How to... Visit a stately home

First things first - ensure the property is open before you visit. When I was a kid, nine of us drove 50 miles across Lincolnshire in two cars, only to find Belton House was closed on Mondays. It didn’t dilute my enthusiasm - to me, visiting a stately home is THE best way to spend a Sunday.

If your chosen property belongs to the National Trust or English Heritage, you’d better have a very convincing answer ready for why you don't want to become a member. The little old ladies in the gift shop may look sweet, but they are all ex-KGB and will sniff out any hint of weakness. Before you know it you’re signing Direct Debit paperwork and being given a free travel rug with water-resistant backing. Prepare your response before you go in. I answer with a blunt “No, I really don’t,” with a disarming smile, but you may wish to be less direct.

Guided tours are the work of the Devil. For every interesting tour guide there are five retired teachers who miss doing Assembly and will bore you rigid with tales of which portrait married which, when all you really want to do is admire some marquetry or gaze in rapture at an exquisite piece of cornicing. It’s even worse if the group is small - once there was just the two of us, meaning we spent the entire hour nodding and making encouraging interjections of Hmm, Fascinating and Really?

Room guides are better, but with an average age of 92, sometimes they sit so quietly that you start to worry they have died. (They tend to revive quickly when another volunteer approaches with a cup of tea and a pink wafer biscuit.)

Houses still in private ownership always have lots of contemporary photographs on display. Owing to centuries of inbreeding aristocrats are rarely photogenic and often startlingly ugly, but it is bad form to leap backwards with a cry of “What is THAT?”, especially if “that” turns out to be the 33rd Baroness Pendlebury.

Uncoordinated

Much to my husband's horror, I am resolutely devoted to Strictly Come Dancing. Well, I say devoted - I don't watch the weekday catch ups, or in fact the Sunday results show, but for two hours on a Saturday evening he knows I am not to be interrupted unless there is blood (or a Chinese takeaway).

I would love to be a good singer. I would love to be a good dancer. Sadly, I am neither. I am a fairly gangly person and my limbs take on the jerky and unpredictable quality of an octopus being attacked by an electric eel. One is rarely called upon to sing in public, but dancing is harder to avoid. "Dad dancing" is endearing in a middle aged man, tragic in a 36 year old woman.

Speaking of middle aged men, Dave Myers - one of the Hairy Bikers - is this year's comedy turn on Strictly. To my embarrassment, the closest thing I've ever seen to my own attempts at dancing was his "Moves like Jagger" tour de force in week 1. (Past a certain level of inebriation I stop caring I am crap, and Go For It in a manner that has ruined several weddings.)

Next weekend two friends are having a joint birthday party. Watch out Village Hall, me and my pelvic thrusts are coming to get you!

How to... Be a student

This autumn marks my tipping point: I’ll have lived up here as long as I lived in Suffolk, thanks to the august institution that is Leicester University. In 1995 tuition fees were but a gleam in the devil’s eye, and one could still go to Uni as a way of delaying getting a job for three years.

I am perturbed that finances are encouraging more kids to study from home. This Completely Misses The Point: you won’t get the chance to reinvent yourself, subsist on instant noodles and watch Quincy every afternoon for three years in your childhood bedroom. A degree’s not just about the difference in your pay cheque, whatever the bloody Daily Mail says. "One of the purposes... is to make the inside of your head a more interesting place to live for the rest of your life." (Scott Brophy, Professor of Philosophy, Hobart.)

Catered or self-catering? Catered halls tend to offer the best social life, but it depends whether you think eating school dinners for a year is worth it. Regardless of where you choose, it will rapidly become a rank cesspit of filth. The French exchange students erected a banner in our kitchen that said “Welcome to the porks house!” in protest against an overflowing bin that none of us were inclined to deal with. (Warning: attempts to impose any sort of cleaning rota will mark you out as a killjoy and ruin your social standing. You’re young, your immune system can handle it. And for the rest of your life, you will appreciate getting into a shower that doesn't have other people's plasters clogging up the drains.)

An earnest theology student recently told me she studied for 60 hours a week. Ludicrous. 20 hours should more than cover it, especially for arts subjects. My highest mark in my finals was for a book I hadn't even read, just regurgitated my lecture notes in the exam.

