Saturday, 4 December 2010

Snow and Sleigh Balls (yes, balls)

Unless like me you live in the (un)lucky pocket of England north of London, that has had a mere eunuch’s-inch worth of snow, you have probably found your school closed for a day or five recently. What you wish for is one overnight splurge that buries everything for a couple of days, forcing decisiveness from your Head in closing the school and letting you know early enough so that you can issue yourself a return ticket from bed to toilet for your morning wee.

What you often get, though, is that measure of snow which still allows your school to open, but which makes your journey a treacherous bastard. Once you’ve skidded (both inside and out) your way into work, throwing off the logic of your natural atheism to embrace the ancient human vulnerability that forces you to prayer to something for deliverance, you slide into school and beseech the same god to sabotage the boiler or at least send the sun out soon to melt the stuff before you have to go home. But if that cruel deity dumps more of the white stuff on you, then who will know your fate? There’ll be no Han Solo trekking out on a tauntaun to find you if you’re not home on time.

Then there’s the day to get through. Staff commitment has been tested. You applaud the teacher who has travelled by 5 forms of public transport across three counties to arrive on time; and you curse the colleague who lives a 5-minute walk away, but who stays at home, because the uncoordinated cluts fell over on the leaves in Autumn and is therefore too fucking spastic to negotiate a quarter mile of snow-lined pavement. At least these days you don’t find yourself covering her lesson.

Then you curse the fact that you’re on break duty today in that sector of the school site best designed for snowball fights. And yet the Head has decreed that there should be no throwing of snow. Trying to enforce that will be like trying to enforce a ban on buggery in a boarding school.

But you get through it and the snow continues for a few days and then it turns to ice and the snowball fights cause carnage, so that there is blood and limbs everywhere, and the playground resembles a white-washed version of the Somme. Kids are carted off for stitches, amputations and trauma-therapy and the world looks like someone’s dropped a giant dishwasher and shit flavoured Slush Puppy on it.

And then it’s nearly Christmas time. Because it’s December.

Fun-loving, altruistic staff organise the Christmas party, book a table for 40 at the local hotel, send out menus, take deposits, discover that only 12 are willing to come or cough up in advance and then cancel it. Everyone moans.

So, a low-key event is semi-organised at the local Chinese buffet (doing Turkey-fried testicles as a special) followed by an informal evening in the school’s local pub. And the six people with the least friends and family to buy presents for turn up.

This is still before the last week of term, as it’s an arse to book anything close to Christmas. The Buffet-Six decided unilaterally that next year’s Christmas do would be in July.

Come the last week of term, the kids start petitioning you for fun lessons or watching a film right from Monday period one. Knowing full well that 5 days of making Maths-themed Christmas Cards and “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” will be more intolerable than trying to teach, you set them an assessment in revenge for their pitiful begging and then on Tuesday you slide “Home Alone” into the DVD.

By the time you finish showing “Home Alone 5: About time you can look after yourself, you’re 27 you lame asshole” it is indeed the last day of term. Half-day, a special assembly of performances from the less talented students and the failed actors and dancers on the staff (there has to be an age limit on wearing fish-net tights, never mind a gender one) and then it’s down the pub to drink yourself silly, to marvel at two colleagues who never spoke to each other before who are now snogging by the quiz machine and to degenerate into a game of shag-marry-avoid before realising it’s closing time, it’s snowed again and you’re all sleeping in the school gym feeling awkward about your answers to that game.

Merry Christmas.