It has been a particularly long and slow week, not least as I waited on news from various job interviews and for myself to finally make up my mind on that pros/cons list. But I can now reveal conclusively that [fanfare]: The List does not help one decide. No. It only makes clear what the choices are, but the difficulty of Decision remains. To demonstrate this, let me refer you to the maxim of my dear beloved mother, which is as equally unhelpful as my List(s): "Well," she will sigh wisely, "there are Two Choices: you either Do or you Don't."
Quite.
Well, I Do. Or, I Did. Or, rather, I have decided to take an offer of employment and shall, as soon as the paperwork is done, be handing in my resignation. And it cannot come too soon. For today, like yesterday and the day before that, and all those dusty days preceding, have left me weary - bored, nay, intellectually starved, but nonetheless weary. Even Queen Mab could hardly raise my spirits today: I gave up trying to explain love's illusions, telling myself he's 16, he'll find out soon enough; and even my young student's impromptu expletives held less of a shock than they used. In short: my work-life lacks lustre.
Indeed, I find myself, as I stand at the water-cooler refilling my cup (which, ostensibly, does not runneth over) for the tenth time, gazing forlornly at the packet of dried baby crabs that have been sitting for a week now on the reception desk for the benefit of peckish passers-by, and feel a strange sense of sympathy. I look at them with their little limbs cracking and breaking off like crisps at the bottom of the bag and see so many lives stopped still: no longer scuttling forward, or even sideways or backwards, they have been rendered lame, awaiting a final annihilation when they will be made a snack to a hungry student. For I too am their snack - a water trough at which they drink, quenching their thirst but draining the source - and I too feel just as lifeless, just as broken and hollow inside.
Well, I am of course, melodramatising! (Or, at least, (she sobs dramatically) I wish I was.) My students are all as delightful as ever. They have not changed: one comes in telling me of his success in Tonbridge and Oundle interviews; another laments the typhoon's failure to reek destruction on the city and give him a day off school; and they are bright, sparky and interested young things, and I shall miss them. But, ah, the chance - some days - to miss teaching them! But now that day is soon approaching. I am waiting with bated breath for the go ahead from my new employers to kiss my old ones goodbye, to hand in my resignation and enter pastures new. No longer will I be English teacher extraordinaire - tiny crusty crab to so many hungry mouths - but... Ah, no: I shall hold out on you yet. Call it superstition - call it absolute fear of everything going bosoms up and me having to remain in my halogen prison forever: glossing "If the assassination could trammel up the consequence and catch with surcease success..." til I know not where the murderous-minded Macbeth ends and I begin, or defending his lady-wife once again from the charge of monstrosity, all the while rubbing my own boss'-bloodspotted hands and fearing that any day they will uncover his dewy corpse where it lies (under his desk, covered in dried seaweed)...
Yes, call it fear, but I shall not tell. Not just yet anyway. Soon enough, this tired teacher shall be saying goodbye, escaping (hopefully, still - just about) with what is left of her sanity in tact and using her powers for good, not evil.
Though, of course, she is preparing herself for all hell to break loose the moment that she announces that she is. Eek. Better watch this space.
