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Viking Day passed in a haze. I overslept and there then ensued a chaos of activity where I had to carry every daughter downstairs, they being still half in half-term mode, feed them, get goth daughter [henceforward known as The Rebel - she has moved on from goths. I knew it was a mistake to give her a name which means 'with no master'] into Viking outfit, take photos for partner to see what she looked like, iron clothes for the bonkers one who had got half her school lunch down her cardigan the day before, fill in endless forms for class photos which I would have done the night before if I hadn't been making last-minute alterations to the Viking outfit and trying to get toddler daughter to bed [every night this week she has relentlessly come downstairs asking to be cuddled to sleep. We have taken her upstairs, ignored her, etc, etc, but her will is stronger than ours]. You get the picture.

This was all done in half an hour as I had to get to the nursery first because I drive to Cambridge on Thursdays so need to be at the other end of the village in order to save the 10 minutes that it would take to divert to the nursery so that I can at least be at work by 10am.

Anyway, by some strange feat or other, I did it and The Rebel was very excited and had a great time, which is good as she hasn't been enjoying school very much lately, in fact since we moved. She keeps complaining of tummy aches, says all the boys hate her and possibly half the girls, she misses her old school, etc. At the weekend she asked whether she could get out of this thing called education. I fleetingly contemplated home schooling, but when would I fit it in? I hate sending her across the playground every morning. She seems so forlorn and lonely.

Everyone already has best friends and it is hard being in a friend triangle where she is the target of jealousy and misunderstandings. Girls' relationships are totally fraught at the best of times. It really is a jungle out there. Also, she would love to play football, but everything is so divided between the sexes, much more than I remember when I was at school, even if we did, aged 8, pull our cardigans down in dancing to avoid any physical contact with boys.

All my daughters, even the toddler one, tell me that things are girl games/toys, etc or boy games/toys and you can't do them if you are the wrong sex. I keep questioning it all, but fear I am getting nowhere. It's even worse than the religion thing with bonkers daughter who cut out her drawing book in the shape of the cross and interrogated me about who died on the cross to save us. Last week we were on the seesaw, me and toddler daughter at one end and bonkers daughter at the other. She, the bonkers one, said it would be good if someone would go in the middle. I said there was no-one around and she added, very seriously, that we could maybe ask God as he was "everywhere".

Anyway, back to boy/girl divisions. I'm not entirely sure where this generation is going to end up, pumped up with gender stereotypes, princess fantasies for the girls, superheroes for the boys and endless consumerism [which I guess is leading/contributing to the gender stereotyping because it sells]. I spent some of my work time doing research on lads' mags this week too and complained about how depressing it all was to my partner - just one long diet of gyrating, big-assed, big-bosomed blondes acting out predictable Lesbian/soft porn fantasies for the lads. He says it's all due to British repression.

Later on in the week I sat next to someone flicking through Brides magazine. A whole magazine about fairy-tale weddings. I marvel at how it sells. Why would you want to read 80 pages about weddings and if you did, why more than the once? And then I skimmed through some women's magazines at the dentist full of stuff about plastic surgery and the full Brazilian [why the lads prefer the FB to 'going wild']. Women seem to be intent on turning their whole bodies into a marketing tool to capture male - or female - attention. I know the whole line about how it is not about the men, it is empowering to have Botox, to have your vagina tightened, etc, etc, but it's really just about creating or enlarging insecurities in order to sell stuff, isn't it? This generation of girls is leading the way in education, has strong role career role models in their mothers and a supposedly post-feminist agenda, but they are surrounded by all the traditional stereotypes in ever more aggressive ways and it just seems terrifyingly confusing for them to me.