Monday 23rd August

As is always the case when getting back from even the shortest of holidays, there seem to be tons and tons of emails waiting for me. What is obvious, though, is how few of the emails I get at work are actually of any importance whatsoever. I spend the morning trawling through them, but find that most can be discarded and even the trickiest ones have already been dealt with by my wonderful colleagues in my absence. As a result, I'm quickly back on this week's work, which unfortunately falls into the tedious-but-necessary world of online admin and staring at spreadsheets. Carefully. For hours. It's at times like this I have to struggle to see this job as anything more glamorous than a menial data-entry position on the fringes of the publishing industry – but it keeps me in beer and sweets, I suppose.

After this less-than-exhilirating start to the week, I head home via Sainsbury's and stock up on the various things we'll need to get through the rest of this shortened week. Shortly after I get back, Alex pops round with her little sister Drew, who's staying down in London for the week. Drew, aged 8, is in dire need of entertainment, it seems, and the girls are here specifically to raid my DVD collection. Alex clearly knows that I'm bound to have at least a few proper kids' films in my juvenile selection (though unfortunately for them my prized Pixar collection is all on Blu-Ray and thus no good) – and she's right, as they managed to pick out Cool Runnings, The Goonies and Wallace and Gromit (two of which, it must be said, are actually K's). We sit and chat for a little while and I recount my cat-harassment story from the weekend for Drew's amusement. The girls head off shortly afterwards and I get on with sorting out dinner.

The rest of the evening is spent, as with many evenings when K is out of the house, fannying around on the computer and watching unnecessarily dull TV shows. I do manage to find, however, Richard Dawkins' recent documentary Faith Schools Menace on Virgin catch-up – a subject I've seen and read the always-entertaining professor take on before – but nevertheless and interesting film looking at the shocking state of selective religious schools and the completely unregulated way they teach RE to impressionable children. One scary moment sees Dawkins asking young girls in a Muslim school to pose questions about evolution to their science teacher (fairly simple ones like, “If we evolved from apes, how come there are still apes around now?”), to which the teacher had absolutely no idea of how to reply. These schools are the ones who claim not to be indoctrinating children, but to offer them a choice and present all beliefs as “theories” - except that they are clearly ignoring fact, paying lip service to the idea of a balanced curriculum and receiving state funding to do so. Needless to say, this subject is one I'm concerned about; especially as I may one day find myself, as an atheist, unable to send my child to the best (or even just the nearest) local school based on the fact that I'm not a demonstrably practising Christian. Shouldn't state schools be for everyone? Hmm.