Death reigns supreme!

As I made my way from the garage, up the stairs to the flat, I found my way impeded by a miasmic wall of odour. It was as if someone had been using Pledge with Attitude.

The answer, of course, was ants. Toni has discovered that we have a ‘plague’ of ants. This infestation passed me by: put it down to wearing glasses. Anyway this unwanted visitation encouraged the purchase of two plastic ‘mini tents’ which were filled with poison and supposedly irresistible to ants.

Toni’s genocidal attitude towards our six legged visitors doesn’t surprise me at all, as I have seen in all before. He shares his detestation with that of my mother who was like a thing possessed whenever an ant with a death wish managed to penetrate the rigid insect security around my family home.

My mother’s poison of choice was the unfortunately named Nippon™.

I have yet to work out the socio-political wrong thinking that went into that inspired trade name. She would place drops of this lethal liquor near known haunts of ants and then lurk above them urging them to drink and take the poison home to destroy the nest. An unedifying sight and not one that I had thought to see repeated. How badly I underestimated Toni!

He even lacked my mother’s deadly patience and, having seen no visible deaths in the arrogant strutting of ants in the house, decided upon dramatic measures which stretch the boundaries of the Geneva Convention. The entire house has been sprayed to within an inch of its liveable limit.

Everything is dead. No ants walk. The cloud of death has done its work. But I also feel that the noxious residue of the wave of death is limiting our lives too! But we are alone again.

This destruction came at the end of a generally uneventful day save for the appearance of the new head of the primary section of the school. My first meeting with her was limited to a smile and a firm handshake, but we were assured that we would be able to meet her informally during a little ‘get together’ at the end of school.

At the end of school we began to assemble in the staff room where there was precisely nothing to suggest that there was a little informal meeting about to take place. We were mystified. Where were the bottles of Cava? The little nibbles? The air of easy informality? Nowhere.

I went into the unit managers’ office and there was our new headteacher sitting by herself gazing (with hope!) at a computer screen. In answer to my laconic questioning she revealed that she too had expected some sort of reception but that The Owner had disappeared and she knew nothing. The shape of things to come!

Returning to the staff room I decided to Do Something. Using the small plastic coffee cups salvaged from the Sports Day and filled them with the orange juice from a colleague’s marriage do and a paper plate of the remaining biscuits from my tin. It looked, I have to say, pathetic.

When the unit manager of the foetal section of the school came into the room she laughed out loud. But I fear that my ironic tribute to adequate refreshments for newly appointed headteachers arriving on their first day and meeting the staff went largely unappreciated as they drank all the orange juice and scoffed all the biscuits!

The new head was duly toasted in orange juice and gave a heartfelt speech which demonstrated to Those Who Know that she has a number of crucial misconceptions about what she can possibly hope to do in this employment that will destroy her if she takes them seriously. And she looks the sort to take them seriously. God help her!

The end of term comes on apace with my attempts to use up all the resources still available in the school becoming more and more inventive and ever more extravagant!

The non appearance of the final format for the reports is driving one of my colleagues frantic with frustration as she is stymied in her attempts to finish everything which is, or may be, or could be required of her. She takes organization to a higher level than I could have believed (or would ever have wanted to have believed) possible.

I wonder how long it will be before I can translate a sentence like that last one into convincing Spanish.

Rhetorical.