So a 2.45% payrise is not enough for the teachers of Britain (or at least, those in the N.U.T.), they want 4.1%.
Teachers do work hard, there's no denying it, but they are amply recompensed by good holidays, and salaries already far in excess of a vast portion of the workforce, and yet that is not enough for those alledgedly instilling education and good values into the youth of today.
'Stop working, and you'll get what you want' seems to be the maxim of those on strike - what a splendid example they set to youths all too eager not to do anything.
I have NO sympathy for the teachers now, not one jot.
It's official, Spring has arrived!
Well actually, rampant frogs have arrived and are laying down clouds of frogspawn in the pond. Every time I open the porch door, there's a splashing flurry of legs as the frog scoots away, all embarrassed at being caught in the act.
It's not looking as if it's going to be a particularly floral Spring, it has to be said. Youngest daughter was at best, disparaging, about the one-and-a-half miniature daffodils that finally managed to make it into the daylight, and the mass of celandines which cheered up the front garden last year are conspicuous by their absence. Even the ever-blooming rose seems to have stopped.
The magnolia tree is starting to bud with a degree of enthusiasm, but whether said buds are going to be leaves or flowers, remains to be seen. After last year, and the somewhat harsh cropping it received at the hands of the mad axe-man, Steve (under the guise of pruning it), I will be very surprised to see vast numbers of flowers, although it wouldn't take very many to beat the seven it displayed after the 'trim'.
Rather splendidly, the Christmas cactus I had as a gift two years ago, is positively vibrant, with new leaves exploding onto the scene, and a second flowering. Until now, it's never even hinted at a desire to spread, and the whole thing has taken me completely by surprise. I have absolutely no idea why it should have happened since the only change is that it now lives in the bathroom, but I'm not complaining.
Being ill is really beginning to tick me off.
Not that I've ever enjoyed it, quite the opposite, I dislike intensely the curtailment of my freedom, my inability to do what I want to do, etc., but now I have to put up with things that used to work fine, not working at all, or deteriorating before my eyes.
My sight is a prime example. For decades now, I've had perfect vision, I could see anything and everything without straining, I could happily switch between short and long distances at will, and I never needed to fret about seeing things in dim light. Suddenly, that's not the case. I now wear spectacles pretty much all the time.
This in itself wouldn't be a major problem, if I was really able to see properly with them, but I'm still struggling. I have a pair of 'varifocals' (I think), that are allegedly meant to cover all eventualities, but I can't drive in them as the weird foggy bits turn my head to mush. So, I also have a pair I drive in - they work fine, except for reversing into parking spaces, where I find that I'm better off not wearing any glasses at all.
Craft work is a nightmare - if the light isn't perfect (which it almost never is), I can't see the bitty things I want to use, and I wouldn't like to confess the number of times I've dropped beads recently, so my multifunction glasses are meant to sort that problem out. Once again though, they fail, the blurry edges make my head ache, even though I've been running them in for eight months.
Then there's the 'reading' glasses that I ought to wear, but I lost.... In reality, I put them down somewhere, and I can't see where I left them!
Thumper, one of our rabbits died in my arms this evening. He was 7 years old, a beautifully fluffy, grey and white lop-eared bunny that we've had since he was so tiny he sat comfortably in the palm of my hand. I can't seem to stop crying for him, and for Bloemph, our other rabbit, who has never been alone for more than a couple of nights.
I miss him.
Every one of us makes daily decisions about people and things, based on our own perception of the situation at the time. We don't always make the right decision, and by the time we've made it, or by the way we made it, it's often too late to recover what we've lost.
Friendships lost through misunderstandings are the hardest to deal with, there's rarely 'closure', so they fester at the back of our minds, occasionally popping up to remind us what we've lost.We find ourselves going back over our reactions to situations and regretting being unable to talk it out. Did 'they' really mean that when they said it? Was that their intention? Should I have said something differently? Did I jump to the wrong conclusion? Should I have let that one go? If I'd said something in a different way, would things all be fine now? Should I have given the benefit of doubt, and not allowed my judgement to be clouded? Maybe I shouldn't have been so thin skinned - should I have swallowed my pride?
Now, it's too late, time has pottered on, as time so often does, and the deep friendship is no more, perhaps there are occasional words which pass between us like ships in the night, but memories of fun, love and support still remain, and the regret of loss will never leave me.
My youngest isn't really young any more, at 15 she's a self-confident and capable young woman, but some things still shake her composure and one of those is examinations. In November she sat her GCSE Maths as part of the top set in her year. It was a harrowing time, the first time she'd sat an exam that REALLY mattered, and she was very afraid that she'd fail, or at best do badly.
I'm thrilled to be able to report that she passed with flying colours, and is now in possession of an A* Maths GCSE Certificate.
She's not a great one to put herself forward, and I was only told about this by a friend who noticed it and recognised my daughter....
