Supply teachers

I feel like my body is slowly beating this cold! It's taking it's bloody time. I wake up feeling okay, but as the day develops, I start to feel less well. I got completely out of breath climbing a flight of stairs earlier, so there's obviously something still wanting to make itself felt. And now Nathan is poorly. He's shaking in bed next to me like one of those hairless dogs.

I stumbled off to Swiss Cottage this afternoon for a meeting, and, in the process, bumped into young Ben Jones who played Alf in Brass. We had a lovely cup of tea at Hampstead Theatre where, incidentally, Sara Kestelman is presently performing, and where we also bumped into Ruby, who played Peggy in Brass. #BrassReunion.

Nathan kindly drove me down to Swiss Cottage, which is a doddle from Highgate in a car, but an absolute nightmare by public transport.

I worked out that it was actually quicker to walk home, but got to the base of Highgate Hill and jumped on a bus into the village. I didn't think a one in ten gradient was a particularly good idea in my present state!

The time zones all went wrong on my computer's email system this afternoon, meaning emails were (and still are) appearing in my inbox as though they'd been sent eight hours earlier. Then the same thing happened to my iPhone, and then Nathan's iPhone and then his computer. There's viruses everywhere in this house! It's like a form of time travel! Poor Nathan tried to sort it out and ended up on the phone for hours. We're still not sorted. I'm still living in the past.

Abbie came over this evening and we ate pizza and watched The Gilmore Girls. We're all off to Bristol tomorrow for Andras' funeral. I can't imagine how awful the day is going to be for Llio and Silvia, but all we can do is send bucket loads of love out into the universe.

It doesn't seem to be a good time for anyone at the moment. Someone who Nathan worked with at Urdang was killed last night on her way from a rehearsal and my Dad's oldest school friend has just had a stroke. 2016: what a flippin' awful year. In twenty years time people will simply say, "oh was that a 2016 occurrence?" And then they'll nod knowingly. They used to do that about my form at school when they saw our exam results in science. We'd had an entire year where we'd been banned from doing experiments on account of our having set fire to the lab, and then another year where we'd had nothing but supply teachers because our main teacher had been the one whose name the gunman was shouting when he came into our school to do the shooting. By the time we reached the fourth year, all bets were off. I didn't know a Bunsen burner from a blancmange.

The supply teachers were fun, though. We once saw how many crocodile clips we could attach to one poor woman's skirt, and, on another occasion, when watching a video in class (we saw the film Threads about nineteen times in instalments) the lights went off, there was a scream, and when the lights came back on again everyone in the class was covered in flour.

Quite what triggered that memory I'm not sure! 

(I think we attached 29 crocodile clips to the supply teachers' skirt.)