Whassssssup? Ahem.

Whasssssssup? That's a little joke, by the way. Bedders' cousin has just downloaded WhatsApp and I've been tempted more than once to send him a message saying 'Whassssssapp?' before I'm reminded that he is merely twenty three, Australian and the Budweiser Whassssssup advert is therefore Not On His Cultural Radar. Unlike me, who stuck a load of Frankie and Louis the Lizard stickers all over my Year 13 school planner. Why? I didn't even like beer. At the time. Right now, I'd kill for one. 

So I'm back at work and a little bit wide-eyed, as predicted. The plan I'd formed of getting into the groove of next September's daily routine in readiness for when I do the afternoon creche run requires Herculean levels of self-control. I had this golden vision of front-loading my days from 7:30 then trotting out of the door at no later than 4:30. So far the 7:30 thing's going OK but the 4:30...well, today I left at 6:37, which is exactly 17 minutes after the creche shuts 45 minutes of public transportness away. Brillo. I wonder, does it actually shut? With the baby locked inside? If the driver of the 44 tram takes the fancy to declare 'Terminus!" at the Musee de Tram as he did tonight and I'm stuck 25 minutes walk from the bairn, what happens? The answer is simple, I know. I just need to leave earlier. Work smarter. Make every second count. Work out how to use the new learning platform. I'm pretty sure it could revolutionise my working life if I allowed it. 

Next week my 'How To Not Freak Out About Giving Birth' course begins, so there'll be a night or two a week where Bedders and I go to sit in a room with other expectant parents and learn how to breathe and say no to an epidural politely in French* from half seven until TEN O'CLOCK AT NIGHT. SERIOUSLY. This is a course for women who are at least six months pregnant and they're KEEPING US AWAKE UNTIL 10pm. 

(*PS I might not say no to the epidural. I might say HELL YEAH. It is entirely one's own choice as to whether one has an epidural or not, obviously. I'm just conscious that, in Belgium, about 99.9999% of women have one because "it's the norm" and if I decide I want one, I want one because I'm reaching cross-eyed levels of agony and begging Adam to finish me off with a spade like a hoary TB-ridden badger - not because "it's the norm.")

I haven't even had a proper week at work and I'm STILL moaning - I was in the Hague for two days visiting a school and was astonished at the utter professionalism and enthusiasm and DAZZLING TALENT of the Head of Department there. He's in charge of Drama, too, and he's directing the school play this year which is - get this - a musical version of Measure for Measure, played as a straight comedy with no tricky questions about Isabella's victim status or anything else but in a rather avant-garde twist each of the main characters has their very own disco anthem. The Duke's is Could it Be I'm Falling in Love?, apparently (how completely fabulous is this song?) The man is a genius. So I left there feeling very inspired and a little bit sleepy (actually fell asleep on the train, woke up, saw I was in Antwerp, thought I was back in Holland and snorted in panic before I realised Antwerp is in Belgium, doh) and a teeeeeny bit inadequate.  

BUT IT IS FAR TOO EARLY IN THE TERM FOR ALL OF THIS NONSENSE. Let's look on the bright side, eh? Tomorrow is Friday. I will do better at leaving earlier. And sometimes kids leave nice things in your classroom just to say 'Hi' and 'Welcome back' and 'I like Tracey Emin too.'

This is what it's all about, no? 

Holiday-ay

I mean holiday-ay in the manner of a Madonna singalong. Thinking about it, though, personal gusto reserves are pretty depleted after an eight-week half-term and I have a bit of a sore throat so if I were to sing it I'd probably sound more like Robbie in The Wedding Singer than Lady Madge. 

Everybody spread the word
I live in my sister's baaaaaasement....

We've had two training days (two!) Thursday and Friday this week, which was a blessed moment of inspiration on somebody's part. Nothing puts a body of staff in a collective sunny mood like wearing jeans, eating free pain au chocolat and having some time to climb down from the top of one's tree and have a bit of a tidy up. My office is spotless and the world is MINE for the taking!

We also had the obligatory pre-half-term training session, except this one was really rather good. The speaker (this guy, formerly of The Bill and Casualty, ooo) won me over pretty quickly when he began with a Hamlet quote on self-doubt - "I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams" - and continued by using Henry V as an example of inspirational leadership. 

Henry V. Worrrr. The good stuff. 

