Just the girls at first, but then anyone he could lay his hands on. Perhaps he is going to be a great obstetrician or something, but you just don’t know Still, at least that isn’t violent. In the second week of term, one boy’s mother came in and saw our pot of scissors.”You’d better keep them away from him. He stabbed his father with a kitchen knife last week,” she said.Another little boy has a mother who thinks that he’s gifted. That is much harder to deal with because it’s hard to know they are being naughty until someone is crying.

Girls seem to have an innate understanding of how to socialise, of the accepted way to behave, and then they will use it to their advantage. Boys do more obvious things.We have had to put the doctor’s kit away because one little blond-haired boy kept examining people. One in particular is a right little madam: she will always ruin someone’s day by saying they look ugly or that everyone hates them. He picked up a wooden block the other day and just swung it right at someone’s head. We had to sit him in the thinking chair to consider what he had done, but we didn’t phone his parents in the end.
The girls are nastier, though No one is more horrid than a little girl. Manolo came to us this year without a word of English – his first language is Spanish – and although he speaks perfectly well now I think he found it very frustrating and he can’t get out of the habit of hitting. The boys tend to be worse-behaved physically because they just hit out.

THIS IS NOT an easy job. But only one, For Women, has survived, which would suggest women at least are not ready for repeated exposure to soft porn, erotica, bawdiness or whatever.Broadly speaking we have shaken off a few shackles, become more tolerant and more adventurous in talking about sex. What may have shocked five years ago does so less now, but we appear to like our raunchiness to come wrapped in good taste or humour The clothing is loosened, but not undone.. But have we had enough? A few years ago four soft-porn magazines were launched aimed at women, in the name of equalling up what is available to men and the empowerment of female sexuality.