We live nine miles from the nearest secondary school. That's an eighteen mile daily round trip with no buses or trains. That's ninety-five miles a week. This is just one of the reasons why we chose to home educate our two children, and it's a growing reason for many rural families due to the closure of village schools over recent years.
The Draughtsman
The solution to merge schools is not practical with no public transport and a prospective hundred mile a week journey. No-one also takes into account what happens in an emergency.
"Timmy's hurt himself/run away/drawing swastikas"
"I'll be there in forty-five minutes. Staunch the bleeding."
It seems an easy enough choice for parents who work from home to home educate, after all you can follow the same syllabus with all the same workbooks and there are limitless educational resources online and the local authority pops round to check every thing's going well, clubs and organisations to take care of the social aspects, but it's not a traditional choice for a writer.
You imagine writers sitting alone, a classic image of solitude and thought, you hear them complain how lonely it can be, how it has to be this way, just them and the blank page. Not me. It's me, my partner and our children all day long in a two bedroom wooden chalet in Pembrokeshire.
This means that at any time I can be asked to judge a baking contest, evaluate an essay, watch a video on FDR's new deal and have three people brushing past the back of my chair and looking over my shoulder, the reflection of their critical faces in the screen, oh, and zero privacy. With two dogs and two cats as well even going to the bathroom becomes a national event of public interest.
It's a big financial sacrifice also. We'd be much better off going out to work but to be honest we just got fed up with one child or the other coming home with bruises or tears as some schools now seem to be more of a daycare fight club, and the loss of income is probably evened out by the lack of stress, although you do inherit a stress of a different strain. Teachers earn every penny to put up with your kids and trying to teach someone who already knows everything.
After four years of this I'm getting used to writing under these conditions. I've tried working alone, have been offered work space, but it never works. Somehow I miss the noise, miss the distractions. I have to steal time to write and I think that helps more than hinders. It never becomes a chore or work because it doesn't exist in that manner. I don't have a door to close or dedicated space so writing still remains my little escape pod as it was when most writers start out.
Besides, if I was alone, in my ivory tower, who would be coughing on the back of my neck or be learning the flute beside my head right this minute?