The Madd House

  Hands up who is tired of the extra stress caused by Covid?   We had more than enough stress to deal with before but then along came Covid and taught us that firstly, we didn’t have a clue how stressful life could be and secondly, we were actually more capable than we gave ourselves credit for.   But I digress, this is old news.   Here is the real question. Do you know how your children are?  I mean, how they really are? Life at the moment is as tight as a trip wire and it simply takes one small movement in the wrong direction to create a huge explosion. And while we’re trying to negotiate this minefield whilst keeping our own sanity as intact as is humanly possible it’s easy to forget about the young folk in our worlds.   They usually just follow along. They’ll be okay. Wrong! Our children are encountering stress as horrid as any adult can encounter and the difference is that they aren’t built to cope – they haven’t had life teach them, over time, how to deal with it.   Yes, I hear

  Every morning and every evening I participate in a little adventure I like to call “Highway Sport”.   I call it sport because it takes quite a lot of skill to not only enter and exit the highway but to negotiate the twenty-odd kilometres and arrive safely on the other side.   The object of the “game” is to slide onto the highway at whatever speed the vehicle in front of you is traveling at and bully your way into one of the four available lanes.   The lanes are entirely preference ranked and it would be futile to assume that the fast lane is on the extreme right and the slow lane is on the extreme left.   In fact, to the contrary, the “fast” lane is the one lane that everyone zooms into only to sit (with a smug expression on their faces at having arrived in the “fast” lane) going at about 70km/h because this lane is the fullest of the lot.   The lane that is the most difficult to negotiate is the second lane from the left.   Where this should be used exclusively for passing ver