Personal Columns – Page 6 – For the fainthearted . . .

Counting down to home time

Just over four weeks until the end of term.

On Wednesday, 21st December, school closes for the two week Christmas holiday.

In my own schooldays, I was always delighted when there was only one month of the term to go; it meant each date in the calendar would only occur once more.

If the term ended on the 21st day of the following month, I would begin the countdown on 22nd day of the previous month, so the counting would have started tomorrow.

The end of term was a morning …

Selling chocolate to us

The Christmas television advertising campaign is under way: is it worth the advertisers’ expense? Would we not go out and spend our money anyway? Parrticularly, on chocolate.

Advertisements from the 1960s and 70s remain clear in the memory, most of which created no desire to rush out and spend money on what they were trying to sell. The chocolate advertisements were always amongst the silliest.

The Milky Bar ads were the worst. How did it go? “The Milky Bar Kid is strong and tough and only the best is good …

Technological meltdown

Of course, there should have been an online back-up. But that was part of the problem. Every time I changed jobs, I lost access to the Onedrive material I had uploaded whilst in post.

During teacher training four years ago, I had realised that I needed something to which I would have safe and secure access that would not be inaccessible if I changed schools.

At £55, the Toshiba external hard drive seemed a good solution to my problems. I could gather all the material from various online locations and …

Gunshot wounds to the face, abdomen and thigh

My great grandfather would have been in the Labour Corps at end of the Great War, where he might have been serving is unknown, so many of the records were lost during the bombing of London in the Second World War. His military service in the Great War can be summarised in two paragraphs:

Charles Bennett of 11 Oxford Gardens, Chiswick enlisted at the Town Hall Chiswick in December 1915, aged 38 years. He was attested at Hounslow on 15th January 1916 and assigned to the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers.

…

A death recalled

Walking along the street in Glastonbury, Michael and I wandered in our conversation. Francis was recalled then I recalled the last news I had heard of Francis.

It had been in an edition of the French regional daily Sud Ouest in August 2007. The tragic story of a family row that had led to someone being stabbed would not have caused comment had the name of the commune not caught the eye and then the name of Francis, the neighbour who had gone to the house to discover the awful …

A poem about an orange

Standing at the photocopier, one of the English teachers was preparing an assessment piece on poetry.

‘I wonder how some of them will react,’ she said. ‘I had a Leaving Certificate student a few years ago who didn’t want to do the exam. Anyway, there was a poem about an orange on the paper, I think it included lines on the texture of the orange’s skin. It was June and I suppose he felt he should be back at home helping with the silage. Anyway, he looked at the paper …