(Title reference – checkout the UK’s weather recently…)

Well, yesterday was the last day of school, which means that summer holidays have FINALLY arrived here. Amazingly, I am assured by colleagues that this is actually an EARLY breakup. I’m sorry, but having been born and raised in North America, I will always resent having to teach in July…

I haven’t posted in a while because, being the last few weeks of school, things have been incredibly busy. There’s been Sports Day (or rather Sports Afternoon, as it was only from lunch onwards…) on July 1 where we hoped that the heavens would not open and drown our release from class. And it didn’t although it was a very close thing at times…

There was also the Duke of Edinburgh award practise trip on the 10 and 11 July, where we DID get rained on whilst tramping about the English countryside with huge packs on our backs. For those of you who don’t know what the D0fE award is, find out more at their website. I had a vague idea of what was involved, but I now have a huge respect for people who can navigate around the countryside with just a compass and a map. (My offer of bringing along my GPS was recieved with a large amount of scorn and a long explanation of why they were inferior to map-and-compass navigation…) I felt sure on the Saturday that if I hadn’t been accompanied by people who knew what they were doing, I would have been stuck out there for days! I was also extremely nervous before the trip (having been warned before agreeing to go as a requisite staff member that there was at least 20 km of walking involved over the weekend) that I would be found huddled up on some forest trail having a huge asthma attack while the air ambulance was called in to rescue me. I was pleaseantly surprised to find that due to some (what I considered to be inferior) walking routes around our house and a concerted effort to lose some weight, I was in better shape than I thought and fared rather well on the weekend. The long trek on Sunday probably did my flabby muscles much good after the amazingly long trek on Saturday, and the only residual effects were a knot in my calf muscle that went away sometime on Wednesday… Oh – and it was more like 35 km of walking, due to a miscalculation of the length of the trails planned, and the fact that we got lost at least 3 times on Saturday…

This last week has been a bit strange in all. Being the last week of school, there’s a certain amount of the ‘goodbye factor’ mixed in with exhaustion and the excitement of the coming holiday. My friend Jo has had this ‘funny feeling’ on the last day of term for the last few years now, and it’s something I can identify with. No matter how much you’ve been looking forward to the last day of school and the summer holidays, you always feel a bit sad on the last day. There’s the favourite classes you won’t have again, the colleagues who are leaving the school for one reason or another, and a certain amount of uncertainty over what, exactly, you are going to do with all this free time on your hands for the next six weeks! For me, this is always mixed in with a bit of panic, thinking that maybe I haven’t done all the paperwork I was supposed to, etc… And this year, for the first time, I also suffered my first beesting! Seems a trivial thing to mention, but not having been stung in living memory, I was shocked by how much it hurt, as well as the after-effects. The insect in question got stuck under my watchband (it had been on my shirt, and got stuck when I brushed my hand down my shirt), and so I was stung on the inside of my left wrist, twice. And yes, it was a bee, rather than a wasp – I think it gor two stings in simply because it was stuck, and rather panicky itself… To top it all off, this happened in class, and so the last impression I gave my extremely good top set year 9 class was of me crying like a baby (that mother HURT!) and running off to the nurse. And coming back smelling like a chip shop, because the best way to treat it, apparently, is to put vinegar on the sting which takes out the venom. It works like a charm, but it still swelled up and STILL itches like crazy… SIGH. Still, I’ll be seeing them around again next year, and although I won’t be teaching any of them, hopefully I’ll be able to prove I’m not as crazy as I appeared to be this week…

Still, despite my reservations, roll on summer holidays!!