Along with the lockdown that I’m now in the 4th week of, comes a certain amount of free time I felt I bereft of prior to its arrival and since what we’re currently going through is fairly significant both socially and economically, perhaps even historically I feel duty bound to document it somehow; so here we are. However, I equally feel if you were a completist, or stranger still had any kind of actual interest in the events of the last 13 months since my last entry I should at least attempt to summarise what’s happened between the last post and now. To me at least.
And the truth is not much. Not much of interest that is, otherwise I imagine I would have written about it before now, so consider it the lowlights before we talk about life under Covid 19. It might prove more interesting than I’d thought, our parameters of excitement having been adjusted now that we’re not allowed to do anything or go anywhere.
Leaving Baxter to go to America was I think the hardest thing I had to do, therefore reuniting him with him fit and healthy, him at least, was probably the highlight of my return.
Re-Entry
Getting back into the house after our term in America was a fucking nightmare. The people in it did not want to leave and did so only very reluctantly. It was in a bit of state and arguments were had about who owed what and we ended up defaulting to throwing money at it until it went away. The problem that is not the house. I wasn’t too annoyed as I understood our tenants plight, and they’d looked after the dog so well I could hardly be a dick about it. I was now however out of cash and had no car. Like Bend, Cumbria is not designed for carlessness.
Bangernomics
I asked Simone about the car in America as her cousin had picked it up off the side of the street and taken it for sale. It had not yet been sold but he had a buyer. The intention had always been to use that car money to buy a new vehicle this end, although the original plan was to sell it before we left. Unfortunately to this day we are yet to see a penny of it. Regardless I took my last £500 and bought a 15 year old Peugeot from a Christian. It was a right state but what can you expect for £500? The rear suspension was collapsed and the starter motor was shot, so I had to spend a week parking it at the top of a hill so I could jump start it the next day. I spent £250 on it and since then it’s just kept trucking. Kept carring.
175k on the clock and counting. The MOT’s now run out but it’s still sitting there until lockdown lock’s up.
6 months of not working passed quickly, and I busied myself running after the kids and indulging in general house husbandry. It was good to have my stuff back and I made the most of the Lakes in summer with the kids, who were now thankfully back at school. The comfort blanket of the NHS will for me, never again be underestimated and even with Brexit in full swing, I felt safer here than I had at any given moment on our travels. And before I knew it I was back at work. My students treated me like a returning rockstar and even some of the other members of staff seemed pleased to see me, and gradually I slipped back into the old routine, like nothing had ever happened. Contrary to the fact that sounds like the opening of a suicide note, I actually enjoy routine so that’s a good thing. It’s indicative nonetheless of the fact that little happens in my everyday life compared to the surge of events that unfolded every day in America. Time then begins to speed up again.
Yeah Buoy.
Bangernomics
So to distract me from this inevitable sprint towards death I decided to spend some money. Money I didn’t have. I was working now so the bank would lend me cash. So I asked them for it and they gave it to me. It was pretty much that simple. I’d been eyeing up a van as my next vehicle, and since the Peugeot sent from God would soon undoubtably return to him I’d elected to get something a bit more long-term. Having been turned back from Scotland in the winter as it was either too cold or too wet, and then again been turned back in Summer because the midgies were fucking insane, I wanted something I could hang out in, safe from the extremities of the outside world. I wanted a camper van.
After a truly ridiculous amount of research I settled on an ex-RAC conversion (hence the colour) that I could hopefully use for my only vehicle and was capable of both winter and summer travel. It slept four so at a push I could get the family in, not that this was in any way for them and it was fully kitted out with everything but a decent stereo. The mileage was high, the colour was loud, it looked pretty uneconomical and it cost much more than it was probably worth: I call it Big Jaffa
It’s undoubtedly a cliche of a vehicle. Since I bought it I’ve started to notice how many there are around, and how similar in demographic terms their owners are to me. When the seller asked me why I wanted one, I sarcastically replied that I was a mountain biker in his fourties, so I felt duty bound and it’s true, every budding outdoorsman north of the big four o either wants one, or already has one, or at the very least has considered one as an option. Why VW? The design is so tried and tested in camper-terms; it can sleep 4 with the poptop up, and has a parking heater for the winter as well as an amazing fridge, which has so far never failed to produce an ice cold beer on demand and the interior space is used amazingly with the spinning seats and the collapsing roof. I’ve been away in it now and it’s done Scotland and the Alps, both in winter and it proved far better than any rented accommodation; you can sleep pretty much wherever you want and and you can be as loud and obnoxious as you like, and I’m pretty loud and obnoxious when I’m drunk.
