Week 372: Cut it out
October 11, 2025
- Lots to say this week.
- This thing about friendship is very good. I loved the idea of the infinite friend. Definitely some bits that aren’t really applicable to a me - an extroverted woman with kids. But if you’re a shy man with free time then definitely worth a read.
- E is writing a story about a girl who gets into a portal and ends up on Brighton Pier.
- Parents evening. Superlatives for my oldest. Skipped the conversation for the youngest as we’d had a long conversation last week.
- On Tuesday I rode around the outskirts of Brighton in a minivan with some boffs from the Department for Transport and some Class Divide people. The DfT people wanted to hear how poor transport links impacts children’s attainment in school. I heard lots of quite bad stories from parents and the headteachers of both of the outer schools and now very much despise the profiteering of the Brighton and Hove bus company.
- Here is a general theme. If your school is not geographically well placed for your students, and transport for school kids isn’t free in your city, then you, as a school, will have to spend money out of the general budget picking up the slack where the bus companies do not deem it profitable to provide a better service.
- Here’s another thing - if your busses regularly make your kids late because they do not run to time your child will get a “late” mark in the register. They won’t be in trouble because everybody knows the bus is the problem. However the college they have applied to will take into account their late marks. “Get an earlier bus” you might think - yeah ok, the bus the currently get is 7:15. How much earlier should we be aiming for here?
- Guess who gets to live in houses within walking distance of the “good” secondary schools, or whose parents have the flexibility + car ownership to provide a safety-net for when the buses don’t work.
- Final couch to 5k this week. Ended on a high (technically a low actually I guess) by running from my house to the beach. I made my best 5k time, but then it is all down hill. Had a coffee and a cinnamon roll looking out at the skeleton of the burnt down pier.
- Why are all the curtain fabrics I find acceptable at least ÂŁ50 per metre. I cannot spend ÂŁ800 on curtain fabric.
- When I quit and it was announced to my peers at the SLT meeting one of my favourite colleagues, someone I would definitely have told 1:1 if things had worked out differently, texted me immediately. We exchanged some messages as the meeting continued until our CTO slacked us both “cut it out you two”.