I was asked the other day if I'd abandoned withdewrespect. My indignant reply was, 'certainly not'!
It's been a busy old few weeks as I'm launching 'an innovative new project' (or so my press release boasts!) at my children's school next week and it's taken over my life, leaving little time for idle ramblings. So I apologise and reassure you that normal service will resume once our Hoppa is up and walking.
Your 'what' I hear you cry?! (well, I thought I heard a small noise, were you just yawning?)
The Hoppa is a hybrid; a cross between a Walking Bus and a Park & Stride scheme, both of which, in my opinion, for various reasons are not a viable or sustainable alternatives to just driving to school.
Like most primary schools around the country, traffic is chaos outside our school. And with that 'chaos' comes danger, 'an accident waiting to happen' as the media likes to dub these scenarios.
So, I've taken it upon my little self, enlisting invaluable help from the Head, fellow parents, local business and road safety professionals, to come up with a scheme to help our school children get walking.
I'm not driver or car-bashing, like some national road safety organisations tend to do. We need to accept that cars are an integral and essential part of every day life and gone are the days when we all walked long distances to school. Let's face it, in my days as an infant in the 70s few folk had cars anyway. (I'll move on before I start sounding like a Monty Python sketch, and suggesting we lived in a shoe box in the middle of a road, which we cleaned with our tongues....). Those were the days eh, when comedy was comedy and not watching Miranda fall off a chair (again)?
Sorry, where was I, oh yes, the school run. It shouldn't be a chore. It is a rare chance to catch up with your children while they are not physically attached to an ipod, laptop or wii controller with their eyes glued to a flickering screen.
It's also a chance for them to socialise with and make new friends, get their chit-chatting out of the way and be ready to learn when they arrive at school. It also gives them exercise, another increasing 'issue' in society.
Remember, 'stop, look and listen'? These days our kids only hear these words when we say, 'hey, stop messing around in the back, look, you'll be in trouble if you drop those crisps on the back seat, I've had the car valeted, just listen to your music and shut up while I drive, we're late!"
And you see secondary school kids ambling down the middle of the road and wandering in front of cars because, if they're not ensconced 'inside' a car, they simply have no idea how to behave on the roads. We all try to wrap our children in cotton wool, the cotton wool in this case being the latest Ford SUV (other models are available).
It's simple, human beings are made of rather brittle materials, skin, bone that kind of thing whereas cars, lorries, vans and buses are made of rather strong chunks of iron, steel and glass. It's not rocket science. In an argument, human beings don't fare well.
We need to teach our children how to behave around these chunks of metal and we're not going to do that if they are always 'inside' the aforementioned chunk.
Well, anyway, can someone give me a lift down from my soapbox please cos I need a wee?
Thank you.
That's better.
So, where was I? Oh yes, I can assure you that, amid Hoppa activities, I've been storing up lots of anecdotal banter to keep you reading withdewrespect instead of Googling your own name when you're bored and the boss is out (ah, is that just me?).
Oh yes, and I've been running, that's what else I've been doing. Here's a pic to prove it. I did the Harewood House Age UK 10K in a gruelling one hour and 47 seconds. Darn those hills, darn those 47 seconds and darn my running partner who lost me in the pack and cracked the hour!
