It has taken me the whole of my professional life and the move to another country, but I have now matched my mother in her first year of teaching.
My first salary from my new school doesn’t cover the cost of my monthly rent.
My mother’s first job was subsidised by my grandparents. Alas! I am bereft of the immediacy of family who can be tapped for easy money, so, in a way the horror is all the more poignant.
My pay slip is an A4 page of incomprehensibility; apart that is, from the deductions. These are all too obvious and I find it difficult to be jocose about the amount ripped from my fragile salary by convincing myself that I am merely paying my dues to my adopted country!
My ‘basic’ salary is so pathetically small that I hesitate to disclose it, but it is augmented by a list of ‘additions’ which Toni informs me are absolute rubbish. The advantage from the point of view of Scrooge like people who pay (I use the term lightly) my salary is that these ‘additions’ can be changed at a moment’s notice and a passing whim. The disadvantage from the point of view of the Cratchit like recipient (my good self) is that my money can diminish beyond the point of incredulity – and all done legally.
If the law allows that (to paraphrase one of my great heroes worthy to sit alongside Satan from Paradise Lost and Iago) then the law is a ass; a idiot!
I am assuming, for the sake of my sanity and my bank balance, that there has been some sort of mistake. I will have some critical and hopefully lucrative discussions with the Powers that Be! If not: who knows!
My lack of clacking at the typewriter keys for the last few days has been because Ceri and Dianne have been visiting.
An odd visit. Not because of Ceri and Dianne, I hasten to add. An odd visit because for the first time since I have known them both our holidays have not been for the same days. My half term holiday (if it can be graced with such a title when the days of non education were so preciously few) was the week before Britain.
Their holiday had been arranged months ago when Easyjet was reasonably priced and before I had discovered my previously well hidden vocation for primary education.
This meant that I was not able to meet them at the airport not was I able to let them into the flat when they arrived!
Problems were solved by the generous help of our local French newsagent who kept her shop open so that my visitors could pick up the keys. Vive la France!
What could have been a leisurely meander through some of the more interesting parts of Catalonia was instead compressed into three evenings – or more exactly three opportunities for aperitifs, meals and digestifs! And talk. And talk. It makes you realise who and how much you miss certain things when you move to a foreign country!
On the last evening when we were sitting, rather defiantly, out on a cooling balcony, we had news of the untimely death of a friend and colleague.
The last few months have been characterised by deaths and their effects have always been revealingly unsettling.
Loss has been partially counterbalanced by the reestablishment of communications with a couple who I knew in my first year of teaching in Kettering in Northamptonshire.
It was my great good fortune to start my teaching career in Kettering Boys’ School in the days when it had achieved international fame because a pupil astronomical club within the school had been the first to announce the launch of a Soviet space rocket to the world – beating the Americans with all their technology!
I of course had heard nothing of this when I arrived for my interview and was far more impressed with the reproductions hanging in the secretary’s office: Rowlandson, Lear (he of the limericks) and Girtin. I was much more impressed when what I took to be tasteful reproductions turned out to be originals!
These artistic treasures were part of the legacy of H. E. Bates (he of “the past is another country”) who was an old boy of the school.
Interviewed by the headteacher and the head of governors, I later visited the home of the latter to view a spare room that she had. She was the wife of the vicar of Barton Seagrave and I soon took up residence in the grandly named St Botolph’s House, St Botolph’s Road in the village. St Botolph’s House was the clergy house; joined to the vicarage, but separate from it. The deacon was living more centrally in the parish and so I had extensive if sparsely furnished accommodation. It was also extensively leaky and bloody cold: but it was Somewhere! The vicar once rather disparagingly if rather wonderfully referred to my part of the vicarage as “Napoleonic jerry building!”
The vicar and his wife were my immediate neighbours and we soon became friends. Who else can say that he had a weekend away with the vicar’s wife in his first year of teaching? It was (I hasten to add) because she and I were English teachers and we went to Stratford to see all three parts of ‘Henry VI’ over two days!
The vicar was notable for delivering sermons that were worth listening to and he was a patient and scholarly listener to my enthusiastic (if untutored) philosophical and theological ramblings and always took the Socratic method of gently bringing me back to academic earth! For which much thanks.
After a hiatus of some years we have regained our annual corresponding link and I feel as if a well worn of the jigsaw has been gently eased back into the wider picture of my life.
In school (which continues to astonish) the saga of my non appearing screen is now approaching epic proportions.
My Welsh visitors brought not only their good selves, but also a supply of OHP photocopying sheets; OHP pens and ordinary OHP transparencies. They also brought a whistle. The red (red?) whistles issued by my present school are visually unprepossessing and practically useless: one good blow and the pea implodes. Thanks to Bob I now have a black plastic professional model on a lanyard which is stridently assertive.
Tomorrow the photographing of sculpture on roundabouts.
