Cheerfulness

In an attempt to stave off the depression of dark evenings brought on by the putting back of the clocks one hour last night, I was up early this morning at 6.45, (which yesterday was 7.45 so not that early really but at least it was light outside and I am a firm believer that people should rise with the sun and not blunder around in the dark putting their trousers on inside out) and I was forcing myself to be cheerful with a bit of singing in the shower and dancing in the kitchen whilst waiting for the kettle to boil. It helped that the sun was shining, the bitter winds of yesterday had dropped and Daisy was doing ballet in the garden.

Thus began my Campaign to Not Letting Winter Get Me Down or CTNLWGMD. (All right, so it doesn't work as a roll-off-the-tongue acronym - in fact it doesn't work as any kind of acronym, but my other potential campaign title of 'Gloom And Doom - Sharing Handy Insightful Tips' wasn't really an option either given the tender dispositions of some of the houseguests.)

I made tea and toast for brekkie, and had Marmite on mine because of the B vitamins. And then I gave the oven a jolly good clean because I find cleaning very therapeutic, and I like being surrounded by tidiness.

Andy went into the garden to give the willow arch a prune and tidy up, and I came up here ('here' being my arty-crafty writing room) to do a spot of writing. Primrose and Daisy have now got free range of half the garden thanks to a delivery of some fencing from Omlet on Wednesday, so they are happy doing chickeny things beyond the confines of their original run, and if I lean back slightly in my chair, I can watch them from the window. I can also see Andy balanced atop one of the garden chairs brandishing a saw and wrestling with the thicker branches of willow, which, given his Taurean bull-in-china-shop tendencies is making me feel slightly ill at ease, so p'raps I shan't lean back again for a while, and maybe I'll open the window ever so slightly so I can hear any thumps/ screams/ cries for help should they ensue.

Oh no, it's okay. Primrose and Daisy are wearing their 'My Little First Aider' outfits. They're doing thumbs up with their wings.

'Don't worry!' shouts Primrose. 'We are fully trained in plastering and Germolening.'

'And I can made a splint out of willow wands,' shouts Daisy.

'Phew,' I say. 'My mind is now at rest. Back to writing.'

There is a little resident robin in the garden who cheers me up, because he now knows I am a provider of food and we are becoming friends.

'No, we bloomin' well aren't,' he says. 'My motives are purely mercenary.'

 He approached within arm's reach this morning. He'll be sitting on my hand by Christmas.

'No, I flippin' well won't,' says he. 'Unless you vary the offering of sunflower seeds to say, oh, a few meal worms. Then I might be tempted.'

And, of course, it is half term this week. No school! The joy with which this fills me only proves that I have made the right decision to leave teaching. After half term, there are six weeks and four days until the Christmas holidays. Which is 34 school days. Minus one child-free day which is a Staff Development Day (or as I prefer to call them - Staff Depression Day. But at least you get a free lunch.)

Not that I'm counting or anything. But I am. It is keeping me cheerful.

I am also allowing myself to think very occasionally on Christmas. Not much. Just in a 'making Christmas card' way. And writing a little MMM Christmas storybook kind of way.

And so I leave you to enjoy a happy and peaceful Sunday with this little saying (apologies to Harriet Beecher Stowe's original) inspired by MMM treasured guest, Olly, from a comment she made about the change that chickens bring:

'When you get into a tight place (like squeezing a size 16 bottom into size 12 knickers) and everything is against you, till it seems as though you cannot hold on a minute longer, never give up (and definitely don't sneeze) - for that is just the place and time that the tide (aka Fate/ Universe/ Luck because we are not at home to Mr Cliche) will turn - usually chased by a chicken holding an umbrella, a mug of hot chocolate and piece of fresh-from-the-oven shortbread.'

Pregnant!

Whilst I wait for the assorted friends and family who read this blog to pick themselves up from the floor, I shall explain how this odd event came about.

The news was, in fact, revealed to me on a visit to The Guardian website as I was perusing through the jobs section just to see what was available. For there I found the job I am leaving at Christmas being advertised as Temporary Maternity Cover! Well, you could have knocked me sideways with a spatula, beat me with a whisk and turned me into pancakes.

I went to work the next day in a state of shock. A colleague appeared in my classroom just before break time.

'So when were you going to tell us you were pregnant?' said she, for she had been reading Guardian Jobs, too.

