Empty!

Poisoned Friday begins.

Although I am not going to talk about The Day of Horror tomorrow, its mere touching of my consciousness has blighted the traditional end of the week feel for a normal Friday.  However, in a normal teaching day it takes far too much energy to fuel red-hot anger and teach at the same time, so I am going to have to suppress my quite natural and understandable feelings of resentment and injustice under a cruelly hypocritical veneer of micron thick affability.

Enough!  I will reserve my true vitriol for tomorrow when the crime is being perpetrated.

The car continues to please and surprise.  I came to school today not warmed by the gloriously cumbersome symphonies of Bruckner but rather by the more astringent music of hummable pop stars – some of whom I could even name and in a few cases even sing along!  Any pop song that mentions, “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” has got my vote!

I have found the cigarette lighter in the car.  Well, it would have been that in my dad’s first car (a Ford Prefect complete with running boards) with a pop out button with a red-hot element at the end of it.  On my last car the hole for the button was there but not cigarette lighter filling it and now, on this car the hole (with integral cover) is labelled 12V.  How times have changed – not even a nod towards the disgusting habits of the past!

While waiting at a roundabout at a set of traffic lights I pushed the brake button to secure the car.  I then went through a period of panic as I failed to get the car moving when the lights changed to green.  I pushed the button again – which did nothing.  I pressed on the accelerator – which did nothing.  I changed the gear lever – which did nothing.  I might add that all these “did nothings” were on a roundabout where consideration and patience are not the attitudes which are on prominent display.

Eventually after what felt like hours but was obviously a matter of seconds I lurched forward again and considered putting the air-con on to get my complexion back to something approaching the ordinary, but I drove on with my eyes on the road ahead and not on my rear-view mirror which I am sure would have shown drivers frothing at the mouth at the unbearable delays that my neophyte incompetence had caused!

I have not yet attempted a hill start, which is just as well as I do not know the holding capabilities of a stopped automatic.  I do have a handbrake so that ought to make things easy, but I have not been in a practical situation which tests my new driving ability.  Given the slopes around the school and the complete inconsideration of many of the drivers I encounter on a daily basis, I must find an opportunity to practice without the pressure of needy parents ostentatiously revving their engines around me as I try to achieve the smooth take offs of my non-automatic driving!

Recently I have found myself confining my reading matter more to the Guardian than to real books and this is something which I intend to rectify as soon as possible.  It will become another of my resolutions which seem to be piling up rather than forming a neat queue and which I seem to be making little effort to diminish.

I still have not returned to my daily swimming (most glaringly) and there are various others tasks and irritations that I am supposed to have taken care of but which flutter in the wind of neglect like forlorn kites tangled around telephone wires.  Something must be done.  And with an exclamation mark too!

I need to call into my Union, but that takes a major effort of organization and I may need to take Toni as translator as much of the vocabulary I will need is not everyday.  There is also the threat of the dentist.

Alas my “good boy” habits seem to have fallen into abeyance as far as these jumped up barbers are concerned and my natural reluctance to visit has increased steadily since the death of Mr Hamilton well over 40 years ago!  He was the dentist of my childhood.  He was the smiling face of dentistry for me: he allowed me to dress up in his white coat; he encouraged me to handle the instruments of torture; he gave me birthday and Christmas presents; he and his wife had me to tea as the sole guest.  In short he was a Good Thing and with him I felt no fear.

His greatest act of questionable kindness was to give me a tiny earthenware pot with a globule of mercury in it.  I had endless minutes of pleasure pouring the blob out onto a smooth surface, breaking it up into a multitude of smaller globules and then marshalling them all back together again before it was put back into its pot. 

The fact that such behaviour nowadays would probably get him struck off for giving a hugely toxic heavy metal to a very young child to play with does not in any way lessen the ecstatic delight with which I regarded such a wonderful present.  And I am sure that he told me not to eat it.  Which I didn’t, and have survived so far without lasting ill effects.  And it’s a bloody sight more than I have had from any other dentist I have visited!

I am not doing too well in the not thinking about The Day of Horror, and it is not helped by seeing colleagues’ faces crumple as they remember periodically and the misery of the ages descends on them momentarily as they attempt to shrug off the awful thoughts.

At least this evening we went out for a consolatory meal of tapas with a decent Rioja – and it has a different taste when you are eating it knowing that the weekend has not really started.  It is devalued by the contempt you feel knowing that the morrow will bring an empty, time wasting experience which, unforgivably encroaches on a sacrosanct weekend.

An early night I think so that I can muse on my hard life and build up the right quantities of resentment so that I am in the right mood for the meeting.

Sleep tight!