The edge of the abyss

I've been waiting for the inspiration for this post to arrive. It hasn't, so I'm taking a friend's advice and just doing it anyway, so it may end up as a collage or a stream of consciousness or just a mess. Probably reflects the way life has been lately. I can't believe my last post was the beginning of October. I'm not very good with medium term memory so I can't really say whether we've been hectically busy. I do get the impression, as I think back, of lots of trips out (well, lots of driving anyway) and a lot of 'stuff' going on, like a new meeting place for our local group. There's also been a lot of niggling (the way a volcano niggles) family stuff to contend with, which culminates in the time-honoured game of 'Who do we upset this christmas?' Unexpected family members have come to our aid, and on the whole tried to ease the way, but everyone has their own agenda, so everybody's competing agendas have done a bit of jostling and elbowing, and hopefully it'll turn out ok. As long as I get my wish of noone throwing major wobblers or spanners in the works till the kids are tucked up in bed at the end of a happy christmas day I can stand all the frantic activity beforehand. And then there's the increasingly worrying legislative 'changes' and challenges. Just trying to keep up with all the 'paperwork' is enough of a headache without trying to work out what it means for home edders generally and us in particular, and what, if anything, can be done to head off the worst excesses of all this tweaking and tinkering. Not that I believe for one moment that that is all there is to it. I suspect an agenda behind it which will potentially change the face of home edding forever,and not for the better. It may even do way with it altogether. And I don't think that's scaremongering. Either there are a lot of paranoid people out here in home ed land or they really are out to get us. And it's not going to be any fun saying 'I told you so'. It seems like we're being cluster bombed with bits here and bits there of stuff that needs to be inticately examined for potential threat. Just because a particular document doesn't mention home edders specifically doesn't mean it won't affect us. As someone pointed out, the truancy legislation wasn't supposed to affect us. I'd like to thank all those dedicated people out there who are looking out for all our interests and putting their time, effort and skill into finding ways to preserve the rights we all have and which have been hard won by other home edders who also were willing to challenge and push and make sure everyone played fair. I'm not sure what my part is in all this as I haven't the first clue what to say in a consultation situation, but I know it's up to every single home edder to keep themselves informed and do what they can. It won't be any good saying 'Oh well, I meant to do something...' BTW that's a note to myself, not a challenge to anyone else.