Ten Green Bottles

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I’m in the classroom setting up.
I’d spent three hours the previous afternoon collecting boxes of materials, files and forms.
Then I…
Lugged them out to my car.
Drove them to another centre
Lugged them out of the car.
Had all the resources I’d borrowed checked out and recorded.
Lugged them out to my car.
Drove home.
Lugged them out of the car.
I then spent all the evening preparing the work and materials ready for the lesson. Hours later when I’d finished there had been a hideous moment of crisis when I realised that what I’d prepared might not be compatible with the computers on their computer suite. Luckily, the teenager had been on hand to help. He had converted the documents and had saved them on my memory stick for me; while I, fraught with worry, had paced the room.
As I set out the little library of books for the students to borrow. I realised that I’d already spent six hours in preparation for this two hour lesson. I do the calculations. It’s less than the minimum wage.
‘Ah,’ someone says. ‘I have to tell you…’
I wait curious to hear.
‘Now, I’m afraid…’ she begins to run down the list of students in the class.
‘She won’t be here, her gran is ill,
‘She won’t be here, domestic problems
‘She won’t be here, as she’s in court today
‘Court?’ I say my eyes widening.
‘Oh, it’s not her, it’s her husband,’ her voice falls to a low whisper ‘he’s done something rather serious. It doesn’t look good.’
I daren’t ask what.
‘Now,’ she adds…
‘This one has to go at ten for a hospital appointment.
‘This one has to go at ten-thirty for a hospital appointment too.
She smiles and leaves the room.
I only have four students in the lesson.
One of them has brought in a curious large box.
It reminds me of the box that I’ve lugged into the room.
‘I’ve brought in some brand new books for you to borrow,’ I begin breezily. I indicate the ‘library.
‘I don’t like reading,’ one of them says in a low hostile grunt. ‘How can I get the time for reading with five children to look after?’
They go to look at the books. One of the students has already chosen a book and has written down her name.
‘She’s got the book I want to read,’ Mother of Five children complains as she reluctantly chooses a book.
The lesson begins. ‘I’ve got to go now,’ one of the students says. ‘I’ve a hospital appointment.’
‘So have I,’ Mother of Five says.
They leave.
It’s like ten green bottles.
I’m down to two.
‘I’m going now too,’ Lady with Big Box says. ‘I’ve arranged to talk to the nursery children about my snakes.’
Snakes!
She leaves with the box.
I’m down to one.
It’s her birthday.
‘Happy birthday,’ I say.
Birthday Girl does an exam practice paper. We mark it together. She passes.
And I lug my things back to the car.

Ribbons and Bows

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I’ve cut the grass!

This is on the scale of things not a major achievement, but for me feeling like I do at the moment, it is there on a par with much lesser feats such as scaling Mount Everest or swimming across the Pacific Ocean twice on the same day, naked!

My lawnmower with its girly ribbons tied where the handles reaches the machine had to be dragged up out of the cellar.

The cellar is only ever visited by very desperate meter readers.

So fearful a place is it that meter readers will only give the slightest of taps on the front door, wait for the briefest of nanoseconds, before quickly scurrying off to the sanctuary of the nice clean cellar next door.

Mine is the sort of cellar where you expect to find dead bodies falling down upon you from one of its many dark corners, a cellar where you expect to see rats scuttling across your slippers, and where you know for certain you are walking on crystallised Eau de Daisy.

Daisy had once lived next door and was ninety something before she was taken away by her son from the house and garden that she loved and plonked in a nursing home.

Something once went badly wrong with her drains. The water that rose up in my cellar was not the spring water that I thought I could bottle and sell, but instead was Eau de Daisy a far more lethal concoction.

That was years and years ago, but the cellar floor has still not lost its musty dampness, and that strange aroma that still seeps through the floorboards into the rest of the house ‘perfuming’ each room with a certain je ne sais quoi.

I force Meter readers to take off their shoes after they’ve read the meter and to carry them back to the front door.

This doesn’t go down well.

They curse me for costing them precious seconds and for making them reveal their designer socks.

Hence their timid taps on my door on future visits for fear of me hearing them; and the hurried silent postings of their, ‘Came to read your meter today but you were out,’ (Thank God) cards through the letter box.

