As I said in my last post, I am currently training to be a teacher. It seemed so worthy when I said it out loud, and in my university interview where I earnestly proclaimed that I wanted to do good. Oh, how naive I was. My ideals remain intact, but my patience for enforcing them is screaming “From now on I live only for weekends! I have been punished enough!”. I’ve been in school two weeks.

Of course, I am exaggerating. All in all, I’ve been lucky to be placed in a nice school where behavioural problems are neither common nor severe, and my new colleagues are kind, helpful and, vitally, keen to drink beer when times are tough.

But having heard staff room talk, and spoken to other trainees and teachers, I begin to think that every teacher in the world has a nemesis. One child to ruin them all, if you like. I feel particularly hard done by that I have met mine in week one, and he’s in my adopted form.

Two sample conversations:

Boy: Miss, what’s semmen?

Me: [internal] Sh*t, do I tell him he’s mispronouncing it and explain, or do I wimp out?

Me: [external] I hope you haven’t been reading ahead in your book, we have lots to get through before then. How about you get on with your questionnaire about whether you’re getting enough fibre?!

Boy: I’ve done it. What is it then? [glint begins to form in child’s eyes]

Me: Well, show me the page where you found it and I’ll explain…..

A couple of minutes of possibly-medically-inaccurate explanation later we both looked like tomatoes and I had an overwhelming sense of having shat on innocence.

Scenario 2, boy is supposed to be reading silently, but is facing the wrong way in his seat, chattering, waving his book around and distracting everyone in the vicinity.

Me: Excuse me, what are you supposed to be doing now please? [correct answer is reading silently and then doing so, and this usually works]

Boy: Er, bombing the Germans?

Me: I beg your pardon? [followed by brief telling off]

Boy: [muttered as I walk away] Wish I had an AK47… (mumble mumble)… get you…

So, an auspicious start in the pastoral side of my teaching, I think you’ll agree. Thank the lord it’s the weekend, and that they don’t sell large guns to small boys.

So, I have recently changed careers from the marketing rut that, as you can see below, was starting to make me a little bit angry, a little bit bitter. A year ago, the day came when a sombre-looking operations director invited me to a meeting in which he’d be Frank and I’d be Earnest….

My first move was to ask for money and time off (I was happy but not stupid), and the second was to meet a recently-departed collague and fellow cheery leaver for a really big cocktail. At three in the afternoon.

Twelve months later, I am sitting at my computer in that magical time that I’ve reclaimed: Half Term. Never again will I be more than 6 weeks from a holiday.

I spent a “lost year” at home, doing odd bits of work, decorating, doing more housework than is truly necessary. And at some point during that year it hit me: I had a blank canvas. Or I was a blank canvas. Or something like that. There was a big white space, to fill with a job that might have more to recommend it than just about paying for cider and lunch.

I considered several things, and in hindsight the vast majority of them were based on bad novels I had read and ended with dreamy men on beaches. But I have a (very nice) boyfriend, and not that much cash, and no talent for becoming a prima ballerina or an international woman of mystery.

I remembered a book I once bought on the recommendation of an ex-boyfriend’s (possibly-brain-damaged-by-pot) sister, which said to write down what you like  and what you can do, and your perfect job will become clear. This is clearly utter balls, but then the book was called What Color Is Your Parachute? - and the spelling tells you all you need to know about that. But I did it for a laugh, and after realising nobody on earth will pay me a decent living downing pints or picking things up with my toes, I tried to be a bit more serious. I eat up books, like bossing people around, and in answer to your question, I give a f*** about an Oxford comma.

Lock up your children. Because I’m coming at them with the complete works of Shakespeare, a grammar book the size of a breeze block, and a really big stick.

Whilst in a particularly long online queue to buy tickets for a concert that just has a whiff of the tragic about it, I realised that it was about time I started to channel the frustrations and annoyances like these back onto the blogosphere. Oh look! There’s one already! “Blogosphere”. Only a w***er would use the word blogosphere.

Oh.

What do you mean they couldn’t get the flowers to spell out the name?!?!? Jeeeeeeesus.

“The company wanted to actively market [ethical] aspects of its brand background, so when the brand was relaunched last autumn Jordans head of brand Carol Flint looked for ways to elevate these credentials. With public concern over dwindling honey bee numbers rising, the idea was to give away bee-friendly plants to customers. Although the plants are obviously unbranded, the plastic markers that identify the plants were printed with the Jordans logo.”

(From an article on merchandising, www.themarketer.co.uk)

I have a stinking hangover. I’m bored. I’m hungry. The aircon in this office is set to a level that is consistently not-quite-comfortable. My chair won’t go to quite the right height. Someone spat outside the cafe I ate lunch in. My stomach hurts. Every news article I have read this morning has had a punctuation error in it. I have a bit of fringe that’s just the right length to poke me in the eye. I’m too hot. I’m too thirsty. Stop talking so loud. Stop laughing, there’s nothing funny. You did that just to annoy me, I know you did.