Speeding awareness
I never received a speeding ticket for the flash in south Cumbria documented in my last post. I reckon the one way nature of the journey – picked up in London and dropped off in Carlisle, along with the fact I had changed vehicles at the last minute meant I’d been too complicated to trace for the speeding fine. Either that or the camera that flashed me had run out of film, either way I dodged that bullet. I was snapped however on the way to work, and was totally oblivious until the letter arrived. I chose to attend the speeding awareness course to avoid the points and whilst driving to it sometime later I was slightly taken aback to see the same mobile camera unit waiting where I was last caught. I slowed to 60 yet the flash still went off. Had I just been caught speeding whilst driving to a speeding awareness course? It was possibly the most ironic thing that had ever happened to me, so I didn’t know how to feel. The nice men leading the speeding awareness course (Scottish, naturally) informed me that since the van I was in was a commercial vehicle (Big Jaffa), the limit on an A road was 50 and I had therefore been speeding by 10 miles per hour. Fucking brilliant. When I drove home that evening bicycles were overtaking me. It all ended up as a storm in a teacup luckily, as after several frantic phone calls to the DVLA, they finally confirmed the previous owner had re-registered the vehicle and that the Scottish men were wrong. I only wish there was some way that I could let them know that.
job interview
One of the most unpleasant things I did prior to starting back at my Job was interview for another. The head had been pressuring me to teach English on my return as there were blanks in that department that presumably needed filling. I didn’t want to teach English. I think it would be more accurately claim that I was incapable of teaching English. His argument was that I had an A’Level in Literature, which I did but he was asking me to teach English Language, albeit to lower school; but I felt strongly that this required a totally different set of skills, and when a teacher position became available in the Keswick School RE department, the allure of being able to teach my specialist subject and being able to walk to work convinced me to give it a punt.
What a ballache. I haven’t been interviewed for about 15 years so even scraping a CV together consumed several evenings. There were all the obligatory references, which in this case were demanded prior to interview, along with the brief including an incredibly specific lesson to be planned for observation. I even had to have a haircut. The yes or no’s of getting through to interview stress you out, and then the further stress of being accepted for interview loom, it basically dominated the two weeks between seeing the advert and attending the day. The full day. Mind you I wasn’t working so I suppose I didn’t have that much else to think about.
The interview day was particularly horrible, consisting of one-to-one interviews, panel interviews, observed lessons, timed marking tests and chats that aren’t chats at all: they’re more interviews. The students I taught and was interviewed by seemed to warm to me, but in my experience they don’t really like that, or at least don’t give it much credence. I was taken to the wrong room for my timed marking test and I ended up losing 10 of the 25 minutes through their fault – they said it wouldn’t matter but can’t imagine it made me look particularly confident. Despite this I felt I had a decent chance. The two other candidates had different strengths: one competent and senior, the other inexperienced but of course much cheaper to hire. Both were women, and I felt that at the end of the day it was down to what they were looking for spec wise. They gave it to the more experienced lady.
The world doesn’t owe us a living, and I’ll admit I understand why the interview process is necessary and I’m not bitter about the decision (not much), but it just kept occurring to me afterwards what a colossal amount of work and stress it all is to not get a job. I’d actually go as far to say I have now passed on two promotional opportunities in my current school as I wasn’t prepared to it all again. It’s so demoralising and can start you reflecting on yourself in all sorts of negative ways.
For example, I don’t look that good on paper. I make no excuses for having a 2:2 degree. People always claim it’s a party degree, the inference being that they were partying too hard so get the result they could have easily got had they not been so free-spirited and popular. I did plenty of partying at University, but it was the lack of work that dictated a second class degree, and whilst it would be wonderful in life to be rewarded for our potential, it’s hardly a robust philosophy on which to base a capitalist society. I got a 2:2 because I didn’t work hard enough to get anything higher. I’ll go further than that in fact: the idea that I was awarded a degree at all for the pitiful amount of work I submitted and the paltry number of lectures I attended is in reality a laughable indictment of the state of education at the time.
That said, the irresponsible hedonist I was at 21 is not the man I am now, and I’m very upset when people cite my academic credentials as reason for not employing me, which has happened on a couple of occasions now. It seems so far in the past and so irrelevant to my current situation, and whilst I am acutely aware of the hypocrisy in this sentiment bearing in mind I have literally just rejected accepting potential for experience, I have equally used nothing of significance from my Philosophy degree in my teaching, in the last 10 years. Maybe if I’d done more work I would have? Anyway, that all comes from merely reflecting on an interview rejection, not even from an interview itself, so when I was called with the bad news about the Job, I didn’t even ask why I hadn’t got it. The answer is, in my experience rarely genuine anyway, so to risk getting lost in that rabbit hole of reflection based on something that wasn’t even the truth in the first place is dangerous. They might, for example, have preferred a woman for the position rather than a man, for which there are all sorts of legitimate reasons, that they could never admit and I fear I could equally do little about. Or maybe they just thought I was a twat.
So there’s a few things that have happened in the last 12 months. Were they interesting? Perhaps not but at least it paves the way for me to talk about something more significant, if indeed you can imagine something more significant than me buying a car or getting a speeding ticket.