The school is suffused with a electrically crackling air of hysteria as today, today we have naming of parts. 

Or to put it another way, we have one of our monumentally long and tedious meetings.  This one is scheduled (“scheduled”) to run for three and as half hours.  As I will be praying for death within five minutes of the start of the thing, you will appreciate that it is going to be a long, long day for me.

On the plus side I suppose that this is the last Great Horror before the holidays and then we will have two months to try and forget that they will all be starting up again next September!

My list of Things To Do is growing longer as we approach the magic date at the end of June and this year I want to get more of my list done than I did the last.  Two things that I am almost determined to complete this year are sorting out my books and visiting a church on the hill that I have been passing for years and have always voiced an ambition to visit it which lasts as long as it is in sight and then my determination fades as it falls behind.

This is part of the reason that the books still remain in their unsorted state.  As my bookcases have opaque doors the chaos of double stacked books and books shoved horizontally into the spaces above the books and below the next shelf is hidden from view, unless, like yesterday I went in search of a book.  Then the full horror is revealed in all its squalid higgledy-piggildyness.

The book I was looking for was the catalogue to the exhibition in the V&A about the Festival of Britain.  As I have been reading other books on this event I wanted to refresh my memory with some of the excellent photographs that I knew the catalogue contained.

All things considered, I found the book relatively quickly: it always helps when you know what the design of the spine is like and I even managed not to be too distracted by seeing other books which seemed to demand my immediate attention.

One thing that I had forgotten was that I had a copy of the original 1951 Guide to the Pleasure Gardens of the Festival of Britain in Battersea.  I wonder how difficult it would be to obtain a Guide to the Exhibition itself.  I will have to consult Amazon!

The Meeting was broken up by the fact that it started at 3.00 pm (1¾ hours before the official end of school) and as there were two lessons to staff some of us had to leave, only to come back after a hour of looking after kids to listen to the gibberish of colleagues who like the sound of their own voices and do not seem to care that there is a life outside school. 

The meeting finally finished a mere 45 minutes late and, as we went home in daylight we counted ourselves lucky.  At least they did, I was fuming with impotent rage at the time (which can never be replaced) was squandered on my having to half understand the tedious home life of kids not in my charge.

I can truthfully say that knowledge of the home life of any pupil has never played a significant part in the way or what I have taught.  A few Shakespeare plays usually cover most of the likely situations of domestic dysfunction that any modern family is likely to reproduce!  What is a teacher supposed to do?  Self-censor?  Bowdlerize?  Rubbish!

When I finally got home and had a swim the water was quite warm at gone 7.00 pm, there was only one way to take away the taste of having been in school for close to twelve hours – going out to eat.

Our choice of the Basque restaurant near when we used to live.  This has always been a good choice as we invariably have the tapas which are placed out on the bar.

We had a fair selection ranging from a slice of tortilla with cod to a strange tapa of chorizo and salmon.  They were good but not good enough to justify the pretty steep charge of 40 odd euros even if that included a bottle of the strange wine which has to be poured into the glass from a distance of a couple of feet!  It will be long time before we go back!

Meanwhile another day done!