Madness of Modern Families had MNHQ Carrie on it!!

[princessmel]

Or maybe it was Justine?

I love that programme. Its very funny. Its like Mn on tv.

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God, imagine the poor bloody copy editors faced with "cod's column"

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again i'm not sure about this, i've never asked about it as the column gives me the heebie-jeebs and i don't work for Style, but i always suspected that Christa was the silly plastic surgery bint. oh Rupes...

cod, if you could smarten up your typing you'd be a shoo-in.

But most of us are sensible enough to let it wash over us. If you're the kind of person shallow enough to worry your friends will judge you because of having the wrong season's Buga-sodding-boo, or not be buying your sling from Peter Jones, or because you're not dressing Tilly and Marmaduke in clothes from La Redoute - or whatever ghastly skeletal clotheshorse "Kate" and friends' sprogs are wearing - then frankly you deserve those friends.

We joke about it in our circle of friends - and we're all middle-class professional parents, exactly the people this series was supposedly aimed at - but we're not LIKE that. I'm sure people are in Notting fucking Hill.

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That thought fleetingly crossed my mind as I wrote it, that they might be the same person. I bet you're right actually.

i see. have just tried to write 'idiosyncratic' in cod-type and failed. how does she do it? (by coincidence, another shit book about wankers).

the whole point of these marketing campaigns is to subtly undermine people's feeling of self worth - there's nothing rational about it at all. whether you realise it or not, you're affected by advertising. in a self-improvement culture, you're constantly made to feel 'not good enough' ... and so you buy the book, the car, the clothes, the coffee - it's not as if it's a rational, conscious decision half the time. it's insidious - that's why it's a problem. i hope you don't work in advertising!

oh well... we didn't buy your book.

and you should see the state of my car...

that is your misfortune (and mine actually). however, the book is somewhat revolutionary, in that it's probably the only book on parenting in the last 15 years that doesn't claim to have all the answers!!!!

It was the faux-ironic jollity of it all that got to me. "of course, people are like this, ho ho, aren't parents KER-AY-ZEEE, ho yuss, and we all just go along with it because.... because...." well, WHY exactly? "Because everyone else does" seemed to be the answer - hence a self-perpetuating cycle of competitiveness which is never going to be broken.

The school episode was a prime example - no attempt made to analyse WHY people are such snobs about school catchments (because they don't want Tilly & Alfie playing with Ryan and Kellee-Cheleese from the council estate and opicking up their HORRID accents, basically). It never seemed to have occurred to any of these self-centered people that the answer to the problem is to STOP DOING IT.

i already don't have the answers, thanks very much. and i'm free.

well i'm a very poor choice to defend that position since i utterly despise it - and have gone state all the way. i actively campaign to end selection (and would vote for a government that banned private education) ... soooooo - that would probably make me very unpopular with plenty of mns!

But not with the main protagonists on this thread, I suspect.

hatjam - now you are just having a laugh.

There's this one

and

this one too

and

then this one

and

also this one

And that's just off the top of my head!!

All far more "true" and not claiming to have any of the answers either.

off the top of your head? that must have been terribly uncomfortable. you're quite right, of course. but dogmatic parenting advice is, unfortunately, far more prevalent.

In my experience, people who actively despise private education (and think the comprehensive syetem is wonderful) make damn sure they jostle themselves into the best state catchment available first before they start mouthing off.....

if everyone put as much energy into helping in and supporting state schools as they do into moving into the right area, there would be no 'sink schools' at all. of course, i don't live in london and the situation is not at all the same. in that respect i'm very lucky.

I don't live in London either, but I do live in a big city where people speak with northern accents (which is why none of them appeared on the Madness Show, LOL).

To be serious for a moment, I think the problem is that no school is going to get turned around overnight - or even in five years. So parents would be making the investment of that time and energy not for their own children, but for those of other parents who'd be going to the school once theirs have left. And some people would still work the system with money - you couldn't ban private education entirely, as it just wouldn't be technically possible. Churches, individuals and trusts would set up their own private academies and the like for "opting out". So the comps would still be left with everyone else.

Could there be a fairer distribution around our cities? Certainly, but once catchment area/ league table madness is entrenched, it's very difficult to un-invent it. It didn't exist (much) when I was at school (1974-87) because league tables were not in the public domain.

i agree with much of what you say (although i'm not sure this is the right thread to be discussing it). i still participate in the running of my kids' old primary school as a governor - it's a major schlepp but i keep it on because i think it's important work. i wish more people were similarly invested. from that perspective i can see how very much pressure state schools are under - in financial terms, as much as anything else. heads are having to make choices between offering facilities that every child should have a right to! so state schools are shockingly underfunded and teachers are completely bogged down with paperwork of one kind or another reporting on minute statistical variance between one cohort and the next. it's completely mad! league table are horrible! the school i'm involved with never performs very well because they make it a matter of principle to welcome special needs children who have been rejected by (or made to feel unwelcome in) other schools. teachers reckon that 'added value' is a far better indication of how schools are doing. abandoning league tables would certainly help to defuse school admissions hysteria. that could be done overnight! if only ...

Hi, I started the thead then went to bed , sorry!

Well I liked the programme even though I didn't relate/agree with a lot of it. Especially the bits about shcools and showing off about what your child eats etc. . I still found it funny. I was watching it while bf dd at bedtime.

(The schools bit was another episode btw) I watched them all

Hi Carrie!!! You looked fab.