Snow Report

I had several plans for the second part of this week, including: return to my swimming routine on Thursday morning, paint with my good friend and fellow artist D at his studio Friday, and above all finish my painting of Southwold Lighthouse.

There it was, week planned; at least until the weather took over. Wednesday afternoon they kicked the kids out of school due to the two inches of snow that covered southern England. A business forum I participate in online gets me in touch with people in other countries, particularly America and Canada. A nice lady from Newfoundland tells me they don’t even consider it to have snowed unless it gets over two feet high. She posted a photo of an eight foot snow drift outside her back door to demonstrate.

Since I live in the next street from the school the teen has no trouble getting in. But the buses from outlying villages will not run, and therein lays the problem apparently. ‘Don’t worry,’ the teen tells me, ‘you can go out all day and I will be fine’ Ha. The teen is not a bad teen, and generally behaves well, but she has an unfortunate addiction to screens. If I go out she will place herself in front of the TV and stay there. She will not drink, eat, use the bathroom, move or notice if the phone rings, the house burns down around her or war is declared against somewhere in the middle east. ‘You should install cctv she’ she says brightly, ‘then you can see what I am doing’. ‘I don’t want to watch you doing nothing all day’ I reply exasperated.

So Thursday and Friday were instead spent fighting the usual battle. The teen wants to watch TV/play DS or wii all day and I wish to limit these activities to two or 3 hours a day. I am not a fan of lazy parenting, mainly because I suspect you pay for it further down the road with grown up kids who won’t get a job and live at home until they are 38, complaining regularly that you don’t iron their clothes quite as they would wish. So in revenge for not being allowed to watch screens all days the teen does everything she can to stop me working via constant interruptions, whinging and playing rubbish music on her mobile phone (so it sounds extra tinny). She can’t go out with her friends as the buses aren’t running and they all live out of town. After ensuring I can’t earn any money she then of course hassles me to give her spending money. Today is Sunday, the teen is with her dad, and I am offering a silent prayer that they open the school tomorrow…