'Well, I didn't know myself,' said I. 'Bit of a shock I can tell you.'
'Is it one of those menopause babies you hear about?' said she.
'Must be,' said I.
'When's it due?' she said.
'I don't know. Sometime around Christmas, I suppose.'
'P'raps you should check with Senior Management,' my colleague suggested. 'Because they seem to know all about it.'
'Clearly,' I said. 'Because I can't imagine that they would be so deceitful as to advertise a permanent job as a temporary maternity cover if it wasn't true, would they?'

And then my colleague and I had a good laugh about the whole preposterousness of the idea.

I have flirted with the idea of playing along with the charade because up to now not a single member of SMT have asked me why I am leaving. None of them have even mentioned it, in and either 'sorry to see you go' nor ' good riddance' kind of way. In fact, it's like I don't exist. I like to fantasise that they might care, but they don't. I think they might be too afraid to ask, because I have gone beyond
the state of depression at the situation and have now reached the state of blazing anger.

So, after half term I might shove a tiny cushion up my dress, and stand in Assembly rubbing my back a bit. I might do a bit of huffing and puffing going up and down the stairs. I might take to chewing on a lump of coal at staff meetings. Or carrying a spot of knitting around.

Of course I'm no more pregnant than I'm an, oh, I don't know, Ofsted performing monkey.

On another note, we had a house viewing today. First one in three weeks. Nice young couple who are marrying next year and wanting to start a family straight away. And we are going to look at a house tomorrow, and are planning a trip to Norfolk soon to see two more houses we've found on the Internet.

Life moves on, but for me there is a distinct smell of freedom in the air.

Support Team

When one is a writer, one needs a support team. I have a support team.

I have Andy, who is and always has been, more positive about my writing abilities than I have ever been. He says, 'Give up teaching, get a little part time job and use the rest of your time to write.' And he is right. He also says, 'You must steel yourself against rejection,' and he is right about this too, because I am rubbish at receiving rejection slips; they make me want to inflict damage on the innocent post man who delivers them, then shut myself away in a tower never to see the light of day again.

I have the cats. When I am writing at the desk top, Pandora sits on my lap. She curls up in a teeny ball because she is freakishly small for a fully adult cat, and then falls asleep, and I feel I can't get up because I don't want to disturb her, so I have to sit and write (or play Mah Jong titans if the muse deserts me) until she wakes up or my legs go dead. And if I am sofa writing ( which is long hand in a notebook) then Tybalt squishes up hard against my side, until he goes to sleep as well and snores which entertains me enormously. And if I move, he gives me such a filthy look for disturbing him, I daren't get up.

And now I have chickens again! My avian muses. They are already planning a Hallowe'en adventure. I tried to tell Primrose that I thought spraying her gingery self a luminous witchy green was bound to end in tears but she said what did I know about sartorial elegance, and I had to admit not a lot really, and she said, exactly, and basically told me to trick or treat off. Watch this space!

I have writer friends in foreign parts who feel, like me, the frustrations of writing, and not being able to write, and thinking 'is it worth it?' and having to give each other 'pull yourself together' talks acroos the interwebbly. And knowing that deep down, writers we are meant to be, and writers we shall be, and it really doesn't matter that the only people who seem to get published these days are established authors or famous people of the cheap celebrity type who can guarantee their publishing houses good sales because some people will buy any old tat if it has been written by their favourite pop star.

And I have my sixth form students who know I am a writer and who have read some of my work and who think I should definitely be published and who have come up with a 'Get Ma'am Published' plan.

Which runs something along these lines...

1) take copies of ma'am's self published book into famous bookshops and insert them surreptitiously into bookshelves

2) go into those same bookshops and ask if they have a copy of Ma'am's book. When met with the predicted negative response, said sixth form plan to 'kick off' and demand that copies are secured for them immediately. They will also bandy phrases like, 'what kind of a bookshop are your running here?' very loudly, to create a public interest

3) make me sit outside famous bookshop at a table piled with my books a la book-signing mode. They will then, along with assorted friends, form a lengthy queue to get my autograph, thereby creating an interest amongst nosey passers-by who think they might be missing out on something

4) leave copies of ma'am's book in as many public places as possible - train stations, buses, libraries etc - they are willing to go pretty global on this one. Rucksacks were mentioned.

