"Eleven year old spends over an hour a day travelling to and from school every day. It's not the best school she goes to, it's the only one she could get into."

Look out, the BBC is showing its agenda again.

There are plans to upgrade the English eduction system which will be announced today in Parliament. Apart from the fact that this is getting a hell of a lot of time on national television when it actually only affects one segment of the audience (especially following on from an extended report about the England cricket team), this report just pissed me off. I spent well over an hour going to and from school from ages 11 to 17. Not because it was the best school in the area, because it was the only one.

The BBC are clearly trying to imply that underprivilidged inner city families are not getting to take advantage of the 'choice' all english families are meant to have. Fair enough, maybe that is the case. But what about rural families who only have one school within their catchment area?! Are they being discriminated against?

Sorry - I shouldn't watch the news in the morning...

I slept pretty well last night and now have a much clearer head. I've decided to not let the issues I was concerned with get to me, that way only leads to madness. Thank you all for hearing me out yesterday - I love you guys!

ETA Okay, so there was a film crew on Dumbarton Road this morning. A proper, full sized, three huge trucks, catering van, crew bus, megawattage lamps type film crew. Anyone know what they were filming? They were testing lighting levels when I drove past so I didn't recognise anyone and it did look like a film crew rather than a TV crew. T'was interesting anyway!

And I've finally decided what I'm going with for NaNoWriMo, which - given that there's only six days left - is probably just as well! Instead of the broad, sweeping, megacorp controlled futuristic Orwellian story that was one option I'm going with what I'm calling my 'Iain Banks homage'. (Or to paraphrase the words of Nathan Fillion, "I'm not so much paying homage to Iain Banks, as copying him exactly." *g* Not copying at all - more echoing the style. Iain Banks writes what would in another time have been called Kailyard novels and in another culture would potentially be called Kitchen Sink dramas. Only there's so much more to them than that - these are ordinary(ish) people who don't have superpowers, don't have to solve murders, don't get caught up in galactic civil wars - they just deal with every day dramas and show just how extraordinary they really are. That said my favourite Banks novel is Whit which is anything but ordinary! Set within a religious cult wherein the eponymous heroine discovers the sordid truth about the origins of the cult. I won't spoil the ending because it's a damn good book.

The main thing about Banks is that his characters are so richly drawn - even the bit parts are more vivid than many main characters would be in the hands of other writers - and he makes you believe in them no matter how jaded or cynical you may be. If I can go down that route, if I can even evoke an iota of that, then I would count this experiment as a success.

I just hope I can live up to it now! I have a basic plot outlined in my head, I have my protaganist and my antagonist, I have my setting. I don't want to think about it too hard now in case I chase it away or I start writing early - because although that's really tempting right now it would be cheating and defeating the point of the exercise. So um... okay, that's me. I'm now rambling (so what's new?!) and I should be writing some Simon fics for joss100!

final edit Just added a nifty gauge to track my NaNo progress to the user-info of my NaNoWriMo journal marajaded_nano