Lots was learned, including the Important Soundbite that sometimes people need to unburden themselves - also known as whinging - and THAT'S OK. I mean, if they're genuinely trying to derail fundamental ways of working then it probably needs dealing with, but everyone needs a good old moan now and again. If instead you vow to hate them forever and record their spiteful words in your Little Book of Personal Grudges, you're actually being more of a Macbeth than a Henry V AND WE ALL KNOW HOW THAT TURNED OUT, DON'T WE?

So I've had two days of sort-out time and inspo and I'm currently busying myself by making a sign for my office door which reads 'DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL - GO AWAY' for when I'm having a night-before-Agincourt moment. 

We're up at 3:30am tomorrow to get a flight to Spainland. A week in the company of leathery 11am brandy-loving Brits awaits.  I cannot wait to be one of their number.  

30 Thoughts On Turning 30

1) The best advice I’ve ever had on relationships was from my dad. “Better to be upset once than be upset a lot,” he counselled sagely as I sobbed down the phone. I didn’t think he was right at the time, but he was. Dads know best.

2) When you find the right person it should feel like coming home and being hit by a train all at the same time. And then a big Batman-esque POW or perhaps KABOOM pops up on your mental screen. 

picture

3) I’m so very glad I don’t need to date anymore, on the grounds of being far too prissy and awkward. ‘Date’ - pah, even the mention of it demands an eyeroll. I enjoy living vicariously through others, though. 

4) Leos get shit done. Maybe not perfectly but hey, stuff gets finished. If you need attention to detail you’d be better off speaking to my perfectionist Virgo sister. 

5) TK Maxx does my head in. There’s too much crap everywhere. I can’t be bothered with the sifting. 

6) Be nice to the admin staff, the IT geeks, the maintenance team and the cleaners at your workplace. They’re the people you’ll need to turn a crisis into a triumph.

7) On a related note, people who are rude to waiters (or anyone else on the minimum wage, for that matter) are dicks. No exceptions. 

'garcon! coffee!' 'garcon means boy.'

8) Find a religion or a spiritual way of going on that works for you. Quakers is pretty interesting. It’s full of Catholics who need a rest. 

9) Hating your face or your body or your elbow or whatever is an extraordinarily pointless waste of energy.

10) Be confident. It is SO unfathomably sexy. 

11) I know; easier said than done. Fake it till you make it. 

12) Although if you have Celtic skintones and gingery-brown hair, fake tan will not work for you. Embrace your bluey-whiteness.

13) And try some exercise. I speak as a former PE note girl who discovered running and the fact that it meant you could eat what you wanted (within reason). I was sold.

14) I’ve worked in state-run and private schools and the biggest difference between them isn’t the class sizes (exaggerated) or the staff (no discernible gap overall) but rather the confidence private education instills in its young charges. I think top-quality parenting can pull off a similar feat.   

15) Don’t ring in sick if you’re not sick. That makes you a prize-winning knobhead on wheels.

16) Frame things properly. You’re an adult, ergo just take pictures to a pictureframer. Yes, it’s more expensive, but clippy frames from Ikea are an abomination. 

17)  I think that Irish speech - the syntax, vocabulary and pronunciation - is beautiful. “How’s the quare fella?” “It’s hateful, so it is.” “TheLORDsaveusandblessus.” “Vee-hi-cle.” Perfect grammar is overrated (did I just say that?)

It'll all become clear if you click on the link above

18) Listening to Christy Moore’s ‘Missing You’ blows my mind from the viewpoint that people used to leave home and not be able to go back for YEARS. ‘I’ve been missing you/I’d give all for the price of the flight,’ he sings. Even if I was in New Zealand I could slap a credit card down the check-in desk and insist I fly. 

19) There’s definitely a place in my heart for folk music. And dodgy country and western. Praise be for Spotify’s Private Session option. 

20) I’m with Caitlin Moran on the writing-about-feminism front. Treat Samantha Brick like the weird fucking post-modernist joke she is (Moran’s words) - i.e. with disdain and a bit of light-hearted banter. She’s ridiculous, yes. Therefore she doesn’t need your anger. 

21) My mother had a Childhood Of Austerity, which we rib her about occasionally when she’s making sandwiches for a car journey or stalking the yellow sticker aisle in Sainsbury’s. She would express grave doubts that her purchase-related guilt has rubbed off onto me, but it has.  

22) Class is endlessly interesting. ‘We’re all middle class now.’ Hmm. 