My lawnmower hangs on a hook in this cellar with its dusty ribbon bows. I yank it from its nails and carry it up the steps. It protests of course, swinging out to catch door jambs and walls as I struggle to carry it up the steep brick steps and try to avoid tripping on old paint tins that form a guard of honour on the cellar steps.

Once on the ‘lawn’ it lies on the elephantine grass deciding whether or not it is going to work when I send that first tingle of electricity through its wires.

But before that I do one more thing.

The bows are part not the original design. Nor have I put them on to the machine to girlify it or to make it look pretty as I mow the grass.

They are to stop the contraption from falling to bits.

The essential plastic bits that held the machine together pinged off into the undergrowth years before, and the ribbons have since done the trick.

The sun was shining and I was feeling quite optimistic despite the Russian cold that the teenager had given me after his trip to Moscow, a couple of weeks ago; and despite doing an on line quiz that stated cheerily that ‘You have mild to moderate depression.’ I was determined to cut the grass!

My energy level is rather flat, so to have any chance at all of cutting the grass I had written a ‘to do list’.

I’d broken everything down into lots of easy steps.

The next step said fix the plastic thingy-me.

This had been a eureka moment, the discovery of one of the long lost plastic bits while working on the fallen wall.

I read my instructions:

Find scissors… I did.

Snip off one ribbon from lawn mower… I did.

Fix plastic thingy-me…

Written down it looked easy, but from long experience I know that easy jobs are often the hardest to accomplish.

Fix plastic thingy-me...I wasn’t very hopeful, but I did in seconds. I was so pleased. I couldn’t believe it.

I read the next instructions on my ‘to do’ list.

Put spare plastic blades in pocket … I did.

The Flymo would now fly.

And it did.

The machine woke up, sent a dreadful racket reverberating off all the brick buildings; shook woodpigeons off their roosts with its cacophony; and did nothing at all for World Peace, but it was working…

For five seconds.

A plastic blade went.

‘Aha,’ I said, and quickly replaced it.

Ten seconds later a second blade went.

‘Aha,’ I said, and replaced it.

In the game of out-witting the lawnmower, I was winning.

‘Aha.’

The machine gave up on the broken blade tactic.

Then there was just the home stretch left to do.

Nearly done.

Then the lawnmower lurched in on itself. There was a ping, as the plastic thingy-me freed itself, flew on a perfect trajectory through the air, describing a perfect parabola and landed with a smug splash in the deepest part of the pond.

Lawnmower 1 WWM 0

I went inside for more ribbon and knotted the bows. The lawnmower resplendent with its tied bunches, finished the job.

I returned the lawnmower back into the depths of the cellar.

‘Now, whatever you do just push a card through that door, you know the one I mean, that strange woman’s house: the one who likes to see the colour of your socks.’ I imagine the veteran gas meter reader telling the new recruit.

I can imagine the wide-eyed fear in the new recruit’s eyes …’You mean she actually puts ribbons on her lawn mower?’

‘Aye, mad as a hatter that one.

I imagine their collective shudders as I read my ‘to do’ list and follow its instructions:

Make a cup of tea.

And I do.

Under a Cerulean Blue Sky

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‘So you are all likely to be made redundant at the end of July.’ The plump pink shirted man announced to the group.

This was day one of my new ‘job’.

The previous week I’d been through a forty-five minute interview. Interviews are becoming more difficult. Not only were there questions to answer but I also had to teach the two people interviewing me.

‘Just a five minute lesson,’ I was reassuringly told on the phone. ‘I’ll send you the details.’

The details demanded a ten minute lesson.

Hours of work went into preparing that ten minute lesson. When I pressed ‘print’ the printer somehow sensing the importance and urgency of the request suddenly chose that exact moment to run out of ink.

Hours of work went into preparing a revised ten minute lesson, which this time would involve taking my lap top into the interview too.

I am hopeless in an interview situation.

I can actually feel the metal shutters slowly coming down in my mind as I sit opening and closing my mouth like a gormless goldfish while I struggle to think of an answer to their last question,

‘What made you decide to go into teaching?’

Can I tell them about my careers guidance interview when in a poky office I was told, ‘You’re pretty and will be married in couple of years’ time. It will be a waste of money you going to university. Teaching is your best option. Here’s the form. Can you see who’s next?’

Instead I can hear my muffled voice coming from somewhere within. There are distorted sentences being voiced, I clutch at one and reiterate it changing just one word.

