Tiny Flirt is 4.

He’s spent the last six months saying, “I’ll be four in a minute!” and asking for a? Pooh Bear? birthday cake, so? by the time? the big day arrived he had completely forgotten that he would have presents as well. He just wanted to see the cake and bagsy Tigger all for himself (“because Tigger? has orange hair, too!“)

We chose his presents with care: lots of dinosaurs and? a couple of pirate ships? (a “Phantom” and a little plastic one? with model pirates to play on them.) It’s very difficult to choose presents for a four-year-old? who adores? pirates and dinosaurs…

But the fun part is that this has brought about a role-reversal that many parents of Autistic children may recognise: he is now teaching Little Nutter (his older brother by 30 months)? how to play? with it.

Little Nutter is fascinated that a toy might have play value even though it is not a train! He watches very carefully as Tiny Flirt does all the things that NeuroTypical boys do with action figures, and Autistic boys don’t. And he wants to join in.

Right now, El Draco is taunting the Duke of Medina Sedonia. Not, strictly speaking, an actual? piratical engagement, I know, but Tiny Flirt has been learning Spanish and Little Nutter is very good at shouting “Aaaaaaarrrgh!“

I do not want another weekend like this weekend. Well, yes, I do – but it needs to be a three day weekend next time.

Kate Rusby was fantastic. She doesn’t just sing like an angel – she is also a very witty stage performer. And however good her recorded music is, her live performances? are infinitely better.? Darling Wifey & I took Bart as a thankyou for all the hard work he has put in to maintaining ASDFriendly? over the years. And we went out for a Spanish dinner afterwards. Great stuff.

Lunch next? day was in Whitby we all ate? fish & chips out of newspaper while sitting on the harbour wall, basking in the late summer sunshine. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but it made us catastrophically late for our next appointment: we had? to arrive early at Grandma’s house to take the kids out for a few hours (did I mention that Grandma had the Chatterboxes and Little Nutter was in respite? You should have realised that something must have happened to them for us to have so much freedom!) and collect the “Ruby Wedding” cake.

The Rules, in these situations, demand a row, so in obedience to them Darling Wifey lost a shoe and I had a tantrum about having to find it for her. She threatened to go to the party barefoot, and I threatened not to go at all. It was a relief to get that out of the way, so we could carry on sorting things out.

At grandma’s, we partied.

Well, inasmuch as grandma would let us party. I was told I could have a beer, which was then confiscated by grandma who had promised several guests that I would drive round to pick them up. Darling Wifey was given the task of photographing everyone for the official “Ruby Wedding” album – a neat choice, this, as it meant that every time Darling Wifey approached anyone they smiled at her and refused to say anything.

Tiny Flirt hid under the buffet table with a plate full of chicken goujons, much to grandma’s distress when she realised they were missing? (and there was no way I was going to grass up my son – he was happy!) and Little Madam hid in a bedroom with her cousin and spent the next few hours having a burping competition.

We made it home at about midnight.

This morning, Darling Wifey lost a gold inlay from a tooth – and we are still registered with a dentist in Durham. And we had to collect Little Nutter from respite afterwards – 20 miles in the opposite direction.

Much fun. Not.

Move over, Yummy Mummies. You’ve had your day. Go and get your hair done, or whatever it is you do all day – it’s time for? us Desirable Daddies to take over.

We? aren’t self obsessed or image conscious. And our recipes for 40p-per-serving chicken and vegetable bake have the kids queueing for seconds. We know how to get 101 different household stains out of clothes and carpets, can iron a pleated school uniform skirt, and can clean the kitchen and tidy up toys while Yummy Mummy is still doing her hair (or while Darling Wifey is busy? running the world.) And we have jobs, too!

And unlike Yummy Mummies, we can park. (It helps that we don’t drive stupid great 4x4s…)

We even know how? to sort laundry and programme the washing machine. And as every domesticated man knows, if you know where all the clean underwear is, you are in charge.

We haven’t quite reached the end of the second week of term, but it already feels like time to stop and have a holiday.

Darling Wifey is already doing battle with the exam boards, one of which had sheer effrontery to allow a second-rate examiner to mark her students’ exam papers. She suspected, the day the results came out, that all was not well, and now that schools can review exam scripts after they have been marked and graded, faculty leaders are in a position to do something about it. Even if it does mean starting the new school year by checking the marking of over 200 exam papers.

Mind you, I am no expert in Darling Wifey’s academic area, but even I can spot the glaring error in a superb essay being graded “1/8″ and failed…

Meanwhile, I am doing battle with my own LEA, which is stupid enough to boast about its “child protection measures” in preventing children from accessing unsuitable websites from school computers. So far this term, they have blocked The Portman Group, Connexions? and several educational resource websites (apparently because they have games on them – which, of course, cannot possibly be “educational.”) My argument, which I don’t think is unreasonable, is that because I am ultimately responsible for what my students view on a computer in my classroom, then I should be the person in control – but they don’t see it that way. And I am particularly angry because they still can’t stop pop-up pornography from appearing on school computers.

But the LEA officials are all meeting their performance targets, so there obviously isn’t a problem…

Little Nutter is delighted to be back at school, and has already destroyed one pair of school trousers. Tiny Flirt loves being “a grown-up schoolboy,” and comes home every night covered in dirt, with a fresh bruise and/or scrape, and fast asleep in the back of the car.

