Chichester and some other things
2011-10-19, 10:41 p.m.
Just found a sweetie on my coffee table. No indication of how long it�s been there nor where it may have come from. The only indicator to its provenance is the word �Paradise� written many times on its wrapper. I have unwrapped it and am eating it. Should you wish to know, Paradise is a little bit sticky and mainly redolent of oranges. If you have the misfortune to shuffle off this mortal coil before the day is out, this information may (or may not!) be useful to you. No, no, you�re welcome.As part of a long-running wider issue, which often threatens to see a husband thrown unceremoniously onto the streets (but never actually achieves it), we have been attempting a little team-building today. Managed to get all the way to Chichester without incident and spent a few hours wandering around the shops and then taking photos of the Cathedral. Some of my photos were pretty much OK, but L�s (borrowed) camera is fancier and has giant paparazzi style lenses and shit like that so sometimes I just had to describe the picture I wanted to get and let him do the actual click-click-whirr-ing. I still count those as �my� pictures because, without my visionary artistic stylings they would have just been �some pictures of a big church�.
Anyway, Chichester cathedral is very nice and if you haven�t been there, I�d recommend it. I�d recommend Chichester, too, especially if you are the sort of person who finds Winchester a bit too much up its own fucking arse (that �sort of person� = me). It has some nice individual shops where you can buy all kinds of overpriced crap. Don�t get me wrong, overpriced crap can be found in any town, but this was different overpriced crap, so it kind of made it OK. I bought some teeny tiny advent calendar cards, which are just the sweetest little things. Im an advent calendar nazi. They must have NO chocolate, NO �non Christmas� pictures (no Bart Simpson skating/tobogganing Winnie the Pooh/Barbie in a Santa hat etc) and they must Must MUST have a wee baby Jeebus behind door 24. Sometimes �proper� advent calendars are hellish difficult to track down, particularly as England does seem to be a pretty Godless place - especially around Christmas and Easter, ironically!
Im no Evangelical bible basher, but I do like faint nod towards Christianity when it comes to Winterval!
Once everything that could be photographed had been photographed, we repaired to Wetherspoons for a little luncheon. Here could be seen the manifestations of �Im trying! � Honest!�, as I studiously DIDN�T count how many pints of Guinness L drank and he bought me (unbidden) a side order of onion rings �because you like them�. Not sure any ACTUAL bridges were built, but there was definitely a bit of half-rotten scaffy plank balanced precariously across the ravine, which is a start I suppose.
After lunch we walked up the street to the market place as we�d heard there was a Sunday market, but it turned out to be a Car Bootie* so we didn�t even go in � we have enough of our OWN broken, worthless junk, without buying a load of someone else�s, thanks. In the party store opposite we found a whole load of bits and pieces for our forthcoming Halloween party � sadly, the things I really liked were too expensive but its given me some ideas for things I could make pretty cheaply�always supposing I get five minutes to myself over the next couple of weeks!
My sister (hearing we were in Chichester) had invited us to go and visit with her for a while as she�s not far from there, but I knew L wasn�t keen so, in a rare moment of generosity (See! See! See how Im trying to be nice!) I said we didn�t have to and we came back instead through Emsworth, which is a pretty enough sort of place in a seasidey, �not much point to it unless you have a boat� kind of way. L didn�t want to get an icecream and I didn�t want to queue up by myself so I had to be content with eating the Reece�s Peanut Butter Cups that Id bought in Chichester, from the funny little sweetie shop that sells foreign sweeties like Hershey Bars and Butterfingers and stuff like that. Id forgotten that they have a wee paper cup underneath the foil wrapper and, because I wasn�t paying attention and am greedy, I just stuffed the first one straight in my mouth, resulting in some undignified spitting out of bits of chocolatey, peanut butter smeared shards of masticated paper into the gutter like a mental old tramp lady.
Have a bit of pictorial evidence of my travels and then I�ll come back and tell you some more:
Chichester Cathedral
and from the other side
Its all about the groovy windows
and what you can see through em!
