The nearer we get to the end of term the less like the end of term it seems to be. Indeed, so unlike an end of term is it that I am beginning to doubt that this term is actually ending and that I face a Sisyphus-like eternity of being stuck in a Wednesday in the last week of term! A truly horrific thought!
It is just as well that I have the various pits of home produced paper which are the essential accoutrements of air travel nowadays. Ryanair, of course, demands that all its customers print their own tickets, book-in on-line and then pay for the privilege of relieving the administrative burden on their “friendly” airline! But at least I do have the paper which suggests, in black and white, that I am not going to be on the Spanish mainland whatever the apparent attitude of the school appears to be, suggesting as it does that there is no end in sight and we will have to teach until the proverbial bovines are back in their domestic paddock.
Everything is, at last, booked. Barding passes are printed and confirmation for hotel and car are tucked away in the Tesco “real leather” travel wallet with magnetic clip. As in my passport, in the section marked “passport”. I am also comforted by the fact that my passport does not expire until the summer of 2015. I shudder to think of the bureaucracy entailed in getting a new document in a foreign country. But be still my beating heart, that is (in terms of this term) eons of time away!
As is usual in our staff room no-one is talking about the planned increase in teaching time and decrease in payment. There is an unspoken (until I speak) assumption that “it will not happen here”. There is no hard evidence for this belief, but one can look to the positive attitude of the school in trying to mitigate the harsher effects of governmental policy, though it has to be said that the conditions of the different schools do not form an exactly level playing field so comparisons, as always, are odious.
I have stumbled through the day and finally made it to the last lesson that I have to teach. This is my “early leave” when I quit the school only 25 minutes later than the end of a normal day in the UK!
I have to admit that I am taking a further 30 minutes off and using the whole of the last period to get to the garage to have my brakes checked and the brake pads changed. I fear that I have left this change over too late and have scratched the discs which will mean a horrific outlay to keep the bloody car on the road. But I will have the front headlight bulb replaced and new trip put on the wheels so that I will feel that something real has been done for the money!
Every day and in every way I get poorer and poorer!
On the other hand when I leave the school I know that there will be just two working days left before the start of the holiday.
Tomorrow is a day when the science department is bringing the delights of knowing about Nano technology to whole chunks of the school and the teachers who would normally be teaching other groups have been drafted in to make this experiment work. Three of my lessons will be affected by the rearrangements and I look forward (on the penultimate day of term no less) to the consequent chaos. I am, apparently, involved in some form of role-play for which I have no information.
Ah, bliss!
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