Finally: There is no other time in your life where you will consider 1:30am an early night... or 9.30am an early start. Enjoy it!

What a load of Rankers

The suggestion that 11 year olds should be compared against each other, with parents informed exactly which 10% band their kid falls into, makes me feel physically sick. It's both cruel and illogical. Imagine how you would feel if the government announced that adults were going to be lined up and assessed as to their attractiveness in swimwear: this is what ranking 11 year olds amounts to. Worse, in fact, because as yet nobody has invented the academic equivalent of “going to the gym”.

The very way it has been reported by the media - probably taken straight from a Whitehall press release - begets a total lack of understanding of education. No test measures pure “ability”. We all know the average girl who worked her socks off and got 3 Bs at A-level, and the hyper-intelligent but disaffected youth who spent most of his time bunking off or smoking and got Ds and Es.

In education, the discrete level a child reaches is called attainment, and is affected by any number of socioeconomic factors as well as baseline aptitude, not a whit of which is within their control. The children at the bottom of the class are invariably the kids for whom learning to spell Mesopotamia comes a poor second to the sheer struggle of staying fed, clean, and not knocked about by their latest “uncle” - does the government think these families are even going to open the results letter, let alone think “Shit - I'd better start listening to her read?” Does the government think these poor little scraps don’t already know they're at the bottom of the pile, or would be anything other than totally demoralised by knowing that almost everyone is “cleverer” than them?

The government presents this retrograde and reprehensible step as a means of “raising standards”. I would suggest their own intelligence is in question if they don’t understand that even if all 11 year olds were achieving to GCSE level, if you rank them into percentiles someone will come last.

It is time to stop seeing intelligence as some sort of moral virtue, any more than we have control over the colour of our eyes. As Eeyore said, “We can’t all, and some of us don’t. That’s all there is to it.” With 900,000 kids NEET, my suspicion is that the government - having first tried to blame immigrants, and families on welfare selfishly renting a council house that has a box room - are now trying to blame our children for their monumental policy cock-ups. Doesn't bloody matter how well they do if there aren’t any jobs for them to go to, does it, Dave?

Saltburn Pier

Moors Explorer

Yesterday we went on the North Yorkshire Moors Railway. It was not a stress-free experience, although for once Molly behaved absolutely impeccably.

Tooth-grinding first occurred in Whitby station car park, which aside from costing an eye watering £8 for the day, required you to input your entire car registration number. This demand, combined with a very small QWERTY keyboard at hip height, didn't suit the railway's typical customer, a 76 year old struggling to see in their Variofocals. I stood in mute agony for a full 10 minutes waiting for my turn.

The first 20 minutes of the journey was brilliant, then a large, garrulous Greek-Cockney family sat down opposite and by us, and the old-school magic was somewhat lost as father and son loudly debated the cost of CNC milling machines. These were replaced at Goathland by a younger family, and here the fun really began. The parents, clad in that Gore-texy kind of stuff that wicks away moisture at such a rate you can easily dehydrate, didn't speak to each other once. Dad concentrated on getting Quavers into his 3 year old, like a council worker feeding Christmas trees into a chipper, while a baby grizzled away on Mum's lap. I know babies whinge, but it's the most irritating sound when you're not a parent yourself. I flung myself and Molly out of the train like a champagne cork when we finally got there.

Of Pickering I will say little, except that it is quite a challenge to while away 2 hours there in the rain. The churchyard was full of Suzys, which freaked me out, and the High Street full of snarling aggressive dogs which had a similar effect on poor Molly.

The return journey was 6-seater carriages, making choice of neighbour even more important. The people we ended up with sucked in their breath over their teeth when we asked if they were dog-friendly, before relenting when they saw how small she was. They were okay, but the man in particular was not backward in coming forwards with his opinion on dogs in general, and I was relieved that Molly fell daintily asleep on my lap for the entirety of the journey. She took revenge on behalf of canine-kind by stealthily farting throughout.

Well behaved pets welcome

We have brought Molly on holiday! She has had a tremendous time, romping on the beach, playing in the sea, meeting lots of other dogs...

She repaid us by barking madly every 15-30 minutes through the night, seemingly every time a seagull five miles away flapped its wings.

6 nights to go. I am NOT in a good mood.