Yes, Friends, if you've spent any period of your life being an 'inspirational' teacher, didn't you just HATE going into work every day - wasn't it the very worst period of your lives? Am I right, or am I right!!!!
The worst part of being 'inspirational' is that the 'cool' kids don't really notice, like happened to that poor woman teacher at nearby Basingstoke Sixth Form College, whose picture was plastered all over page 95 of the print editions of this morning's local Onion News for East Hampshire.
Read her story and weep !!!!!
However, for me and my light-to-moderate wife Lois, here at our home in semi-leafy Liphook, Hampshire this morning it gives us a bit of a one-sided, ironic smile to read Norwood's story, because pictures have also started coming in from our granddaughter Josie, a fresher just starting at Durham this autumn - and there hasn't been one word so far about the teachers there, inspirational or not, would you believe (!).
For "Our Josie", the student life there so far seems to be one big round of pub evenings, parties, karaoke, and all sorts of hijinks in the narrow streets of that quiet little old northern town.
What madness !!!!
What a crazy world we live in !!!! [That's enough madness! - Ed]
21:00 Still, at least we don't have to go to work each day, although sometimes I think it would be less frantic than being retired, believe it or not !!!!!!
And tonight Lois gets an awful reminder of her working life back in the day, before we got married, in an interesting programme featuring the reminiscences of Scottish crime-novelist Val McDermid.
Val, a working class kid from Glasgow with an Oxford degree, started her career in journalism, but found the profession "too awful" (!) and eventually graduated to writing crime novels.
Oh dear! Before becoming a crime novelist, during the journalistic part of her life, Val had worked in the Investigative Department of the Sunday People newspaper.
our granddaughter Josie (centre) with two fellow-freshers at Durham this week
And what japes they're getting up to, the little rascals !!!!!
I've asked Lois whether we could start that sort of caper ourselves, but she says, perhaps rightly, that at 79 we're starting to get a bit "long in the tooth" to go cavorting through the quiet streets of Liphook, Hampshire, disguised as pea pods - but your views welcome: postcards only !!!!!
me and my light-to-moderate wife Lois - a recent picture
08:00 And it's another early start for us today, because Matthew, our new gardener is supposed to be coming at 9 am to do some more work on the "jungle" that is our back garden - what madness! And Matthew's "nine o'clocks" always turn out to be more like 8.50 am, because he's a notorious "twirly" - somebody who always arrives 'too early' - geddit?
Lois and I are barely out of bed before our gardener Matthew arrives: (left)
Lois dragging him through the shrubbery (!) before they get 'down and dirty'
in our overgrown flower-beds - what madness !!!
Busy busy busy!!!!! Luckily we had a good sleep last night - in our neighbours' back-gardens, the fireworks for Bonfire Night started to 'fizzle out' [no pun intended!!!!] around 9 pm, as parents ushered their kids indoors and up to bed.
It's fortunate that we don't live anywhere near Edenbridge, Kent, where, according to an email from Steve, our American brother-in-law, enthusiasts were due to be burning a massive effigy, not of the 17th century anti-government rebel Guy Fawkes, but of a massive Keir Starmer doll (available from toyshops everywhere haha!). It's a bit of a tradition there, apparently - Liz Truss and Donald Trump dolls have suffered similar fates in the past - but what madness !!!!
13:00 And the mayhem continues after Matthew finishes gardening for the day, because we have to dash out to the post office to post a large envelope to our daughter Sarah and family, in Perth, Australia.
Lois and I only moved to our current home in Liphook back in January. Our former home in Malvern, Worcestershire, still hasn't been sold. We weren't aware, however, but Sarah's husband Francis, who likes to have a UK postal address for some of his business correspondence, has continued to give his contacts our old address in Malvern, and he forgot to update the address in January when Lois and I moved to Liphook.
our former home in Malvern, Worcestershire, empty and still unsold,
where, unknown to us, 10 months of business letters have been piling up
for our son-in-law Francis, who lives in Perth, Australia - what madness !!!!
The result - masses of business letters addressed to Francis have been piling up in our empty house in Malvern - what madness!!! Today we post them on to him in Perth, stripped of their envelopes etc, at a total cost of - wait for it - £14 !!!And that's even at "snail mail" prices !!!!!
What a crazy world we live in !!!!!
Lois and I have been retired for nearly 20 years. When will we get a chance for a nice "lie-in" - is that too much to ask??!!!!
[You really don't know what 'busy' means, do you, Colin! - Ed]
flashback to March 2006 - my 60th birthday, and the day we both retired.
Little did we imagine the total 'mayhem' that was just about to start!!!!
And tonight Lois gets an awful reminder of her working life back in the day, before we got married, in an interesting programme featuring the reminiscences of Scottish crime-novelist Val McDermid.
And what Val thought of journalism, especially the tabloid sort, comes out even in her novels, as here, in "Report for Murder", where her journalist heroine, Allie, who thinks she's got hold of a good story, goes in for a meeting with her editor, only to get a bit of a rough rebuff (!).
At some point in the 1960's Anglo-Czech tycoon Robert Maxwell, father of the arguably now more famous Ghislaine (!), bought up the Mirror Group of Newspapers. Val says this was a disaster for the corporation.
Maxwell made his "management style" known, early on, she says. Whenever Maxwell came into the news room, he used to give a loud whistle, and all the journalists had to stand up, gather round, and extinguish their cigarettes - those were the days!
Maxwell was a deeply unpleasant man, Val says. He was a bully, he was aggressive, he was a liar. Once, and once only, Val tried to challenge him on a point.
Even tough old Val had to give in at this point.
Maxwell liked to put on his soft shoes and creep down the corridor, she recalls, so he could fling the office door open, in the hope of catching somebody not working - what madness !!!!
flashback to the late 1960's; Lois in the days when she worked in the documentation
department of Robert Maxwell's vanity enterprise, Pergamon Press
And it's well-known in our family that Yours Truly saved Lois from a "fate worse than death", after Maxwell chose her to accompany him on a business trip to a book fair in Cologne, West Germany. Fortunately, Lois and I had already arranged to get married the same month - August 1972, after which she was going to be leaving Maxwell's firm anyway. So Maxwell had to find another woman to go in her place.
flashback to the late 1960's: Headington Hall, Oxford, where Maxwell
lived with his family, also site of the office where Lois worked,
as an employee of his vanity project Pergamon Press
Phew - a narrow escape there, to put it mildly! All Maxwell's female employees used to dread his business trips and the much-feared "knock on the hotel room door in the middle of the night".
Yikes !!!!
But what a crazy world we live in !!!!!
Will this do?
[Oh just go to bed! - Ed]
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzz!!!!!!
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