‘I love being with people and helping them.’ I say.

It sounds insincere.

The interviewers have a tick sheet.

Sometimes I hit the right word and an interviewer’s pencil checks the sheet and I am rewarded with a nod and a smile. The word ‘assessment,’ was greeted in such a way. More typical is the critical frown and the stubborn refusal of the hovering pencil to move.

I begin my ten minute lesson.

I’m teaching vocabulary: the names of colours. I’ve brought in my paint brushes and little watercolour squares of paint. Within moments they are painting cerulean blue, alizarin crimson, viridian green, burnt umber and yellow ochre. The names of the colours are beautiful and we search the picture on my lap top for traces of each shade.

With the lesson over more frustrating questions follow which I struggle to answer.

I leave eager to feel once again the wind in my hair.

I smile wanly at the next person to be interviewed.

‘Good luck,’ I say.

Later, I was amazed to be offered the job.

‘Now don’t take this the wrong way,’ the voice said on the other end of the phone.

Immediately I’m taking it the wrong way.

‘What we liked about you… is that you are so… ’
There’s a pause and I wait. I’m winging in words of my own. ‘Creative, inventive, enthusiastic?’

‘ …gentle.’ The voice declares.

I am stunned.

It’s the very quality that cost me my last job: an inability to say ‘boo’ to a goose and to stand up to a bullying Head teacher.

‘We’d like to offer you two hours’ teaching a week.’

I am shocked. There had been a vagueness about the hours on offer, but I’d expected more than that.

I’d gone through all that effort and preparation just to secure two hours’ work a week!

Still somebody wants me, and my fragile self-esteem is rejoicing.

Now at the conference that I’ve been invited to attend I am being told that redundancies now loom.

I’ve been in the ‘job’ for half a day!

I smile wryly at the woman who’d been at the same interview and is now attending the same conference.

‘Never mind,’ she says. ‘Good luck!’

We are the only ones laughing softly and wearily in that stunned room.

The last of the Bumble Bees

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There was a patch of sunlight in the garden and I dashed outside to stand in it and warm myself up a little. It seemed incredible that only a few days ago there was another blanket of snow again.

On a geranium leaf was a bumble bee. Knowing how rare theses beasties are, I crouched by it for a closer look.

That is when the battle began.

A honey bee dived down directly onto the bumble bee. The bumble bee did its best to swipe the attacker away with its legs. Within moments the honey bee returned and attacked again. I tried to swipe the honey bee away risking the wrath of both bees. However, the honey bee was not to be deterred. It dodged the flimsy grass stalk I was waving at it and attacked again and again, dive bombing the bumble bee and then chasing it off into my neighbour’s garden.

I had never seen such deliberate, determined, aggressive behaviour before between bees. Perhaps there is so little nectar available that the honey bees are defending the little that there is.

Have killer honey bees arrived in England?

Have I seen the last of the bumble bees?

I backed off as more honey bees patrolled the area like airborne sharks and headed back into the safer darkness inside the house, muttering my mantra:
'Cowards live longer!'

'Tis Done

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Freedom!
‘Tis done.
The hardest part was returning the laptop. It had entwined itself into my soul and had to be wrenched out of my reluctant arms. I had earlier stared at the keys and the mouse pad that my fingers had worn down to a shine with great sadness.
All that work.
When I finally left the building there was no one there to witness my ignominious exit past the recycling skips.
I’d even accidentally managed to miss my own lunchtime leaving do. I was sitting instead in the grounds of St Andrew’s Hospital thinking of John Clare and trying to see the things through his eyes such as the old church and the game of crochet on the green.
I returned to the leftovers.
Only one of the three members of staff who were leaving had been present for the surprise lunch. One had been rounded up by the photocopying machine, I could not be found and arrived late, and the third wasn’t even at work that day so she stood even less of a chance of being surprised.
I was given elephants.
Beautiful wooden elephants.
There was another staff do, an evening meal at Red Hot. It was my first time there and the chocolate fountain alone won me over.
‘Chocolate comes from a bean,’ someone explained to me. ‘And this is a grape, and if you cover it with chocolate then you are getting two of the five portions of fruit and vegetables a day.’
I loved the logic.
So with a grape skewered on a stick, I happily coated it with chocolate from the fountain…delicious!
And so beginneth a new chapter…