5) become my marketing team. They have already decided which of them will be my agent, which my publicity manager, which my press officer. They will give their services free of charge which I thought was rather touching until they said, 'Until you achieve international multi-millionaire status,' and I said I wasn't really doing it to make lots of money, and they looked at me like I was mad, then fell about laughing. Mercenary bunch!

But most of all I have you, the Much Malarkey Manor house guests, who, just by dropping by to have a read every day or once in a while, make my writing all worth-while.

So thank you! My support team!

Scrabbled

Quite a few of my Year 10 class were out gallivanting this morning on various outings, so I decided, in an act of blatant loose cannonness (canoninity?) to throw out the detailed lesson plan I hadn't written because I am hacked off with having to write detailed lesson plans, and decided to do what we did occasionally in the old days which was commonly known as 'winging it.' My only proviso, I told the group when I told them of my avant guard plan for the hour, was that every activity we winged must have a connection to the novel 'Of Mice and Men' because that is what we have been studying for the last 8 weeks.

So, I had a group of three girlies out in the corridor doing a Jeremy Kyle-style 'Curley's wife-meets-her-horrid-mother-who-ruined-her-dreams-of-being-a-movie-star' and has it out with her, spitting and swearing in a mock TV extravaganza.

And another group of five girlies making a board game to teach younger students about the characters, plot, setting and themes of the novel, which produced the most spectacularly enormous cardboard dice I have ever seen in the almost 15 years I've been involved in education.

And then there were a couple of lads who constructed a rather fetching 3-D pictorial representation of the opening scene in the novel complete with a river, a pond and a lovely sunset coming down over the Galiban mountains. They even added some relevant quotations, but only after I had threatened them.

And finally, there was a boys versus girls Scrabble game where not only did they have to come up with words that actually existed, they had to spell them correctly AND link them to the novel. One of the lads tried to convince me that the heron at the end of the novel that eats the water snake thus foreshadowing the death of Lennie, was, in fact, a budgie, but I wasn't letting him get away with that one, especially as I was winning at the time.

Anyway, when it became clear I was likely to win the game of Scrabble, I was voted off the girl's team by the boys and another student took my place. I went off to sulk in the corridor with the Jeremy Kyle girls, but came back just in time to see the spectacular fracas between Chloe and Fraser.

 It is my belief that Chloe and Fraser are secretly in love, but outwardly they are always  niggling and sniping at each other, and thus it had been during the Scrabble game. Until, that is, Chloe decided to end it all by flinging the board, tiles and all, across the table with the anguished shout of 'You are such an IMBECILE!' before picking up her enormous and flamboyant bag and flouncing to the opposite side of the classroom for a mammoth sulking session.

I was so proud of her! They are a bottom set group...and she used the word 'imbecile' in exactly the right context!

My job is done.

Watching them, watching us, watching them

'They're watching us again,' says Daisy. 'And my pants are being buffeted by the wind.'
'My fault I'm afraid,' says Primrose. She has secreted her laptop inside the chicken feeder because from the kitchen window it looks like she is eating when she is, in fact, typing away on her Hen-pad, writing the outline to her next best-selling novel.
'Why for your fault?' says Daisy.
'Well,' says Primrose, 'for a start, when I put in for this writing retreat holiday, I distinctly remember asking for a country Manor location in sunny climes. Wind was most certainly not on the agenda.'

Daisy turns so she is standing down from the stiff north-westerly that is currently beating the garden into leaf drop submission. 'I suppose,' she says, 'I could put up the windbreak.'

'You could,' says Primrose.

'What ARE they doing?' says Daisy.

'Who?' says Primrose.

'Them,' says Daisy. 'So far today they have thrown oddments of food at us, covered this run with a dodgy looking piece of corrugated Perspex sheeting and squatted in the mud at various intervals clucking at us in a language I've never heard of. No idea what they're saying, have you?'

'I think it's some sort of pidgin English,' says Primrose.

'Well that's no good, is it?' says Daisy. ' Coz we're chickens, not pigeons.'

'They're just trying to be friendly,' says Primrose. 'You know, like giving us a variety of food, making sure we're warm and dry.'

'Ha!' says Daisy. 'You'll be telling me they've given us names next.'

'They have,' says Primrose. 'I'm Primrose and you are Daisy.'

'Ridiculous!' says Daisy.

'What are they thinking?' I say to Andy, staring into the soggy back garden at the hens. Andy is making another batch of sour dough bread. He is determined to perfect the art of using a sour dough starter, and there is much huffing, puffing and pummelling going on.

