How bad can it get?

In spite of my best and most professional intentions to remain stony faced when I entered the school this morning, so as to express best my feelings of desolation about the forthcoming meeting this evening, I was tricked into a positively friendly reply to a more than cheery “Good morning!” uttered by one of the office staff – and she had her tiny child with her as well.  Who am I to preserve a harsh demeanour when she is able to sound happy encumbered with a small person as she was!

I think that I was lulled into a false state of complacency with the world by the fact that one of the cars on the manically car filled motorway which I have to join, deliberately moved over to let me onto the carriageway from my lowly side road point of entry!  Such things unsettle you for the whole day.  Especially in Spain!

I have only lost my temper once over the proposed meeting so far today and am trying to limit my ire so that I have some energy left to look suitably morose by the time of the meeting itself!

I have discovered that there are going to be attempts to get the “work” (pause for hollow laughter) for tomorrow’s meeting done tonight, so that there will be one less day of unutterable misery.  The day can hardly be considered good as I will be teaching six periods tomorrow as it is, so a two and a half hour meeting can only make the day unbearable.  Though of course we do bear such things and even seem to thrive upon them; which is our weakness – and our strength.

In order to get me through the day (and especially the evening) Toni has promised to make a chicken dish of his own devising so that I can concentrate my mind on that rather than the meaningless chatter with which I shall be surrounded.

I might also re-start my daily swimming, admittedly late in the evening, as a way of metaphorically and literally washing the school off me.

I have just discovered that the delivery that I was expecting from Amazon has not arrived – which is par for the course for the non-delivering delivers who do not service my area.  It is back to their office armed with a magic reference number for the umpteenth time to get myself what they should have brought to me.

Just to add that soupçon of icy anger to an already hotly furious attitude I have just found out that sending a description of my group by internal electronic email has not actually worked and teachers have been asking where my venomously honeyed words have gone.  I have had to find the file on my portable computer, transfer it via my pen drive to a school machine (don’t ask) and then have it print out two copies for my colleagues.  Neither of who speaks presentable English. (If that last non sentence is actually presentable English!) And of course my little piece makes few concessions to a less than fluent grasp of our slippery language.  I pride myself upon getting the words “Svengali-like” into one description.  And that was one of the easier ones.  What fun they will have!  Linguistic revenge is sweet!

My final lesson of the day is about to start and the end of that usually brings to an end an exhausting day.  Not today.  But I am not talking about that.  I cannot trust myself to do that.

I am now sitting in the room waiting for the horror to start and start it does only five minutes late which is astonishingly early for us!

I am sure it is a false start.