Motherload

I've been exercised about exactly what creativity is for some time now. Apparently while I've been exercised about this, others have been busy appropriating it. Which is odd, because I had the feeling that creative used to be what your mother hoped you weren't, so that you'd do well in your exams and get a good job. These days, creativity is a term that is linked more often with enterprise , innovation and collaboration than with drug-fuelled hippies, going off the rails, and lone artists in garrets. What's being stolen is the origin of creativity. It's being sold back to us as a commodity, something we can buy cheaply and easily, but which effaces the origins of the product, like brightly-lit supermarkets purveying white milk in plastic containers, rather than cows. Let me give an example. Jonah Lehrer is a clever young chap, who wrote a book called Proust was a Neuroscientist (by implication, I am not, I am a grumpy old woman). I read and enjoyed ...

A post scriptum to 'Safeguarding Gone Mad in Tescos'.... We were just about on time for the school run this morning. But at the last minute I realised my deaughter wasn't wearing her cycle helmet. So I told her to go back inside to get it, and catch us up. Then I set off with son on scooter, assuming she would join us a few seconds later. Many seconds later it was clear that something had gone wrong. I sent son on scooter back as an envoy, she was duly found, and caught up with us. At first I tried to quell my ever-present impatience by asking if she was all right. But when she said that she'd been frightened because mummy wasn't there, I'm ashamed to say I lost that fragile patience completely. I know, I know, I'm not proud of this. Why do you think I write about it? What happened is that I told her off for not listening to me, and for not using her common sense. If you read the Tescos post, you'll sense a theme here. Into the gap between my expectation...

Ah, at last, a subject for a mothering blog to really sink your teeth into. Maternal negligence. So, I took the two children to the supermarket with me. I had only managed this by virtue of agreeing to let my son go to the toy section. He knows this particular supermarket stocks a brand of some unspeakable tut, which appears to be a 'trash monster'. Delightful. We now give our children replica waste disposal units, presumably to prepare them for a lifetime of cleaning up the environmental disaster we've caused. Anyway, I delivered both the children to the toys, and instructed my oldest, who is about to turn 9, to keep the youngest in sight at all times, and then walk up the central aisle and look down the side aisles for me when they'd had enough of window shopping. I peacefully got on with my shop, congratulating myself that we had at last got to a point where I could let my daughter be responsible, give her a little independence, and not have them trail after me, whin...