23) Another endlessly interesting pop-psychology topic: birth order, and birth order combined with gender. I am SUCH a middle-child-girl. 

23) When we were little (say, about eight) my brother got locked in a toilet in a convent. Several nuns tried to pick the lock and one attempted a shoulder barge. It remains one of the most surreal moments of my life. 

24) My granddad spent eighteen months in a hospice dying of cancer and my mum would bring him bags of boiled sweets. ‘But granddad’s diabetic,’ I remember saying. ‘There comes a point when you take pleasure where you find it,’ was her answer. Fair enough.

25) The power of the pen is remarkable. Not long ago I received a hand-written postcard from Alan Bennett. Write to people.  

That says 'From Alan Bennett'. Wah!

26) If you have a reasonable income, a busy life and you’re uncomfortable with the bathroom being dirty, employ a cleaner. I guarantee you, the 27 euros or sterling equivalent you’ll pay out each week is worth far, far more than the time, the resentment and the arguments you’d otherwise engage in over the situation. 

27) Spend the time you would have spent cleaning the bathroom reading a quality newspaper. Occasionally read the paper first rather than the glossy supplements. Feel cleverer.

28) As you get older, you might not make as many friends as you did in your university years and beginning at work, but when you do make a good adult friend it's bloody brilliant. You do more ‘making do’ when you’re younger. 

29) Facebook is annoying, yes. Do it or don't do it. But please don't get your knickers in a twist about it. 

30) If you’re in your 20s, get on. Whatever it is you’re doing - working, studying, having children, whatever - just push on with it. Do it well.

**

I had an inordinate amount of fun doing this. Basically, I saw this over on twitter and laughed my back off, and then a likeable someone retweeted this which I thought was just marvellous and I wanted to do my own version. I think everyone should have a go. 

Birthday countdown has BEGUN. 16 days to go :/ 

Advice for Writers

my pinterest

It is Book Week at school, people. Cue my moaning on Twitter about having to find a literature-related fancy dress costume for Friday (I'm toying with plaits and a sign hanging around my neck reading THIS GIRL TELLS LIES). 

I could get a bit evangelical here, but I won't - suffice to say that it's a real pleasure to work in a school that sincerely values reading as opposed to to tagging it onto the bottom of a whole-school agenda to satiate an Ofsted inspector who's been told to look out for some literacy. Oo, a poster with a book on it! In a room that used to be a library but is now full of computers! Ahem. 

Liz Lochhead was the surprise guest speaker today for Key Stage 5 students. Needless to say they were studious and thoughtful and appreciative and asked some intelligent questions.

One boy who asked if she'd written her poetry with the intention of twenty students in a classroom somewhere poring over every detail of it. "Och, no!" she said. "I didn't write it to mek you suffer!" Cue laughter. But then she said, "I wrote it because some people might like it. Some people won't. And you have to find something that you like in whatever you're studying and enjoy. Within the constraints of exam board requirements and all that crap." Cue more laughter. 

She read some of her poems and talked about them. She started with Bairnsang and the male patriarchy in Literature ("The way it had to be said/was as if you were posh, grown-up, male, English and dead.") and finished on patriarchy, too, with Men Talk ("Women natter, women nag/women niggle niggle niggle") - which I didn't realise she'd written after reading a book by Dale Spender.

And I was in heaven. And she signed my book (nerd). 

And then she gave out some advice for writers. It's reproduced below. 

This woman speaks the truth. Enjoy. 

***

All the good advice about writing is very simple.

So straightforward it's all been said before, but it's probably worth reminding ourselves of. I know I have to tell myself all this, and I have to do this every time I get going on something new.

1. Write what really interests you, not what you think you ought to be interested in.

2. The old five senses. See it, touch it, taste it, smell it, hear it. Turn yourself into it, said Ted Hughes, and the words will look after themselves. Well, certainly I have to turn all my censors, inhibitors and ego, and false sense of myself as a writer, and certainly any attempts at cleverness off - in the first draft at least.

See, it's only when you read back what you have written down, tasting and testing the words as words and sounds you can see where you have captured a bit of life in the language, an image, a wee detail - and that won't necessarily be in the bit that felt like it flowed or had the fancy words, but often in the bit that you struggled over and in the end, och, just put down what would have to do for now....

3. Throw away all the bits that don't have bits of life in them, keep these surprisingly honest and vivid bits, the bits that, to tell the truth, surprised you - mibbe by their simplicity - and start again with them.

