Stocktaking

It's been a while now since my nasty little operation. I have been off work ever since. There has been pain and there has been blood but fingers-crossed, things are feeling rather better now. Last week was a first for me - my first doctor's note - giving me licence to be off work for a further seven days. I may as well take it. I owe the school where I work no favours and I will be leaving there in less than a month anyway.

I saw a job in the Times Educational Supplement. It's about promoting global understanding through school-based activities - developing resources, trialling and evaluating them. It would be so different from what I have been doing for the last thirty years. I have completed the online application form but then hesitated. I am not sure it's what I want to do but it would bring in decent money. Maybe I should just click and send it. The likelihood is that there's somebody lined up for it anyway. Who knows.

There aren't many pictures of me connected with the job of teaching. I have always been a keen photographer but a very reluctant subject. I came across two photos that other teachers snapped of me - both of them around twenty years ago. In one I am holding a homemade sign linked with the school's annual cross country run. Perhaps it is an instruction to drivers to slow down because of runners crossing or perhaps - and this seems more likely to me - a declaration that the children who are about to cross the road are intellectually challenged.

The second picture shows me behaving like the Pied Piper of Hamelin on the school's annual sponsored walk. I am leading the slow children into the cave. The entrance will magically close behind them and I will be left with a crippled youth called Hans or maybe Herman. I think of that workplace - the hours I have put in , the weekends, the sleepless nights, the times I have gone the extra mile and I wonder - will this be all that's left to show - two photographs from twenty years back? Work. It's a much over-rated activity in my view.