But most disturbing of all is Little Madam, who proudly announced that she “now knows the difference between kissing and snogging” as I spat my lamb stew across the dining table in shock, and promises to be a very good girl if I sign her consent form to join the school gun club. She’s 9. I suppose that putting those two things together should make a father feel a little happier, but I can only feel my hair turning grey.

Inevitably, some colleagues at work were less than impressed at our decision to send Little Madam and Tiny Flirt to a public school.

“Posh bastard” was the response that we all agreed summed up the opinions of the non-teaching staff.

Senior management were concerned that my “highly politicised statement of dissent” would damage my future promotion prospects. To which I can only reply that if the education politburo wants all teachers to enthusiastically applaud the Emperor’s New Clothes every time New Labour announces educational reform, then they don’t want me on the team anyway. And I can manage quite nicely with my special needs qualification allowance, thank you.

Who cares; Little Madam and Tiny Flirt are enjoying themselves more than Darling Wifey & I ever imagined. Whatever anyone says about public schools, and I am sure that at some point the criticisms may have been correct, this has to be acknowledged: in the 21st century, no other institutions work as hard or as successfully at creating paradise for children.

Maybe I am judging them all by this one school, acknowledged in its own right to be among the best, and maybe I’m still a bit starry-eyed after seeing two ecstatically happy children come home every night and sleep soundly all night. But these children are no longer being driven to exam success by paranoid local authority apparatchiks. They are being educated by teachers lucky enough? to have the jobs that all teachers were called to do, but government interference wont let us.

And the stereotypical public school family isn’t what it once was, anyway. After school this morning (yes, they have lessons on a Saturday morning) I helped to push start one mum’s clapped out old Toyota Previa in the car park.

Public schooling isn’t about privilege. It’s about attitude.

And it is not significantly? more expensive than our monthly bills for childcare, lunches, clubs and transport used to be. It can even be afforded on teachers’ salaries – if they are prepared to make the necessary? personal sacrifices.

I got where I am by persistent hard work, a persistent and bloody minded approach to getting my own way, and a persistent total denial of reality.

And lots of bluffing.

Not bad for a lanky swot from a failing inner city comp in the North Midlands, don’t you think?

But there are two things that my hard work really did achieve for me: they helped me get a pretty decent middle class salary; and they helped me to meet Darling Wifey, with her slightly larger middle class salary. For people with my background, such success is to be enjoyed and savoured.

But no. I don’t play by those rules.

Tomorrow, Little Madam and Tiny Flirt have their first day at an English public school with a global reputation. And when I say global, I mean that the school’s name is? instantly recognised across half the planet.

For the next fifteen years my entire salary will be transferred, on payday, to the school’s bank.

And that, my dear friends, is what you work hard for. Not for consumer durables, or a Mercedes-Benz and a holiday in the Bahamas, but a future for your children.

Perhaps this can go some way to mitigate for the challenges of sharing a home with Little Nutter, where every night’s sleep is disturbed and every morning begins with the routine cleanup of smeared faeces from the bedrooms. And maybe even compensate for the loss of friends who just cannot face visiting a home occupied by a non-verbal, naked Autistic sibling. I don’t know – that is for my children? to decide.

But this way, they have the best of both worlds. The stark, grim and gritty realities of life at the hard end, and the silver spoon.

What else can I give them?

If you want to open an account to receive satellite television, the phone will be answered within 20 seconds.

Call with a complaint or – shock horror – a request to close your account, and you will be on hold for? at least 45 minutes.

It’s like trying to leave a gymnasium or health club, or trying to close a credit card account.

And this morning I tried to close a MySpace account.

I only opened the account because several people I know were raving about MySpace, and I couldn’t add comments to their blogs without joining. But there really was no point in me fully participating in “the MySpace experience,” firstly because I like having my blog on a domain I control, and secondly because what experience I did have wasn’t what I would call fun.

Anyway, within 24 hours of? creating an account I had received a message from a woman in Wisconsin informing me that she would be arriving in about a fortnight and should be staying for no longer than a month. So I edited everything I could edit, and made a point of displaying my status as very married, and certainly not looking for anything else.

Then I received an email saying I had been invited to join a myspace group. The invitation came from someone who, coincidentally, uses the same nickname as a friend of mine. So, naively, I clicked on it.

It seems that quite a few people in the West Midlands are into spanking. Judging by the handprints being proudly displayed, they are very good at it.

The final straw came this morning when I saw that I had been invited to join yet another group, this time one? that promised not to tell my wife. (It is so obvious they have never met her. This is the woman who can tell I have done something by the way in which I park the car on the drive. If I joined an online gentlemen’s club, she would be able to detect the Catholic guilt from several rooms away.)

So I went hunting on the MySpace page for a “delete my account” option. Excellent! It is on the “My Account” page. So I clicked on the link. Was I sure? Yes – I clicked on that link, too.

There are serious consequences to deleting your MySpace account, I was told. Oh really? I had better stop giggling, then, and read the caveats displayed above the next “Delete MySpace Account” button carefully. Apparentley I would lose all my friends. A serious threat, but since none of my friends knew about my MySpace account, I thought it worth the risk.

“Before deleting your MySpace account, please tell us why you want to leave? so we can improve the MySpace experience.” No, I thought, and clicked on the delete button. It didn’t like that. Apparently you can’t leave without explaining yourself. So I wrote “I don’t like the people you introduced me to.” And clicked the delete button.

This took me to a page saying an email would be sent to my registration email address, giving me instructions for deleting my account. “Please click on the link in the email.” So I did.

“We will cancel your account in 24 hours, after which you will no longer be able to log in.” I’m glad they explained that – I hadn’t realised…