4. Don't explain. You don't have to give the reasons for going there or the co-ordinates on a map. Consider cutting off the beginning and the end paragraph or stanza of what you have written - and do this once you think it's finished and cut down to the bone already. No 'vamping till ready', no summing up. Just trust your reader to be right there with you in the middle of the place you are writing about. Get in, get out and don't linger said Raymond Carver. 

5. Don't try and describe your feelings. An emotion named is an emotion obliterated from any text. Stick to those five sound senses, stick to objects and actions, what's done, what's said. Get this right and all the feeling in the world will be in this. 

6. It's all in the details, in the particular. Small things. Plain words, probably, But which ones? Ah, I said the advice was simple, I didn't say it was easy...

7. Enjoy yourself. Struggle with not enjoying yourself until you begin to, very much. 

(If I can't, or won't, it's usually because I'm not obeying Rule Number One.) 

The Simple Things

Sometimes, it's the simple things.

Like being so ridiculously excited to teach a lesson because you've managed to squeeze some Irish Republicanism in there along with a visual treat in the form of Cillian Murphy.

CUE THE JURASSIC PARK THEME MUSIC.

And so tomorrow my Year 12s will watch this film trailer as a precursor to the question 'So what do you already know about the Irish Civil War?'

(not much, I fear. But I'm prepared to be proven wrong.)

And, in the process, I've been reminded of what a brilliant film it is. And the beauty of Cillian Murphy.

Strange things happen when you google 'The Beauty of Cillian Murphy'. Including this. Scroll down until you see the puppet. With a leading statement like that, how can you resist?

I have been away. Sozzatronic. But I have some photos and some book recommendations and things to share as soon as things get a bit quieter. Hopefully, a calmer period is around the corner.

Oh, how I long to sit in my pyjamas and watch The Thick of It! Roll on this weekend.

Word Magpie

Two bookish snippets that are gnawing at me.

"This is one moment
But know that another
Shall pierce you with a sudden painful joy."

-T.S. Eliot

//one moment//

Which leads seamlessly into this one:

"So when people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle-classes, or that it shouldn't be read at school because it's irrelevant, or any of the strange and stupid things that are said about poetry and it splace in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language - and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers - a language powerful enough to say how it is. It isn't a hiding place. It is a finding place."

-Jeneatte Winterson, 'Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal?'

//hold that thought//

I love these words and what they do to me. They make my heart beat a little bit faster. They fill me with conviction and remind me of ideals. Ah, man.

//feed your imagination//

No more eggs or yoghurts, please.

Hello. Remember me? Jesus. That was a bit of a mental week and a half.

Tonight I left work 'early' - quarter to six - after arriving 'late'. That'd be quarter past seven. I've been doing similar for the last week. Then arriving home, eating a spartan/weird tea of oatcakes/blue cheese/Twirl Bites (Bedders has been away, hence any kind of food-regularity has gone out of the window) and marking like a machine. 

I've been begging Di, HR Manager and Queen Of The School (I Heart Di) for an hour's cover here and there for my non-exam classes (which amount to the princely sum of two hours a week) to sort out a myriad of issues it'd be wholly unprofessional to go into on here.

essays

I've been gritting my teeth a lot, ignoring bellyaches and having Actual Dreams About Controlled Assessment. Scratch that - Nightmares. Oh dear.

But hey. Stuff is sorted. Ish.

All that, and I've rented out my house in Leeds, been to Newcastle, saw Don Williams (his voice is a total parody of a country singer's - like honey and cigarette smoke - "Sing it again, that's real purdy..."), been to Manchester to meet up with Richard and company (farmer by day, wedding chauffer by night), eaten a really, really bad Chinese and got a BUS back to Leeds instead of the train - I almost wept - had a medical for my new job (fighting fit, huzzah) and fretting about my total lack of inclination to go running. But tonight, though, I welcomed back some normality.

Hello, normal life. I've missed you.

I've been for a slightly better run. I've voted. OK, so I don't do it every day but it still makes me feel like me. I've read (yesterday's) paper and a bit of Private Eye. I've embraced my seventeen year old by spotifying some Skunk Anansie after hearing it on my new radio station of choice, Absolute90s ("She's a LESBIAN, you know," I remember people saying knowingly at school. Oh, the scandal). 

And Bedders if off to Brussels on Sunday while I see out the rest of the school year. Yikes.

