we believe this is yours,” they said, proffering the poncho.
I don't know why I didn't lie but when I replied, “You're too kind; you shouldn't have,” I really, really meant it.
It's a swell river, the Thames
I once had a boyfriend who lived on a boat in the middle of the Thames near Albert Bridge.
Making the short crossing in a tiny tender was always alarming: the Thames's tidal nature is intensified by its narrow containment between the two embankments, creating choppy waves, opposing currents.
Last weekend was spent walking the Thames Path with two friends. We took a train to Kemble and walked through rough pastures edged with ragwort and cow parsley, shaded by willow trees. It felt incredibly remote.
The source of the Thames is only a hundred miles from London, a surprisingly short distance for it to swell as much as it does.
It was even more of a surprise to discover its starting point is a small dip in the Gloucestershire earth that wouldn't dampen a sock.
