Today is Friday. Good, I haven’t yet lost track of days and I can pretty much recall the date with less than a momentary pause. In class, I don’t always get that right. For example, when writing the date on the board which one starts to do less often these days, I tend to write May when it should be March and there are a couple of other months I do not always get right first time round. Apart from all of Monday in work, with a total of 20, maybe 21 students and a whole staff bar those in self-isolation and then a few hours yesterday, I am now officially home learning most of the time…or home teaching…or remote learning…or whatever the buzzword of the week is right now. With 11 students on site at any one time and maybe six over the Easter holidays, it does look like this key – sorry, ‘Crisis’ worker, will get more of a normal break even if it is within the four walls. One thing that has benefited me over this period has been my own reading: I have read loads, albeit the smaller 200 page over the 500 page novels and it has helped – not by cheating; I sincerely have always intended on reading them – my Goodreads challenge no end. I have become more enamoured to Margaret Atwood. Always appreciating her masterstroke as an author and all of what she is attempting in these times of global lockdown, I am not – horror of horror – the biggest fan of Handmaid although I will read The Testaments at some conjecture. No, I instead really enjoyed Hagseed when she wrote it: The Tempest being a favourite Shakespeare of mine; and this week I lapped up The Penelopiad, her precursor to a run of popularising the age-old myth of time immemorial. Currently I am liking her, what I thought was a debut but is in fact her second work, Surfacing. I am enjoying the characterisation within, almongst a remote Canadian lakeside landscape. This should be finished by this evening too.
My form, Year 7, have been reassuring me as much as I have been reaching out by e-mail to reassure me. Goodness only knows how I’ll be breaking it to this bunch that I am moving on come September, to promotion, when not so long ago I thought my career, if not at least my chances of getting back on to the ladder were over. Big things here for Mr L but it doesn’t take away the hardness of losing good relationships with the cohort you currently teach. I can remember, still, some names from students on my PGCE and in particular, my first school in 2002. Year 12/13 then would now be approaching 35 or 36: now that is scary!
I have also been ecstatic and potentially concerned that the tutors at the Open, bastion of my lifelong learning-take-part-in-Masters-for-a-considerable-fee-but-I-love-it, have been marking the wrong person’s work then attributing me with a good grade. I can barely think of what I wrote on my third assignment of the year yet once again it came back on point and commended. I am now on the last straight as far as this course is concerned and virus notwithstanding, I reckon the smell of success, handshakes with the Dean and the third throwing of a mortarboard are within my peripheral vision. Touch wood. Turn money over. White rabbits. Hope among hope.
Now to think seriously about getting somewhere with the writing I have been honing and considering as part of this package. An agent might be nice. Very nice. A publisher, even better. If I could even have just get one spot, one day, talking at Hay about, er, something I’d be happy; the smallest stage, I am not fussy. Play to the toilets if need be. A diary of all things Scatological. Well, maybe not.
I’m off. It is – or would ordinarily be lunchtime, but without the duty – time for satiation and there is no Corona in the fridge.
Stay safe.
The Muse Within 