I think I'm a bit fraught; I think he is too. I got upset over his note for the milkman this morning.

"Could you change the order to one pint of skimmed Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday? No more eggs or yoghurts, please."

A bloody note for the bloody milkman. Sob.

Anyway, I'm blethering. I was thinking about literary references to missing someone. I thought of Elizabeth Bishop. 

One Art

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster,

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three beloved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

-- Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) a disaster.

Ah, Bisto. Heavenly. I dug out my old lecture book to find the notes that accompanied it. Oo, Elizabeth Bishop - "sceptical and stoic" - "language increasingly restrained and emotional intensity behind it intensifies" - "Influenced by surrealism in Paris, but didn't succumb entirely to the dream world - too much of a New England Yankee-woman for that!" - "Philsophy in Bishop's writing ISN'T metaphysical - if it exists, it's empirical". You, like, learn stuff at University, don't you? And have time to think about stuff, hmm? I kind of wish I had hours to go through all of my old notes. Maybe I will. Maybe that'll be a Bedders-is-in-Brussels-and-I-live-on-my-own project. Along with making that wedding album, writing some stuff down, doing an online course on the iGCSE and IB and emptying the house of all my possessions...why aye. Not a bother.

I shall cheer up soon. I promise.

A book that will make your heart stop.

I was offering an trainee teacher some advice on interview questions today.

"What did they ask you? he asked. "In your first teaching interview?"

So I thought back. And I thought. And I stroked my chin and thought some more.

And I really couldn't remember.

I remember my interview for the PGCE. I remember the man who would become my lecturer entering into an impromptu role play about behaviour management and acting out the part of a 15 year old boy. A fifteen year old boy who hates poetry.

He scrumpled up a piece of paper on his desk and threw it at me.

"That's what I think of your fucking handout," he said. "What are you going to do?"

Ah. Rightio.

But that's another story.

Thinking about it now, at my first school interview, they must have asked me about classroom management. About assessment. About what makes a good lesson. About what makes a crap lesson. They must have asked, 'Why THIS school?'

But there's only one question I can actually remember.

"So, Laura. What are you reading at the minute?"

The words couldn't tumble out quickly enough. "Oh my God. The End of the Affair by Graham Greene. Have you read it?"

The Head shook his head.

And I started blethering on about it. About Maurice and Sarah and their torrid affair. About its post-War bleakness. About what a desolate read it was, and how fierce. About the tug of war between Catholic morals and the wartime spirit of "eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die!" About Sarah's death, and Maurice's terrible realisation that his love is shabby and shallow. Maybe not just his love - maybe all love. What the hell is love, anyway? About Greene's wider messages about transience and human selfishness and dishonesty. I imagine I didn't tell him that I'd dropped it in the bath. Or that it appealed to my highly-developed sense of morbidity.

Or how I was scrawling quotations from it in my little book of the time.

“The Church offers privileges, Mr. Miles, as well as responsibilities. There are special Masses for our dead. Prayers are regularly said. We remember our dead,” he added, and I thought angrily, how do you remember them? Your theories are all right. You preach the importance of the individual. Our hairs are all numbered, you say, but I can feel her hair on the back of my hand; I can remember the fine dust of hair at the base of the spine as she lay face down on my bed. We remember our dead too, in our way.”

What outrage. How dare you claim your cool pious grasp on my love was greater than my physical knowledge of her? I knew every inch of her. She was mine. Powerful, eh?

But that fire doesn't last. Time gets us all in the end. Greene tells us so, the miserable bugger.

“Oh, she doesn’t belong to anybody now,” he said, and suddenly I saw her for what she was—a piece of refuse waiting to be cleared away; if you needed a bit of hair you could take it, or trim her nails if nail trimmings had value to you. Like a saint’s her bones could be divided up—if anybody required them. She was going to be burned soon, so why shouldn’t everybody have what he wanted first? What a fool I had been during three years to imagine that in any way I had possessed her. We are possessed by nobody, not even by ourselves.”

Oh, and this. It's beautiful.

"...but when I tried to remember her voice saying 'don't worry,' I found I had no memory for sounds. I couldn't imitate her voice. I couldn't even caricature it: when I tried to remember it, it was anonymous – just a woman's voice. The process of forgetting her had set in."

It's absolutely stuffed to the gills with hit-the-nail-on-the-head writing. Note the indiscriminate, crazed quoting. I wolfed this book down, I tell you.

