Dramatic events

Iwrite with the soporific radio murmur of middle-class English voices in the background, all of them complaining that Radio4 is "too middle-class and too anglo-centric." Those agonized debates about what defines Englishness could start and stop with the ability to complain endlessly about anything. I promise to try avoid this in my blog (although I have to say that the weather since I arrived here has been dire - until this weekend! Hurrah hooray! Warmth, sunshine!)

My big news is that I've landed the lead in the Kirkwall pantomime. This is a huge honour and I only hope I can deliver what they want. So I write to you as The Snow Queen (well you knew it had to be a wicked witch, didn't you?) That's the good news: the snag is that I have to sing. So far, I know there will be 'Killer Queen' with a backing chorus of penguins.

Continuing the theme of Drama, I will draw a veil over my experiences as a supply teacher for the absent Head of Drama at Kirkwall Grammar School, as it's not my favourite event of the week. However, a more entertaining aspect of Drama was my recent debut as a playwright. The Head at Stronsay sprang on me that the entire secondary school (all 15 of them) and all the secondary teachers would be away apart from the S1 group and that I would therefore have to take them for English all day. I felt that this was a shortcut to them hating English for the rest of their lives, so I decided to write them a play. I'd been to see a man performing Beowulf in Anglo-Saxon at a local venue and only fell asleep twice, so I thought this would go down well, if I wrote them a play version. I was so engrossed in writing this masterpiece that I didn't notice the ferry had docked at Houton. Luckily, a ferryman spotted me: "Ye'd best git oaf if ye dinna wantae go back to Hoy." I bumped into the mother of a Hoy student in the building society the next day and, after she'd berated me for not doing enough Shakespeare, we moved onto Beowulf. She and her husband are, apparently, obsessed with Vikings and have not only changed their names to Viking ones, but also do Viking re-enactments and she insisted on lending me some of their gear.

The following Tuesday she turned up at school with chain-mail, helmets, drinking horns and a very large sword, all of which she said would be no problem to get on the plane the next morning. (The chain-mail alone would have caused its tail to fall off. I nearly cracked a rib trying to get it in the boot of the car.) I decided against attempting to get the sword on the plane, seeing as you aren't even allowed a nail-file these days. But the kids loved the other stuff. We rehearsed all morning and performed the play for the Primary School in the afternoon. They laughed in all the right places and S1 loved it. Sadly they'd taken most of their costume off by the time I took the photo, so you can't appreciate the true horror of the monster Grendel's skyblue furry slippers.

(It has taken me about half an hour to work out how to put photos on this, so if there is only one, it's because it's now bedtime. However, I will try to give you a few more...

15 minutes later: well, I tried. There's now a view from the plane as well. The others will have to wait. Night night.)

At last, online in Orkney!

I blame technology.


The Grand Plan was to start this blog around March, recording the mixture of emotions as I swung between the fear of the unknown and the desire for change, the cosiness of home and hearth and the longing for the wide skies of the Far North. Instead, the computer blows up; I then spend several months dithering about what to replace it with; when I finally buy my (wonderful Toshiba) laptop, I find I can't get back on the Internet at home; I then move up here, wait for weeks to be connected to Sky broadband and eventually find that it rarely works. Hence this intial posting will be more of an autobiography than a diary entry. I'll keep it brief.


I bade my neighbours a fond farewell on Sunday night, warning them I'd be off around 5am on Monday 13 August, and all they waved me goodbye as I finally left at 5.30 that evening. I got as far as Lancaster the first night and stayed in a lovely 4* hotel that served breakfasts worthy of an Edwardian country house, something that fired me into driving 400 miles the next day. (Pause for quick preen.) The Scottish tourist office en route advised me to book my accommodation for that night as it was the height of the tourist season (well you could have fooled me, given the empty roads) and thus I found myself in a dismal room over a pub that reeked of chips and all for a mere £68. All the other guests came from the Faroe Islands and none of them could speak English. I waited patiently while the lady tried to explain 'neeps and tatties' and 'battered haddock' to the only Faroese who had any English, gave up and went for a walk, only to find that 100 yards down the road was a superb 13th castle converted into an hotel. Rooms were £40 per night and their chef had just won Scotland's 'Chef of the Year' award.


The last leg of the 725 mile journey took me past the seat of the Duke of Sutherland, Dunrobin Castle, its name being, I assume, a reference to the past activities of his ancestors, who successfully depopulated this part of the country by deporting all their tenants to the colonies. Made it to Scrabster (that's a port, not a local delicacy) in good time and fell asleep on the ferry, waking up just in time to see the Old Man of Hoy, which was jolly exciting, especially as this is the 40th anniversary of its first climbing.


Met my housemate, Emma, for the first time - lovely girl and very easy to share with. We spent the first couple of weeks nagging the council for luxury items, e.g. a shower, central heating that works and chests-of-drawers. 'What do you need a chest of drawers for? You have a cupboard.' 'Do you hang YOUR socks on coathangers?' We wore her down in the end.


The first experience of work was two days of in-service training for teachers new to Orkney. It was excruciating. By the second day, doodling and writing out the alphabet in Devanagari (my usual mental yoga) no longer worked, so I took to wrtiting down all the cliches uttered by the worst of the speakers from the council. I was frantic: so hard to keep pace. They fell from his lips with what would have been astonishing rapidity, were it not for the fact that he spoke at a quarter of the pace of a normal human being.


Here are a couple of samples: "If we had health workers here, they'd be jumping up and down saying 'ah but' yet bear with me. For the broad model I will deal with this in terms of longitudinal time." "These are the folk who in terms of yesterday's terminology are the folk who actually go in on the front line."



I finally got to meet my charges the following week. The ferry takes me to Hoy and a taxi to the school. I teach S1 and S2 (Years 8 and 9, except they're actually the age of Years 7 & 8 - it's very confusing) together, all 10 of them. I like them very much, but the timetable is a pain. Most of their English classes are on Fridays. By the end of Friday, they are not amenable to English classes and we are all heartily sick of each other. We start by devising our own coats-of-arms. One child has problems grasping the concept of what symbols to draw on his shield. 'What interests you? What do you like?' 'I like ship. I like kye. I like ducksh. I like tractorsh.' His coat-of-arms is a masterpiece of drawings of Ferguson tractors both in one piece and in bits, surrounded by sheep, cows and ducks. Across the centre are twin spanners, crossed.



To get to Stronsay, I fly. It is an 8-seater plane and attains a height of 525 feet. My friend Wendy calls it The Clockwork Budgie. Stronsay has a bigger secondary school. I teach a total of 22 students. This is because at the end of September, a new family arrived from Yorkshire and their two children increased the size of my S4 class by 25% and S2 by 50%. (That's your maths problem for the day. Tomorrow, one on how many men it takes to overload an 8-seater plane so that it flies to an island different from the one where you actually work.)



There's so much more to tell you but this is already far too long and I doubt whether anyone will actually make it this far. If you have, well done, give yourself a virtual hippo (a merit system I have yet to introduce my students to) and talk to you soon.