It's the damn waiting!

Another exam – but the sun is shining.  You take the rough with the smooth!

A depressing number of kids look as though they are going to turn up for the odd days we have in school during “Stupid Week” next week.  We come in for two days out of the five (on Wednesday and Friday!) and I would have thought that the clear indication to pupils and parents alike was that they should regard the whole week as a holiday.  This message seems not to have been clear enough or, on the other hand, the parents simply cannot face five whole days with their own kids.  I do at least know where they are coming from in that case!

This particular week will show the school at its best: trying to cope with unusual circumstances at the very last moment.  I will be extremely disappointed if the two days that we are in school are full days with no “free gifts” of extra time.  It is at the end of the week that all the marks have to be fed into the computer using a different program and we will need the comfort of strangers and the very real help of program literate colleagues to get all the marks in the right place at the right time.

And as soon as we have done that, we start all over again!

After the evening meeting on Tuesday, I am entitled to exchange the time I spend there to enable me to leave school during a free period today.  This hard-won “freedom” will be expended in going to a large supermarket to find an overpriced plastic monstrosity exuding slime that has been demanded by the younger elements in the family.  As far as I can tell the plastic thing is some emanation of the violence that characterises the Japanese cartoon industry and is indistinguishable from every other monster construction with which the attention deficit generation whiles away those tedious moments between TV and oblivion!

I am determined to buy a book.  If I am being forced into buying Christmas presents this early in the month then there has to be some sort of pay off!

Then there is the problem of the Christmas tree.  And no Tesco.

There are the frighteningly practical problems of getting the bloody thing out of the hidey-hole in which it is at present secreted; the aesthetic problems of how to decorate it; the logistical problems about where to site it.  But up it will certainly be and in the very near future.

I do miss Tesco, Peacocks and Matalan where, by judicious yet totally unnecessaryI spending one can accumulate many glittery bits and pieces, not to mention new and wonderfully camp sets of lights.  However, one has to cut one’s electrical urges to fit the voltage or whatever, and Catalonia does not offer the cornucopia of delights for Christmas indulgence – though they are gaining on us.

The pseudo-holiday draws nearer and it won’t come a day too soon.