The horror begins. In just a few short days, the summer holidays starts.
At the end of this week a fee-paying school I'm involved with in Suffolk breaks up and all the children, from the Prep tinies to the suit-wearing Sixth Formers will only be in the empty, silent hallways, the strangely-food free dining hall and the echoing vacant classrooms as ghosts, half-glimpsed shadows that disappear when you raise your head to look straight at them, a softly-repeated: 'But I thought there was someone there...' All the while the gilt-painted wooden boards commemorating former pupils, all the Jenkins and Robertsons, the Atwell-Smythes and the Barracloughs, going all the way back a century and more will stand still and timeless, waiting for September.
Instead, more terrible still, all those children will be at home, messing the house up for months with piles of shoes, games, discarded socks, tennis rackets, Playstations and all the other things that to a child were essential life-support systems until oh, a minute ago, now lying ready to trip unsuspecting adults down the stairs.
Pocket Money Cards were designed to help, without recourse to gin or emigrating while the children spend the week with their grandparents. Every pack of Pocket Money Cards contains 80 different chores cards, 10 Write Your Own cards, and 10 Excuses! cards, as well as the instructions card, all infinitely adaptable to suit pretty much every household we could think of, from a traditional nuclear family or Mum, Dad and the children to first-time-away-from-Mummy flatmates who haven't a clue.
Pocket Money Cards help get chores done, and households cleaner, tidier and nicer places to live in. But more than that, they help children build their capabilities, their confidence and self-reliance and the communication skills they need to become fulfilled, functioning adults.
We can't promise that your household will instantly win the starring role in the remake of The Waltons. But you never know.....