Emsworth (looking a bit more picturesque than it actually is)
and the teeniest tiniest of advent calendars (and a very big old lady hand)
Other stuff which has probably been happening includes:
OMIGOSH I�m so busy at work! The Food Tech teacher has Bell�s Palsy so Ive been covering HUGE amounts of Food Tech lessons. Unfortunately, as I don�t have the correct insurance, I am not allowed to take practical lessons with the kids at the moment so everything has to be on bookwork, which the kids HATE. The stupidest thing is, Ive had kids come in all week with bags of ingredients, thinking that they would be cooking, and Ive had to tell them we cant cook today, give them a piece of paper with some hastily scribbled instructions on and tell them to make the dishes when they got home. That would kind of be OK if the dishes they were supposed to be making were some kind of tricky, fancy high-skill type haute cuisine, but no. The dishes I have not been insured to show 13 year olds how to cook this week have included such specialities as Spaghetti Bolognese, Shepherds Pie and Cupcakes.
I finally got a chance to talk to the Catering teacher and ask her about the lesson plans for the Food Hygiene lessons I take once a week. I thought these lesson plans (seeing as theyre dated) were supposed to last up until Half Term, which is the end of next week. Turns out, these are the lesson plans to last up until Christmas (regardless of dates) which means I have been teaching Food Hygiene at twice the necessary speed. This would be bad enough with a group of bright children but I have 3 who have moderate learning difficulties and 3 with BESD (difficulties with Behaviour, Emotional or Social Development). That leaves 5 or 6 who are just either a bit thick or a bit naughty. Hardly Straight A students, shall we say. No wonder every lesson seems so rushed and Ive been making pages of extra notes at home for them to take away with them cos Ive been pretty certain that they haven�t really grasped the concepts.
It has led to some high comedy moments tho. Whilst none of them could confidently spell Staphyllococcus Aureus, they know where it likes to grow and can all chorus �DON�T PICK YOUR NOSE!� with gusto. Likewise, in trying to explain how salmonella gets onto/into eggshells, I got into a very convoluted discussion about the �exits� of a chicken (explaining that they just have the one hole which does for all urinary, fecal and reproductive �exits�, rather than the three more specific �exits� of a human woman), leading to one boy calling out from the back of the class �If eggs come out where pooh comes out, does that mean chickens like bum-sex?� I had to conclude that it might be wisest to ask a chicken on that one as the bedroom habits of farmyard fowl isn�t exactly my speciality.
The school were interviewing on Friday for a fourth person to join our team as one person resigned a couple of weeks ago. Yeh. Resigned after a disciplinary and then �went sick� for the whole of his notice period, which is just about the shittiest thing you could do to your team. Any sympathy I may have had over the reason for the original disciplinary (which wasn�t a huge amount but I was prepared to pay lip service to my colleague, because it�s the right thing to do) went straight out the window when I heard he�d been signed off �sick�. He dropped the three of us RIGHT in the klartz, especially when you consider that the other two have only been in the school since September and were still finding their feet. Anyway, he�s a shitbag for doing that and, for the record, I agree with everything he was being disciplined about, the shiftless wanker.
Hopefully they have appointed someone who can hit the ground running � I saw the candidates and they all looked AWFULLY young�.but then, everyone looks awfully young to me these days!
Needless to say three people doing the work of four doesn�t make for a lot of free periods and does make for getting home at night with my brain completely fried. Ordinarily this wouldn�t matter, of course, as my evenings often consist of nothing more taxing than cooking the dinner and talking about boys with Jooj but there has been the small matter of trying to choose a 6th Form College (16-18yrs) for Jooj so it has been endless rounds of information evenings, Open Days, conferences and all manner of comparisons to be made to ensure the maximum chances of �getting into Cambridge� which is pretty much Jooj�s raison d�etre these days. Its all astonishingly stressful for everyone and has led to some terse emails between me and Shagnasty, as we have different styles of parenting at the best of times without having the �should we tell our daughter what to study and where?� conundrum into the mix.
Oh, and we�ve been without internet for most of the week so this is all a bit ancient history now. Sorry �bout that. We gots our internets back now so I thought Id better post this raggedy arsed entry just as it is (ie unfinished) and then write something a bit more recent�possibly at the weekend.
Later
S
x
*Car Bootie = Car Boot Sale. In case you don�t have them where you live, this is when a whole bunch of people load the unwanted contents of their shed/attic/kitchen drawer/cupboard-under-the-stairs into the boot of their car, drive to a local gathering place, set up a wallpapering table at the back of their car and display the evidence of their bad taste and poor judgement for all the world to see (and hopefully to purchase). Many and varied items of pointless, broken rubbish can be bought there and there is always a predominance of Foot Spas and knackered-looking VHS tapes. Most people go home with more stuff than they set out with, and junk-shop owning pikeys swoop in before you�ve even unlocked your boot and try to get all your best stuff for 20p.
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