ABSTRACT
A gang of us used to elaborate them back in the 1980s, while we drank coffee out of paper cups at the leisure centre and watched our nine-year-olds’ swimming lesson. (To tell the truth, we kept the poor sprats at it for years, doing swimming lessons they no longer really needed because we mothers so enjoyed our Friday teatime conversaziones.)
The fantasy was this: when our children outgrew primary school, we would raise two fingers to both the troubled, overcrowded, league-tabled, government-bullied state system and the prissy, snobbish, tie-wearing local independents. We would start our own school.
