Being Me

We don't have an expansive garden. Put it this way, when Paul says 'I'm going out to mow the lawn,' it takes him longer to haul the mower out of the shed and plug it in than it does to finish the job itself. There's a zzsshh zzsshh sound for about twenty seconds and that's it done: tidy lawn, with its nineteen blades of grass short and neat. He still indulges in a heavy self-satisfied sigh afterwards as though he's just mown the gardens at Kensington Palace or the Taj Mahal, but I'll allow him that, as I never offer to mow the lawn myself. Sometimes I think it would be fun, though, while he's in the shed foraging out the mower, to run outside with a pair of nail scissors and do the job myself before he emerges. 'Da DAH! Surprise!' We like to encourage the local wildlife into the garden but because of its size there are limitations. Bees, butterflies and tiny birds we can cope with. If a fat pigeon, a pregnant cat or even a particularly

Someone stopped me in a corridor at school last week to say, 'Oh, I hear you're retiring. Congratulations!' Retiring? Retiring? How old does she think I look? Is my new make-up regime not effective? Have I chosen the wrong plastic surgeon? 'Not retiring,' I said, graciously, while thinking 'One more insinuation like that and I will bop you over the head with this Oxford English Dictionary.' 'Oh?' she said. 'Moving on from classroom teaching, though,' I told her. 'After the summer holidays, I'll be working in a learning centre which provides one-to-one GCSE teaching for pupils not coping in mainstream education.' 'One-to-one?' she said, with a breathy sense of wonder as though saying, 'Five years' holiday on a remote Greek island with Sean Bean?' I can't believe it either. I've always thought my choices for my main day job were a) teach whole classes in a school or b) leave teaching as