Being Me

A short play entitled 'Fran goes for an MRI scan' 'MRI, sweet?' 'Yes, my appointment's at 2. Er, honeybun.' 'No, I mean are you here for the MRI suite?' 'Ah, yes.  I'm having a scan of my knee.' ' Could you sit over there, please? We'll call you.' 'What will you call me this time? Coochy-coo?' [10 minutes later.] 'Do come through. Are you wearing anything metal?' 'Is my gold-encrusted underwear a problem?' 'You might need to remov -' 'It was a joke.' 'Any metal plates in your mouth?' 'No, my smile is always as big as this.' 'Is your bra wireless?' 'Yes, and I can print from it without using a USB connection.' 'Are you wearing a watch?' 'It's 2.05. Glad to be of help.' 'Please take the watch off and lie down here. I'll give you some headphones because ...

The Gas Man has Beeneth.  He came today to check our gas appliances and it was my day off work so I was here to let him in. Only people of a certain age will understand that cultural reference to Flanders and Swann singing 'The Gas Man Cometh'.  If you've never heard it, it's only 2 minutes long and it's very funny. It's all about what happens when you have people 'in' to do jobs and things go wrong. By the way, that's the first time I've ever learned to post a video link into a blog post, As I've now written 560 posts according to my stats, I don't think I could ever claim to be a fast learner. Talking about technology, I suppose the modern equivalent of The Gas Man Cometh would be The Computer Man Cometh. 'Twas on a Monday morning I rang Computer Man. He said, 'I am an expert. I'll help you if I can.' But he couldn't come 'til Thursday. I tried hard not to mind 'cause I had to use a notepad...

I'm teaching the great Irish writer Samuel Beckett's 'Waiting for Godot' to sixth formers. A telling line in the play is when one character, Estragon, says, 'There's no lack of void.' After reading this line on Monday, we discussed how the characters in the play (and people in general) 'avoid the void' with useless, repetitive activities to distract themselves from how meaningless their lives seem. Estragon and Vladimir play silly games, swap hats, insult each other, sing nonsense songs and engage in faux-intellectual conversations, just to pass the time while they wait for Godot. (Spoiler alert: he doesn't arrive, folks.) I guess if Beckett wrote it today, he'd have Vladimir and Estragon playing Angry Birds on their phones, joining in with #ruinasongtitlebytakingawayoneletter on Twitter, and checking Facebook to see if anyone had a ham sandwich for lunch. I told the class I thought my title for the day's lesson 'Avoid the void...

I love the @VeryBritishProblems tweets.  They always make me laugh. There's even a book of them you can get from Amazon which is all about your little British awkwardnesse s  and there's a Facebook page. There's no need to miss out on the 'Yes, I do that' moments.  There's comfort in knowing you're not the only one who says sorry to people who bulldoze into you in the street because they weren't looking where they were going. Tonight, one tweet said, Missing the opportunity to correct someone, meaning you now have a brand new first name. #VeryBritishProblems And that reminded me. We had an after-school training session with a visiting speaker at my school some months ago.  There were at least thirty other teachers in the room. A colleague came up to me while we were busy doing group discussion and said, 'The trainer needs a fast typist to write up the notes as the groups give feedback. I've volunteered you.' Aren't people kind? ...

I promised you some Deborah Jenkins and here she is, guest posting for me about windows. Enjoy..........   Windows When you enter a strange room, what’s the first thing you do? Introduce yourself? Admire pictures?  Plump for the comfy chair? Perhaps you’re a circulator or you do a quick reccy of the room checking for exits and extinguisher positions in case of fire. Perhaps you sniff the air, appreciatively or otherwise, for signs of flowers or body odour. Perhaps you sidle. I like sidlers. I used to be one years ago. The art is to flatten yourself wafer thin against a wall and move, crab-like, towards the nibbles. If you are quick – small, jerky movements work best – no one will notice you, because they’ll be too busy admiring pictures, testing the sofa etc. And by the time they’ve finished, you’ll be sitting on a dining chair shovelling cheese straws for all you’re worth and they’ll mistake the smell for body odour and leave you alone… Well, these days I don’t d...

I don't get many invitations these days.  That's what happens when, at people's dinners and parties, you tell the same jokes again and again, like this one. A customer goes into a fish and chip shop and says, 'Can I have a steak and kiddly pie, please?' 'A steak and kiddly pie?' says the shop assistant.  'Surely you mean steak and kidney?' 'But I said that, diddle I?' says the customer. One of the reasons I love that joke is that I can use it to start off lessons about phonology (speech sounds).  It doesn't always work.  Often I say, 'Let me start the lesson by telling you this joke ..' and the students say, 'Is it the one about the steak and kiddly pie?' and I say, 'Oh, damn.  Have I already done that?' and they yawn and say, 'Yes, about fifty times.  Could you just teach us the lesson and then we can go?' Anyway, having said I don't get many invitations, I did have one this week, and tha...

Once upon a time, there was a big mix-up about vowels across the kingdom.  Hence, the not-so-well-known story of the three ..... One morning, the three beers were having breakfast.  Things weren't going well.  Yet again, Mother and Father Beer were perturbed.  'How come,' they said, 'we have a son who is exactly the same size as us?  What the hell happened to hierarchy?' It was true.  Baby Beer, at the tender age of seven, was as tall and as wide as both parents.  When they went shopping, and Mother Beer met a friend, it was always awkward, introducing Baby Beer.  When she said, 'And this is my son,' her friends sniggered behind their hands, and patted the heads of their own diminutive offspring indulgently. Every morning, the Beer parents awoke, hoping that in the night some miraculous process would have returned Baby Beer to a normal size.  They dressed him in age 7 pyjamas, even though it was a strain to get the buttons done ...