Stupid.........

To explain to those who are not stupid enough to be foster carers.

Every year a UK foster carer has a review of their performance, the things that went well, the things that went less well, the disasters, the calamities and out and out mayhems...

So anyway yesterday was the start of ours. Our link worker arrived and decided she was doing a health and safety review. Now, I do know a little about these things, "know a little" placed me 150 % ahead of the visiting social worker and thus gave me a source of innocent fun.

But the daft things they want to know; are the car keys locked away, of course not this is the country and anyway we would be bound to loose them. Only on place to keep car keys - in the car.

Of course that wasn't the best bit, no sir; are all electrical appliances safe? I didn't know I was supposed to be an engineer. The answer: howtheforkwouldIknow did not go down well.

But the best was yet to come. I had to undertake to prevent anyone who is a danger to children from having contact with the looked after children (my kids of course may be exposed to anyone). Oh what a merry dance we had, you see one of the looked after kids dad is a violent sex offender with a record of offences against women and children. Apparently it's OK for them to allow contact between such a person and children but of course if I do it, it's wrong. This was a real live proper giggle as their non joined up risk averse thinking unravelled.

Think about it, what do you know, as in really know, about everyone who has contact with your children?

Can you give a guarantee in absolute that none of them have harmful intent?

Quite

Then we moved on to training and assessing our training needs.

"Something else you are not qualified to do then", I quipped.

Oh look, a passable impersonation of a bulldog eating wasps I thought....

I did enjoy it, her manager is coming next time.

Watch this space.

I might even sell tickets.


R