Iceberg lettuce
Red capsicum
Cucumber
Spring onion
Tomato

Honey and mustard (to make the dressing)

Chicken cooked in garlic, chilli and onions.

And it was all disgracefully low in fat, additives and salt.

I was offered pizza - but I preferred to cook this instead. It’s disgraceful.

PS Happy New Year. I can’t believe that Little Madam will be ten this year. Or that Tiny Flirt, who was only a month old when I started this blog, is now an exuberant, hyperactive four-year-old.

Time flies. Or, as loads of unoriginal people say, Tempers Fuggit.

Yesterday Little Nutter helped Darling Wifey to make mince pies - and giggled his head off when he was allowed to dust them with icing sugar.

And this morning, while I was helping Little Madam and Tiny Flirt set up their Christmas presents, I recognised the same giggle coming from the kitchen.

Little Nutter had only been in the kitchen by himself for about half a minute -? it was long enough. He had gone for the “Airburst” effect with the box of icing sugar. It took about an hour for it all to settle, and now the kitchen looks very festive.

Mike Baker (education correspondent for the BBC) wrote this:

“Apparently, one in three head teachers reported that over work often left them “too tired for sex”.

If we go any further down that road there is a danger that government will impose targets for improving the sexual attainment of head teachers, bringing demands for a whole new category of school performance tables. Perish the thought.”

I’m not so concerned about kids’ diets in city schools, faith school rolls or lecturers’ pay - which doesn’t mean that they are not important. Just that it’s someone else’s job to be concerned about them. I’m glad that someone worries about these things in the same way that I am glad that there are traffic patrols and parking wardens. ‘Go and bother someone else‘ sort of glad.

Which brings me to head teachers. And sex. And at this point I think it might be relevant to point out that eleven years of experience teaching sex education and researching the subject for an MA proved this inescapable conclusion to me: people always over exaggerate how much they are getting. So when one in three HTs say they aren’t getting enough, it means that the other two aren’t missing it.

And it couldn’t happen to more deserving people. (Not that I’m bitter.)

The thing is, you only get to be a HT these days one way. And that is by arselicking. You climb the greasy pole in education by enthusiastically seizing every new government initiative, making it your own, and doing all the hard work so that someone else’s stupid idea really works. Executive authority is never, ever given to teachers who ask questions, evaluate whether something is really worth doing, and dump the crap.

Only by being a brainless toady can you get the Big Cheese’s seat. If the price? for that is the end of your sex life and 4 hours sleep a night, then take the six-figure salary and pay the price.

Just don’t expect sympathy from me.

There appears to be a backlash developing - against, of all things, Political Correctness.

As you can probably imagine, I am delighted.

A tabloid newspaper today features a cartoon of a ruined family Christmas, a home covered with labels decreeing that cards, decorations and feasts are banned for a variety of PC reasons.

Meanwhile,? religious groups of all ilks are taking great pains? to point out that actually, no, they are not offended by overt expressions of ideals they don’t share because they understand that if they don’t protect other people’s ideals from attack, their own will be next.

Even Tony Bliar is talking sense on the subject? - and frankly, I was so astonished by that turn of events I had to download his speech from his press office, read it twice, and spend half an hour shaking my head in disbelief? over a cup of tea.

And now the ABC has waded in to protect Evangelicals from institutional secularism. And the strangest thing is that I agree with him.

Mind you, I don’t want to protect Evangelical rights because I fear for my own freedom to believe. I want to protect Evangelicals because it is so much fun to trip them up on their own delusions.

There’s precious little opportunity for having fun at other people’s expense these days. So let’s stick up for the Evangelicals and other nutters - just so we can poke fun at them.

I was recently inspired by a couple of things on the radio.

First, Dr Liam Fox MP, Shadow something-or-other, was criticising the Government for its habit of setting targets and monitoring achievement by looking only at what can be measured, not what is necessary. That, he said, is typical of this Government’s attitude in all areas.

Well done, Dr Fox! It’s only taken your lot nine years to work that out! Free lunches and trebles all round!

The second Inspirational Particle came from another radio programme in which it was revealed that, statistically, the most reliable single indicator that a house will be burgled was whether or not it had been burgled before. Reasons for this are “not known” to researchers – but they weren’t bothered about that anyway. They just wanted their “exciting findings” to be used to inform & guide police strategic planning and reduce future crime.

Obviously, victims of crime are thrilled…

Causality, I can conclude, is redundant. Ephemeral plausibility, internal consistency and, ultimately, statistics mean everything.

So I shall solve the problems of our education system with one, simple new initiative.

From next September, all pupils will have their ability to concentrate on work tasks measured. This measure, to be called the Mean Attention Duration, or MAD, will be calculated from teacher observation during tasks in at least three lessons every day.

? Naturally, this is not an arbitrary measure. I will be conducting a study which will demonstrate that people with longer attention spans work harder, for longer, and are more economically productive than their workshy peers. An incidental study, to be published later, will also demonstrate that people with short attention spans are responsible for the majority of crime and antisocial behaviour, going out without their coats in cold weather, and voting for the Opposition. (This should secure my future funding and a peerage in one stroke.)

Teachers will be trained by a network of Attention Span Specialists in Holistic Education (known as ASSHOLEs for short) in a series of full-day Local Education Authority professional development programmes, where they will be shown overcomplicated PowerPoint presentations that explain how to fill in the forms and what rewards they will get for filling them in properly.

The schools with the neatest paperwork will be given the coveted Attention Span Seal of Credit Indicating Special Success (ASSCISS) logo to put on their paperwork.

All school performance indicators, league tables and funding will be based upon MAD scores, and only the MADDEST teachers will get promotions and pay rises.

I can already hear the head teachers telling their staff, “I’m so excited about this latest initiative that I was up ‘til 4 this morning preparing our meeting…”

Tiny Flirt is four, and a cross between Just William and Calvin. He comes home from school every day looking like he has slept rough in a combine harvester, disshevelled, dirty and rambunctious. The only thing that is missing from his school uniform is a catapult.

And the strictest of strict parenting does nothing to control him; it has just taught him to be polite and charming while he disobeys you noisily. It is very disarming - and because he is so endearing with it, people seem to let him get away with it.

So when he organised a class of eight other toddlers to climb aboard a Cozy Coupe and roll it down a steep hill at school, scattering little bodies all over the place, he was forgiven because he carefully organised the queue for First Aid afterwards - before shouting “Let’s Do It Again!” at the top of his voice and organising pushing the car back up the hill.

When I told him at 7 this morning that Mummy was getting a lie-in, his response was to announce loudly to the rest of the house, after a fanfare on a toy trumpet, that “Mummy is sleeping and if anyone wakes her I’ll smack their bottoms!“