AND TODAY I HAVE FOUND OUT THAT THERE IS A FILM VERSION.

WITH RALPH FIENNES IN IT.

Oh, what a lovely coat.

Gasp.

“Sometimes I don’t recognise my own thoughts.”

OK, so perhaps you don't want to kill yourself over Christmas. But when you're feeling like you want to indulge your maudlin side (just me, then?) I thoroughly recommend this gritty beauty.

Some say love's a little boy...

This week, work has required me to get to grips with WH Auden.

Now let it be known, I like miserable poets. Particularly miserable British and Irish poets of the 1930s and 40s.

Miserable poets are well and truly my thing. I like the way they deal with misery. It's elegant and understated. I think you've already heard my thoughts on Thomas Hardy - now THERE was a miserable bastard - but, hey, each to their own. I once worked with a teacher who rated Dave Pelzer as a writer. That was uncomfortable. And if you share that view, well, I think it's best we never meet. Soz.

I'm not denying that he went through a horrific experience. However, he's also responsible the horrific Airport Fiction experience I go through once or twice a year. Seriously, have you ever tried to find a book that isn't about child abuse at an airport WH Smith? I've taken to hiding them behind Lonely Planet guides and naff autobiographies. Pelzer spawned an entire genre of fiction that didn't previously exist - FOR A GOOD REASON. Who wants to read about child abuse? I don't get it. People give these books to each for Christmas, for God's sake. Christ. And Christmas is statistically an annual suicide high-point. Coincidence? I think not.

But I digress. Miserable poets float my boat. So much so that when the English department decided to run a after-school enrichment club for clever kids eager beavers and we each had to nominate a Specialist Subject, Mastermind-style, I went with the misery.

"Miserable 1940s Poets. I'll think of a better name."

And of all the miserable poets, Auden is probably my favourite.

Probably. Possibly. Bah, too hard.

But it ain't all sad, is it? Look at this cheeky little devil.

you should probably join pinterest. it's wicked.

(although originally from here)

We don't teach this beauty at AS level. But I did consider it as a wedding reading

It's so jolly and bouncy. Musing on the matter of love, the line 'Is it usually sick on a swing?' never fails to raise a smile. And the final stanza is near-perfection.

When it comes, will it come without warning
Just as I'm picking my nose?
Will it knock on my door in the morning,
Or tread in the bus on my toes?
Will it come like a change in the weather?
Will its greeting be courteous or rough? Will it alter my life altogether?
O tell me the truth about love.

(read its jolly entirety here)

***

Some Monday Auden-loving.

Residentials

Remember those? Residentials? A.K.A. School trips where y'all sleep over?

Dorms. The air heavy with the scent of Impulse bodyspray. Copious amounts of salt-and-vinegar chipsticks. Midnight makeovers with a poor selection of cosmetics pilfered from mums and sisters. Conversations about which boys you fancied the most. Yup. They were ace.

'But I thought they didn't exist any more!' I hear you cry. Didn't they happen back in ye olde happy days before where-there's-blame-there's-a-claim and health and safety went bonkers?

Well, you're wrong. I'm on one. With Year 8. Destination: Ullswater, the Lake District. Objective: tucker those little so-and-sos out.

Yesterday we walked ridiculous numbers of kilometres with heavy packs on. It took 7 hours. Then we camped, cooked some hideous packet food and slept. Woke up in the pissing rain. Got dressed and packed up in the pissing rain. Sang happy birthday to Kirsten (aged 13) in the pissing rain. Walked for 2 hours in the pissing rain. Clamboured up a gorge. It'd stopped raining but I was up to thigh-depth in freezing water so it didn't really matter by that point.

But who am I kidding? I'm loving it. It's ace. It's a bit like Stand By Me up here. The kids are coming-of-age and growing up and going through emotional turmoils and enjoying the outdoors and gaining confidence and learning stuff. Woah. Seriously, I might shed a tear before the week is out. Lying alone in a tent with no mobile signal or light or book (it got soaked through) allows you just to... think. And mebbes get a bit philosophical. I might post more on that later.

Oh yes. School trips are just as good as they were. Even though these days the minibuses have seatbelts - no more cries of 'link arms, kids!'. And the teachers aren't getting blotto on wine like they were back in the day. Well, not completely blotto anyway.

The picture: lo! The view from my tent this morning. Getting a brew on, inniiiiiit.

Death By Boredom

The best idea I've ever had: official.