OK, I admit it. I am so ridiculously grumpy.

It’s not even very original to be grumpy these days; in fact being curmudgeonly is some kind of franchise apparently. The success of the BBC Grumpy Old.. series has led to a spin off live show (what a bloody riot that must be) and although I find it squirmingly funny, shitmydadsays on Twitter isn’t unusual, and has its female equivalent in many of the posts on Postcards From Yo Momma. My grandad spoke like that all the time and he had stuff to be peeved about, what with the war and the stroke and the black lung and my nan’s bad pastry.

The annoying thing about that is that people now find my grouchiness comedic and think I am being funny. I’m not. To give you some guidelines, if I had more than three drinks last night, if it is before 11am, if you eat with your mouth open, if you push past me on the tube or the pavement, or finally if you spit ANYWHERE, I genuinely hate you. ‘K?

Sometimes I am left utterly speechless by people. It’s a given that the world is full of people who are cruel, morally void, spiteful, vitriolic, even just plain unkind. Let’s face it, the news would be short and frankly odd if not.

So it’s no wonder that there’s a lot of language which is designed to be propelled from your mouth or fingertips to describe these people with the venom they rouse.

Often, I feel annoyed that such good words are wasted on bad people. Swearwords certainly have the joy of being a bit naughty when you say them, but probably nobody wants to smile as they expound on the ways in which a power-hungry boss was a shithead, or exactly why the person who mugged them is a ….

Hard vowels may be the best expressions of spitting rage; a well-placed V, C or K in an adjective is satisfying. Metaphors for hardness, coldness, ugliness are embraced as they demonstrate eloquence in the insulter we are allowed to assume for that moment that the insultee won’t possess because he’s a “tapeworm carved in frozen pee”.

Today however I fell into discussion about a person who offended more than one of my friends with bloody-mindedness, a distinct lack of social aptitude, and a deadpan sarcastic delivery that might be genius if it didn’t contain the bitterness of someone who knows they are under fire and accepts no blame. Then a word came out of my mouth and for once, it said everything I wanted to say.

It’s good to use for a woman, it comes out of your mouth like cobra venom even if you whisper it, the consonants stick in your craw like the thought of the person. If it was applied to me I’d cry for a week, nobody could love it.

Use sparingly. When it fits it’s a beauty.

So, I have had swine flu. It’s not as exciting as it sounds, and frankly seemed highly unlikely to kill me, but it’s given me kudos on my return to work. Reactions veer between avoidance with a look of curiosity (“will she sprout a corkscrew tail or vomit green toxic sludge? Will she, will she?”) and people asking for details. Look, if you want to know the ins and numerous outs of how I spent this weekend whilst sicker than I have been in some time, you are most definitely not the kind of person I wish to share aforesaid details with.

Being ill makes you feel vulnerable, tired, broken - a little bit less than yourself. You are well within your rights to feel immensely sorry for yourself, and even, I think, to have a little cry when it hurts a lot or frustrates you.

So why exactly is indignity piled, and piled again, on top of this pitiable state? I phoned my boss to say I wouldn’t be at work. I felt I had to list symptoms as after all, I would have to be very ill not to come bounding in to work like the enthusiastic office terrier one must be in order to succeed in Media… So I did. I told a man who doesn’t know my sister’s name that I had a severe upset stomach, and when prompted, at which end this was manifesting itself, and my temperature to the nearest .5 of a degree.

That wasn’t enough. I then had to repeat this every day - the rule being that a call must be made on the morning of every absence. I woke up not only feeling poorly, but feeling stressed by the few euphemisms at my disposal. I estimate this stress delayed my recovery by some 3 hours. I didn’t mention it in case he asked about the toilet again.

I went to the chemist. I was too late to take tamiflu apparently, so an over-the-counter spree was necessary to tackle the many ways the illness manifested itself. But this time I was surrounded by other poorly people who I am guessing were comparing and contrasting as I was grilled by the shop assistant. She began in a loud voice asking about the colour of my phlegm, and I don’t really want to go into how it degraded from there. If you happened to be in Boots in Wimbledon this week, I apologise profusely for what you may have heard.

I’m now much better - it was, after all, only flu - but I’ve not yet recovered my dignity. A shopful of pensioners know my innermost workings and my boss might, for all I know and utterly blamelessly, have an image of me huddled in my miniscule bathroom, just as I was for most of the week. And what can I do about it? Nothing. Because Huw Edwards keeps banging on about it.

I’ve just submitted a request to HR. I want all employees (I’m not selfish) to have the once-a-year wildcard, as a legitimate sickness procedure, which allows them to text their boss once and just once. Saying “Trust me, I’ve got the shits.”