Occasional Tales

The end of the term is nigh. Not nigh enough, though. The term has been dragging painfully to a conclusion. The one bright spot is that we don’t have to come in on Monday. Yeah, Monday is the actual last day of term. Could this Empire be more stupid? What has term been like this year? Short for one thing. With the Spring Festival being so early, term is ending nearly two weeks before it usually finishes, but that means the second term will drag on even longer. Even so, in spite of a shorter first term, I’m feeling knackered. It may be an age thing, but getting up at 6.00am while it could still be any time during the hours of darkness has had a worse effect on me than previous years. There’s a reason why I hate alarm clocks: I inevitably wake up before they go off, and that might mean anything up to an hour. I did it twenty years ago and I still do the same today. But, as I said, it’s felt worse this term to be getting up so early and to be arriving at school just as the su...

No, it’s yours. Oh, bugger. Fred asked me where tomorrow’s English exam paper was. I thought he was dealing with it. Turns out he was taking care of the mock exam for March this year; and thus, we don’t have an exam for tomorrow. Actually, make that “didn’t have”. I’ve thrown something together this afternoon, but it’ll be a close-run thing with the paper being printed this afternoon. No one reminded me or asked me about the exam, which is why this didn’t come to light sooner. The confusion which led to this problem is a consequence of the AQM setting end-of-term exams in the past, which is why I thought that’s what Fred was doing. It’s also another argument for having Adobe Acrobat here at school so that I could pluck pages from this exam and that, and plonk them in a single file, which I could then have sent to Iris so that they could be dispatched directly to Mr Photocopy. To add insult to injury, I have Friday off because of certain teachers being absent last Sa...