Apologies to all of you who are kind enough to urge me on - sorry it's bin another lengthy gap between blogs. Problem is, my year of underwork has caught up with me and I've been discovering all sorts of things I should have been doing and didn't know about. I'm not trained in the Scottish education system and there's an assumption that I can intuit various things that are required of a Scottish English teacher. I do sometimes miss being part of a department (not often admittedly, but just occasionally.) Apart from apologising, I'd just like to send out a couple of messages: Simon - your French email address doesn't work. I tried and tried! Kushal: how lovely to hear from you. How's it going? Now back to the blog...
The big event of the past few weeks, workwise, was the trip to Shetland with the Hoy kids. The entire secondary school, bar one who had to attend a funeral, spent 4 days on a trip organised by Alaric, another itinerant teacher and all-round Outdoor Man. I was the obligatory female teacher. I had mixed feelings about this trip, not least because the Head rang me to say that she wasn't happy about Alaric's cavalier attitude to health and safety, and I was having visions of fishing kids out of the sea. As it turned out, though, he was a brilliant leader, just allergic to filling in all those quadruplicate forms.
We took the overnight ferry. I had the cabin between that of the boys and the girls, while Alaric had to sleep in a chair, having only booked one staff cabin - WHAT?! - but the Head informed him that that arrangement was unacceptable, so I didn't have the embarrassment of telling him so myself. The girls, who were absolutely brilliant all week, went straight off to sleep and the boys didn't. I eventually fell asleep and woke in the morning to find 4 of the little sods had kept the others up all night, so the first day was marred by the fact that those who needed their kip were really quite unwell. This meant that my trip to the fantastic brand-new museum in Lerwick was curtailed by having to look after vomiting children and I missed some of the best stuff.
Shetland is wonderful. It's much more like Norway than Orkney, despite the Orcadians insistence that they're not really British. The weather was fantastic , which meant that we were able to wear the kids out with lots of outdoor activities, so we didn't have any repetitions of the night on the boat. Selected highlights: Mousa Broch, the most complete of all the weird milk churn-shaped dry stone towers unique to the North of Scotland. The Norway Bus Museum, dedicated to the Shetlanders who risked their lives sailing to Norway during the war to rescue Resistance workers in tiny fishing boats while the Luftwaffe rained bombs on them. North Atlantic Fisheries College, where mariners are trained and scientific research is carried out into all aspects of marine life. (One thing I was particularly pleased about was that Graeme announced after we'd been there about an hour that this was where he wants to study: that boy has grown up so much over the past year - brilliant.) They've got a sort of zoo where you can see - and handle - some of the weird creatures that live in the seas round here. Visiting another Junior High School, where Sam blew their kids out of the water with his accordion playing. Dressing up as Vikings to tour a reconstructed settlement. Touring Jarlshof and seeing how fascinated kids can be by archaelogy if it's presented in an imaginative way. Donald on the phone to his mum every night for an hour - " We had mince and tatties tonight. Aye, it was aal reet" - and proudly showing me the little gifts he'd bought for his brand-new baby brother at every gift shop. Going round the Aith lifeboat and, when the coxswain asked them if they'd lost any relatives in the Longhope lifeboat disaster, the sensible way they conversed with him about it. (I was astonished how many relatives of the kids had died. A grandfather, several uncles...)
All in all, they were brilliant. Even on the boat going home, we found an Estonian young woman who was to play in the Orkney Folk Festival - which I missed, as it coincided with the trip and I was too tired after to catch the last couple of gigs - and she and Iona sat for an hour and played fiddle together.
We had chartered a boat to take them from Stromness to a jetty at the top of Hoy, which the skipper agreed to do as long as we could dump the kids and go, so we got back at 11.50pm only to find no parents, as the letter had been sent out with the wrong time, so there was a hairy half-hour in which Alaric and I feared we'd be abandoned in the most desolate place you could imagine. Eventually parents started arriving and, of course, no one, apart from Iona's mum, bothered to thank us or even say 'good evening' - par for the course I've always found on school trips.
Other events of the past weeks have included a weekend in Dundee, home of the Beano and the Dandy, which included two beautiful drives through the Highlands - the Cairngorms still had a lot of snow on them - and me driving at 90 mph along the John o' Groats road to try to catch the ferry, only to find that they'd given us the wrong time and we were 2 hours early. Clearly the good folk at Northlink Ferries haven't quite grasped the 24-hour clock. 7 o' clock is NOT 1700 hours, ducky.
I've enjoyed 2 terms of teaching Drama on Thursdays, but the Council has axed the funding for that post, so next term I look forward to a 4-day week and incipient poverty. However, we break up for the summer hols next week and we're enjoying White Nights at present, so there are plenty of Reasons to be Cheerful.
