A Spring Holiday

A lot's happened since I last wrote. For someone in my pretty delicate professional condition it is a big deal that I have been prevented from updating this blog because of having had TOO MUCH TO DO. Yes, I have even been able to indulge in the lexicon of busy people by making throw-away comments like "So sorry I haven't got back to you - I've been rushed off my feet." Ahhhh, feels good. Yes, things are changing; the clocks have gone forward and so, it seems, have I. I'm even employed. Of a fashion. I am now a paid-by-the-hour mobile tutor. I am currently tutoring my former English teacher's son French A-level. (Oh how life goes round in circles, she mutters reflectively.) I prepare work, I carry a file, I impart knowledge, I get money for it. I spend half of that money on petrol. Nevertheless, I am content. I have also applied for a PGCE place and even been invited for interview. This is cork-popping success by 2009's book. Out of the dark maelstrom of the past two months and into March.

I spent today writing a speech in Spanish on the importance of learning languages. For the interview. Picking up the battered and bruised Collins Spanish Dictionary, untouched since Black Summer 2005, I felt a bit like a traitor. As I opened its finger-smudged pages, it sneered at me. "Where the hell have you been these past four years?? Journalism? Wasn't good enough for you was I?" Believe me, re-opening that dictionary wasn't easy. Emotional almost. A few lines into my rusty Spanish prose and I was getting into the swing of it. I was horrified to think that it could have been much longer before I wrote those funny words with their oddly placed accents. I jest. I don't go in for all that linguistic xenophobia. But, seriously, thinking about how I'd just saved myself from a potentially foreign language-starved life, I felt immense relief. I spoke a few of the funny words aloud. It was great. By the way, if this linguistic fetish is making anyone feel uncomfortable please refer back to the last post and the reference to lack of sporting cred/street cred at school. Then things shouldn't be so confusing or disturbing. Smash Hits magazine? You could have given me any copy of Authentik - 'educational Spanish publication meant for secondary school pupils, not known for its wide readership' - and I'd have been chuffed.

Of late, I also seem to have gained rent-a-speaker status. So, I was asked to do a talk at my old school in January remember? (oh the presumptuousness of the word 'remember') Well, that seems to have unleashed the lecture beast and I have now been called upon to help with careers evenings, speak about journalism (all four on-and-off years of it) and also to counsel students considering taking languages beyond GCSE - as if it's such a precarious decision to take them that they need someone who they believe has succeeded in that line of education (although not, as yet, of work) to encourage, slash coerce, them into taking the leap. The government likes languages apparently - although determining the number of politicians who actually speak a second language would be an interesting poll to carry out. They like the idea of language learning so much that they have (and hands down to them) put quite a bit of effort into getting them into primary school classrooms. They like the idea so much that, after having done this, they have then announced that it is not compulsory for kids to take a language at GCSE. I had quite a heated debate about this with the Simon Cowell of PGCEs at the teaching conference so I got most of it out of my system then. But still, it deserves a mention here.

So I'm becoming quite an ambassador for the languages. And, to boot, I have also acquired something which I believes gives me the edge. Something which is the icing on the cake, the final waxen seal of success on this much clearer professional path - glasses. I have been prescribed reading glasses. Prescribed makes it sound like a bad thing when, actually, I couldn't be happier. From mere naked-faced youth to spectacle-wearing adulthood. I never thought I would be so pleased about the onset of failing vision but, for me, it marks the beginning of the serious, the mature..the job. These glasses will be my weapon against teenagers who talk in my lessons. Or just those who don't like me. I won't be having any of that either. One can't peer without glasses and I don't think one can reasonably wag a finger without having a pair of glasses perched on the nose. So for me it finishes off the whole pedagogical preparations quite tidily.

My work is not quite done of course. There are the interviews, which involve the ability to recite the (maybe on reflection far too complicated) Spanish I have just written for myself to perform, then there's the time to be spent in more schools, soaking up the ideas I will be able to employ in my new career...and then there's the training and actually doing the job....But, I'm getting far too far ahead of myself. A holiday is what's needed first. Refresh things, get a squint of a tan, speak some Spanish with the Brits or the Germans (?) ...which is why I am jetting off to Lanzarote, that big volcano by Africa, next week. I'll try my best to avoid the burger bars, I'll try less hard to avoid the bar bars and I'll be sunbathing whether it's 12 degrees or 22. And I'll root out some native speakers if I can. Although don't blame me if I come back speaking Dutch. It's apparently a very popular place with them. But most importantly, I'm looking forward to drawing a very satisfying line under the exhausting, draining first part of this year, filled with CV-sending, simpering cold-calling and yet another bout of work experience.

And where better to draw a line than in the sand, on a beach? I won't send a postcard but here's a picture of a beach. Ok, it's a picture of Leonardo DiCaprio in the 2000 film The Beach. But you get the idea.