Half term brings a wonderful sense of time out from the routine of school life, and this one especially offers time to look back over a very busy few weeks. Social events with colleagues and students, a concentration of parents' evenings, and the rush of marking trial exams, have all soaked up the few waking hours not already allocated to professional duties. The easiest way to deal with such pressures is to surrender any hope of "spare time", and accept that for a while, life is allocated unequally to work and sleep. In an ordinary job, such a regime would be unbearable, but this is not by any means an ordinary job. A lost Saturday in front of the TV becomes a riotous house dance in the fives court; a sacrificed Sunday evening or Saturday afternoon turns into a welcome chance to meet the families of the children I see every week to compare perspectives on their progress.Fortunately, I have a most accommodating lifestyle. With all the offspring now fledged, I can be flexible outside the conventional working day, and with a few exceptions, touching base with them can be fitted around school duties. There was one potential exception recently, though.
However, my daughter-in-law, in a most dutiful fashion, delivered my grandson a week early, on the Saturday afternoon of my only free weekend of the term, allowing me the chance to race up the motorway and spend time with the new family without encroaching at all on school life. Needless to say, he is quite the most perfect baby ever born.
This lull in the term offers the
chance to enjoy a different pace of life. After a weekend city break with my lover, the rest of the week holds other pleasures: a trip to London to wish daughter Happy Birthday, and a trip to the theatre with son number 2; a drive through the Cotswolds to visit my Dad, who has been feeling under the weather recently; lie-ins and the boxed set of "Goodnight Sweetheart".There are things I have to do, though. With an eye to the exams in summer, I have school revision materials to edit and exam board materials to write, and there are plenty of jobs to do around the house. The joy is having the time to pace these chores, interspersing them with self-indulgent trifles, and doing them after enough sleep to feel energetic and motivated. So I am enjoying the lull, knowing that next week I will be plunging headlong into the mad rush towards Easter.
