Election Fever

There's still over a month to go, and I am officially SICK AND TIRED of the election already. I don't wish to see the smug faces of David Cameron, Nick Clegg, Ed Miliband or Nigel Farage, or any of the other suspects on my telly ever again.  I am becoming more despairing by the day as the various levels of racist parties push their propaganda and scaremongering through my door.

Therefore, I am declaring this blog an Election-Free Zone.  Until May I will not entertain any mentions of politics, politicians, voting, schools being used as polling stations & therefore closed, or anything other than fairies, flowers and Frozen.

In fact, I am happily embracing watching children's telly with Squeaky for the next 5 weeks, at least they don't mention the election on Disney.  I'm slightly dreading the next one already, in 5 years time we will firmly be in the grip of CBBC, and if my childhood was anything to go by, they start teaching political stuff in the top end of primary when there's an election to deal with.

In fact, this is as political as I will get.  We had mock elections, linked up with the kids telly of the day when I was in the top end of primary, and again in the top end of secondary school. I don't really remember the first, but for the secondary episode, the school took it very, very seriously. As did a small number of the kind of kids that do at that age. The rest of us were slightly less interested.  A group of the boys in my year took it upon themselves to stand in the name of one of the lesser parties, and launched the kind of election campaigning more commonly seen in the US than the UK, with rallies, entertainment, and full on electioneering.  They won with a landslide majority.  Unfortunately for the school it was a landslide majority for the Monster Raving Loony Party, and as such they refused to return our results to Children's BBC.  I was desperate for our school's proudest moment to appear on Newsround. Instead we had a special assembly reinforcing the seriousness and importance of politics and why we should get properly involved in things rather than treating life as a big joke.

Me? Nah.

Playground Politics

No, no. I'm not talking about the kind of playground politics of whose child has the swankiest lunchbag, the most expensive coat or the biggest poster when the week's homework is "make something about the local landmark". Nor the most party invitations, biggest car parked on the double yellow lines or who can look most like a functioning adult during the breakfast club school run.  No.  I'm talking serious school politics.

Yep, Amongst the small forest of missives we receive from Squeaky's school on a weekly basis was one that asked for parents to stand as Parent Governors.  As the school is brand new, having been formed by the merging of two other schools, they need a whole new raft of governors.  I'd already dodged the PTA bullet, I looked the other way and muttered something about not having enough time when someone walked towards me with a fixed grin and a yellow clipboard looking for names, but there was something about this... Well, it's just writing your name on a piece of paper, in your own time.  To begin with at least.  And my boss keeps on saying I should stand for election, though we can't agree on a party.

I'm not there yet, mind you.  I've put my name forward, submitted my 50 words (or less) about myself, and now we await the ballot.  A ballot.  The last time I voluntarily entered anything involving a vote, I was in school myself, and we held a mock election alongside the real thing.  And if I remember right, our school refused to submit the results to Newsround because there was a landslide victory for the Monster Raving Loony Party, and apparently we didn't treat it with the seriousness a general election deserved.  And now I'm up for actual real and proper election myself. Eeeek.

Image courtesy of  David Castillo Dominici at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Do you think, if I'm elected, I could call myself a governess?  I still have this hankering to feature in a days-gone-by Jolly Hockeysticks type novel. If I can't attend the Chalet School, then maybe this is the next best thing?