Febrile activity at the moment as the Lady
with the List appears in the staff room spreading misery where’re she goes as
the many substitutions are distributed to cope with the wholesale absence of
staff who are succumbing right, left and centre to the ravages of colds and
flu-like diseases.
I am sitting alone in the staff room as I
am early and all the rest of my colleagues have rushed off to start their first
lessons at the ungodly time of 8.15 am.
I am, as you will realise, totally vulnerable and as management rush
around looking more and more frazzled I can’t help feeling that my free time is
in a more than fragile state. And there
is nowhere to hide. When teaching starts
all available rooms are in use and therefore not available for hiding.
The lady has returned with sheaves of paper
with the names of the condemned on them.
I shall go to the toilet in self-defence!
The comings and goings are continuing and I
still have not had the courage to look at the list to see if I have been
“taken”. It is more stressful worrying
about the possible loss of non-contact periods than actually losing them!
Lunch consisted of veggie-burgers of
sawdust like texture and it certainly gave a clear indication of taste together
with a plate of cooked, sliced vegetables with a sauce which was as
gastronomically distant from the pseudo-burgers as Boris Johnston is from a
Black Hole – although I realise that that last random conjunction of imagers is
perhaps not as random (or as distant) as I first thought! Anyway, the veg were excellent and made up
for the rest.
Apart from my liking for meat, eggs, fish
and the like I really think that I could become a vegetarian.
Not to be out of the diseased loop which seems
to be claiming so many of the staff I too now feel slightly under the
weather. There is that vague tickle in
the back of the throat, a slightly metallic feel to the back of the nose and a
very distinct lethargy – if that is not a contradiction in words – which I know
well.
These symptoms are not helped by the
skittish attitude towards working temperature that the building I am in at
present thinks is conducive to stable living.
As you progress from room to room via the corridor it is like going on a
walking tour of the globe passing from Tundra to Tropical in a matter of
seconds. In a piece of idiocy that has
to be experienced to be believed each room has its own complex temperature
control. Which doesn’t work. It is either too hot (even for me!) or too
cold.
And you have to have experienced Catalan
and Spanish children to realise just how pathetic they are capable of being
when they encounter anything less than Atacama Desert heat in their teaching
environment. Their piteous cries for warmth
would melt the heart of a Thatcher – but I remain coldly aloof and smile an icy
smile of complete lack of sympathy at their plight, and urge them to think harder
and faster to get the neurons heated up!
Our Second Annual Chocolate Week
(incorporating cakes) is now scheduled to start on Monday 27th of
February and to stretch into March (even if this year is a Leap Year) and give
us something to look forward to and something to think back on during the hard
days leading up to the Easter Holidays.
As I promised a colleague during our First
Annual Chocolate Week I will be making chocolate goldies this year – they are
the same as chocolate brownies but made with white chocolate rather than dark
or milk. I also quite like taking over
the St David’s Day spot and producing a triple chocolate Welsh flag topped
cake. But that might be a bake beyond!
Time will tell.
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