Don’t ask, merely wonder at the range of excitement that defines my life at present!
My first salary from my new school doesn’t cover the cost of my monthly rent.
My mother’s first job was subsidised by my grandparents. Alas! I am bereft of the immediacy of family who can be tapped for easy money, so, in a way the horror is all the more poignant.
My pay slip is an A4 page of incomprehensibility; apart that is, from the deductions. These are all too obvious and I find it difficult to be jocose about the amount ripped from my fragile salary by convincing myself that I am merely paying my dues to my adopted country!
My ‘basic’ salary is so pathetically small that I hesitate to disclose it, but it is augmented by a list of ‘additions’ which Toni informs me are absolute rubbish. The advantage from the point of view of Scrooge like people who pay (I use the term lightly) my salary is that these ‘additions’ can be changed at a moment’s notice and a passing whim. The disadvantage from the point of view of the Cratchit like recipient (my good self) is that my money can diminish beyond the point of incredulity – and all done legally.
If the law allows that (to paraphrase one of my great heroes worthy to sit alongside Satan from Paradise Lost and Iago) then the law is a ass; a idiot!
I am assuming, for the sake of my sanity and my bank balance, that there has been some sort of mistake. I will have some critical and hopefully lucrative discussions with the Powers that Be! If not: who knows!
My lack of clacking at the typewriter keys for the last few days has been because Ceri and Dianne have been visiting.
An odd visit. Not because of Ceri and Dianne, I hasten to add. An odd visit because for the first time since I have known them both our holidays have not been for the same days. My half term holiday (if it can be graced with such a title when the days of non education were so preciously few) was the week before Britain.
Their holiday had been arranged months ago when Easyjet was reasonably priced and before I had discovered my previously well hidden vocation for primary education.
This meant that I was not able to meet them at the airport not was I able to let them into the flat when they arrived!
Problems were solved by the generous help of our local French newsagent who kept her shop open so that my visitors could pick up the keys. Vive la France!
What could have been a leisurely meander through some of the more interesting parts of Catalonia was instead compressed into three evenings – or more exactly three opportunities for aperitifs, meals and digestifs! And talk. And talk. It makes you realise who and how much you miss certain things when you move to a foreign country!
On the last evening when we were sitting, rather defiantly, out on a cooling balcony, we had news of the untimely death of a friend and colleague.
The last few months have been characterised by deaths and their effects have always been revealingly unsettling.
Loss has been partially counterbalanced by the reestablishment of communications with a couple who I knew in my first year of teaching in Kettering in Northamptonshire.
It was my great good fortune to start my teaching career in Kettering Boys’ School in the days when it had achieved international fame because a pupil astronomical club within the school had been the first to announce the launch of a Soviet space rocket to the world – beating the Americans with all their technology!
I of course had heard nothing of this when I arrived for my interview and was far more impressed with the reproductions hanging in the secretary’s office: Rowlandson, Lear (he of the limericks) and Girtin. I was much more impressed when what I took to be tasteful reproductions turned out to be originals!
These artistic treasures were part of the legacy of H. E. Bates (he of “the past is another country”) who was an old boy of the school.
Interviewed by the headteacher and the head of governors, I later visited the home of the latter to view a spare room that she had. She was the wife of the vicar of Barton Seagrave and I soon took up residence in the grandly named St Botolph’s House, St Botolph’s Road in the village. St Botolph’s House was the clergy house; joined to the vicarage, but separate from it. The deacon was living more centrally in the parish and so I had extensive if sparsely furnished accommodation. It was also extensively leaky and bloody cold: but it was Somewhere! The vicar once rather disparagingly if rather wonderfully referred to my part of the vicarage as “Napoleonic jerry building!”
The vicar and his wife were my immediate neighbours and we soon became friends. Who else can say that he had a weekend away with the vicar’s wife in his first year of teaching? It was (I hasten to add) because she and I were English teachers and we went to Stratford to see all three parts of ‘Henry VI’ over two days!
The vicar was notable for delivering sermons that were worth listening to and he was a patient and scholarly listener to my enthusiastic (if untutored) philosophical and theological ramblings and always took the Socratic method of gently bringing me back to academic earth! For which much thanks.
After a hiatus of some years we have regained our annual corresponding link and I feel as if a well worn of the jigsaw has been gently eased back into the wider picture of my life.
In school (which continues to astonish) the saga of my non appearing screen is now approaching epic proportions.
My Welsh visitors brought not only their good selves, but also a supply of OHP photocopying sheets; OHP pens and ordinary OHP transparencies. They also brought a whistle. The red (red?) whistles issued by my present school are visually unprepossessing and practically useless: one good blow and the pea implodes. Thanks to Bob I now have a black plastic professional model on a lanyard which is stridently assertive.
Tomorrow the photographing of sculpture on roundabouts.
Don’t ask, merely wonder at the range of excitement that defines my life at present!
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