a) had a lot of work to do
b) got a bit bored
c) discovered, on going back to pick up the thread again, that my conversant was some kind of weird natural law ideologue and left it at that. 
I had started this post before this all happened, but the argument is fundamentally the same, it's just here I have put it in complete sentences and paragraphs (and bothered to finish it), which in my opinion is a much better way to construct an argument.
On that day a man went to the high court to defend his right to be utterly selfish (and won). At least, as far as I can see, that's his motivation. His interview on the Today programme that morning was one of those events that leaves you wondering whether a person has ever stopped to listen to what they are actually saying. His argument was broadly the usual libertarian rant about the state telling him what to do, but the justifications were amazing. He claimed that those of his children who go to a 'non-selective' fee paying school (surely by dint of the fact that it requires fees, it is selective) have shorter terms and yet the schools have better results than state schools. Of course the key point there (apart from the one about the school actually being selective) is that whilst the terms may be shorter, they are uninterrupted. Also I can't see shortening the terms of state schools being popular with the many other parents who struggle to find childcare for the existing holidays.
The other part of his argument was that because his children have a good attendance record the rest of the time, they should be allowed to miss two weeks of school. I imagine this is a logic that he would not tolerate elsewhere in society.
If I never drive under the influence of alcohol, but a few pints down one day, find that my child needs a lift to a friend's house, given that I know I am a good driver, I know the route and I have a good track record with drink driving, should I be able to exempt myself from prosecution? Even if I were to accidentally hit one of this man's children on that journey (maybe one of the ones he doesn't care about enough to send to a fee paying school), that's just an unfortunate consequence of the child being in/near the road and not because I broke the law. Right? This is clearly a preposterous argument; no one would defend their right to drink and drive (although it's not so many years since people would have done), but the principle is the same: if a law exists, who gets to decide that it is unreasonable? The initial answer given by my friend on Twitter was correct: 'we do', unfortunately when qualifying the 'we' bit was when he got all weird and nonsensical. We do agree on what laws are reasonable by two methods:
1. voting for and lobbying the politicians who make them
2. testing the law in court.
Clearly our man on the radio had decided on the latter course, and I'm afraid this is the bit that I think is rather selfish of him. I don't object to him taking his child out of school (I think it's stupid, but I'll come to that), but I do object to him attempting to change the law because he didn't want to pay a fine he could easily afford. If he thought the law was unjust, he could have campaigned against it or set up a petition to establish the unpopularity of the law and the desire for it to change. Instead I imagine he decided that as he knows what is best for his children (the monotonous chant of all his apologists), that must mean he also knows what is best for everyone else's children. He took his case to court and won, so now parents much less 'responsible' than him have an excuse to disrupt their childrens' education (and potentially the education of others in the same class) because he wanted to prove a point. Furthermore, the government has already said that it will change the law to make sure that the legal loophole he has opened by this court case will be closed again, so that's a whole bunch of civil servants' time plus the various sittings of parliament that we will all have to pay for, just so this guy could have his 15 minutes. Indeed the likelihood is that by challenging a law that he saw as infringing on his rights as a parent, he'll probably end up with an even more restrictive law. Well done, here's the sound of one hand clapping.
In many ways this is just the law working as is intended: the courts challenge the detail of the legislation and the legislation is modified to accommodate the weaknesses exposed by the legal process. As part of the social contract implicit in being the citizen of any country, we agree to abide by the laws and to accept the consequences of the laws; if we collectively agree that they are unreasonable, then we change them. Anyone who thinks that we can live together without engaging in such a social contract is either deluded, an anarchist or both. We learn about this at school, not necessarily by negotiating our own social contract, but by abiding by the rules and facing our punishment if we break them. As we grow up we gradually learn how those laws are agreed and how we can negotiate them. It is not a simple relationship and we all navigate it as best we can. There will always be things that we personally think are unjust and we have to find our ways of negotiating these, from our first detention* onwards. However, if someone in authority comes along and says that the rules do not need to apply, that we can just opt out of the ones we don't like, how do we learn to engage properly with them? We grow up thinking that we can always be excused, that we are exceptional, that we don't need to engage with society because we can change the law on a whim to suit our personal preference. We grow up believing in the primacy of selfishness.
* detentions probably aren't allowed any more because some parent who knows what's best objected to them.
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