'I think they are thinking they have found a jolly nice place to live,' says Andy.

'Primrose looks like she is using a laptop behind the feeder,' I say, as Primrose's head bobs up and looks around like a startled meerkat for the umpteenth time, much like I do when I am in the middle of an in depth writing session.

'P'raps they're getting fed up with eating layers' mash,' says Andy. 'Shall I throw a few grapes at them?'

'They'd like that, ' I say. 'Especially Daisy.'

Name Games

All our previous hens have arrived with names. We knew they were arriving and so we had time to muck about thinking of what they should be called.

But Primrose (the little ginger girl) and Daisy (the larger white lass) arrived sans les nomes, because I didn't know they were on their way and Andy isn't really bothered about names for animals, and if he was he'd probably call them something totally unsuitable like 'Spud Head' or 'Nobby.'

No, it takes a woman's touch to come up with the right names, because we are sensitive to character and personality, and we're usually the ones who stand at the back door shouting into the garden and need to chose something that is a) unembarrassing and b) pronounceable after a glass of wine or two. Not that I drink. But I might be driven to it by Christmas.

And so the new girls went to bed that first night, nameless, and I went to bed thinking of what to call them, which was very soothing because usually I go to bed fretting about what the next day at school will bring.

I like to name animals after characters who mean something to me, ergo Tybalt is Tybalt because I love Shakespeare, and Pandora is Pandora after Adrian Mole's infinitely marvellous love interest in The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole (and not because I like boxes with surprises in them unless the surprise is a kitten or a chick, and it is an especially nice box.)

And the previous hens were all named after female characters from favourite sitcoms, and so it was this tack I began with.

'Hyacinth' and 'Audrey' were the first choices, after Hyacinth Bucket from Keeping Up Appearances and Audrey Fforbes-Hamilton from To The Manor Born. And from the same sitcom, Marjorie.

Nope. They didn't seem right. A bit too 'bossy.' And these hens didn't seem the bossy types.

So I looked at literary heroines. One of my favourite authors is Stella Gibbons. I could almost hear the hens saying, 'We are NOT going to be called 'Stella' and 'Gibbon'.'

'What about Flora and Mybug?' I imaginarily said.

'Mybug?'

'Yes,' I said, continuing the imaginary conversation. 'From Cold Comfort Farm.'

'I don't mind being called Flora,' they said back in imaginary unison. 'But Mybug???'

'Feckless and Careless,' I said. 'After the cows?'

'NO!'

I flirted briefly with Enid (Blyton) and Beatrix (Potter) and whilst both of them looked like an Enid, neither looked like a Beatrix. And then Margaret/ Maggie (Thatcher) but there was no way Andy would tolerate that, plus there are no other female politicians I have a high enough regard for to name one of my hens in their honour.

And so I went to sleep...

...and as soon as I woke up, it came through very clearly. They were Primrose and Daisy.

So I didn't name them. The Patron Saint of Hens (St Bokkity-Bok-Bok) did. I didn't tell Andy straight away. I had to let the names sit with me for a while.Just to make sure.

But I texted him when I got to school. 'Primrose and Daisy say they think they will enjoy living at MMM very much,' I wrote.

'Did they text and tell you?' texted Andy back.

'No,' I said. 'They Skyped. Live news link straight from the pod.'

'These youngsters and their technology,' texted Andy.

Luck, luck, luck....cluck!

Well, you know how I've been having a miserable time at work lately...

...and you know how it's my birthday in two weeks' time...

...and how I nearly stole a chicken last weekend....

So, I got home from work last night at 9.15 p.m. Yes, that's right. 9.15 pm in the evening, at night, 13 and three quarter hours after I went to work in the morning, because it was Open Evening and we have to teach all day, then set up loads of activities and then speak to parents and their off-spring about how fab the school is.

And I was fed-up, and headachy, and hungry, and my dratted cough and cold is still hanging on.

And Andy said to me on my arrival home, 'Come into the garden,' and I thought, 'Hello, hello...'
but I went into the garden anyway even though it was pitch black and tipping it down with rain.

And there, 'neath the willow arch, the eglu pod and run stood...

...it hadn't been there that morning...

...and inside the pod, snuggled up and fast asleep were...

PRIMROSE AND DAISY!!!

 

 

Well, I haven't been able to wipe the smile off my face all day!

Andy said, 'You need chickens. Happy Early Birthday!'