baba_o_riley

I PASSED MY DRIVING TEST TODAY! I AM A MOTORIST! I'M GOING TO PICK UP MY CAR TONIGHT!

Shopping at the Trafford Centre = an immensely underwhelming experience.

This morning I rode the bus to the Trafford Centre to shop for things for my holiday. I got there at 09:40 but the shops didn't open for another 20 minutes because, unlike other reasonable retail outlets, the shops at the TC open at 10:00, not 09:00. I therefore had to waste 20 minutes and £3.45 in a Starbucks having a coffee.
I then preceded to wander around fruitlessly for 3 hours buying nothing but sun cream because all the clothes at the TC were either:
a) rubbish
b) badly fitting or
c) not in my size.

Questions about the TC:
1) Why do people get so dressed up, just to go shopping?
2) Why doesn't it open at 09:00?
3) Why is it so popular?

I'm feeling a bit cynical about my TC experience today because I went there specifically to buy a pair of sandals from Clarks, which apparently are so popular that the TC has sold out of them.

Actually, almost all of my TC experiences to date have been this disappointing.

I'm an idiot.

I made a beef stew and had it bubbling away on the hob so I decided to work on my lesson resources for my Enrichment project; making Powerpoints and worksheets, ect. on the computer. But I left the heat on too high and, just now, when I went back into the kitchen to stir my stew, it had turned into a blackened, smelly and inedible mess, stuck to the bottom of the pan. Now I don't have anything to eat for my tea. What a disaster.

Apparently, today is supposed to be the last sunny day for a while. It's been quite hot recently. I was enjoying the sunshine in London on Monday when Ian and I went down to do some research for our project. We went to the Sherlock Holmes museum on Baker Street where they have actors dressed as Watson and Holmes who talk to you and you can have your picture taken in an armchair in front of the fire, wearing a deerstalker hat.

We also bought a guidebook to Whitechapel and went to all the locations and murder sights related to Jack the Ripper where we took pictures of street signs and filmed ourselves reading aloud from the book, describing the old haunts of various dead prostitutes.

Then we went for a curry on Brick Lane. It was a good day.

I'm doing a presentation about my project on Wednesday and my course finishes next Friday.

Tonight I'm making more resources and will have to resort to eating eggs or cereal for my tea.

Always he would walk
With a cloudy heart
Through falling rain
In weathered dreams
To find out how
I know his name.

Well, the CDA is done. All 7000 words+ of the beast. I finished it at the Southport Weekender after a night of hardcord partyage and before another night of the same. It's official, I am no longer human and have transormed into a machine that only knows how to work and nothing else.

I got a job on Friday. Next year I'm going to be a real teacher at a real school. I'd like to pretend that I'm reallty excited about this but the thought of having to teach for the rest of my life is a miserable one. I can only hope that the real thing is not as soul-destroying as the training process.

It's official... I'm EXCELLENT. I was awarded 'excellent practice' this week for my teaching. I'm expecting a cash prize, a holiday and a celebratory banquet for the amount of work I had to put in to get this. I was the only person on my course to get it this year.

But I shouldn't be moaning. These are some good achievements. I do actually feel quite proud. I wish I had the energy to celebrate.

Why I am wasting time on Facebook when I should be writing my CDA?

Could love bring
Peace to the early moon
And fly like the bird
That is my heart
Up in a dreamy sky.

It's the end of the first week of the holidays and I have done practically no work. Not much has changed then. I've gotten to 23 and not learned that leaving everything till the last minute is the hard way to do things.

I haven't written here for a while because I have had literally no time to do so. During the past six weeks of school, I've been getting up at 06:40, working all day at school, coming home, working until I went to bed (which was usally between 23:30 and 01:30), collapsing from exhaustion, and doing the same the next day. I'm just glad this period of the training process is finished. Finally, the hard part is over. It's been six weeks of sheer misery and I've wanted to quit on numerous occasions. I've felt like doing this has completely broken me. It has stripped away everything that was good and strong about me and left me at my utter lowest. I've survived on raw determination because the only thing that's kept me going is the thought that I wasn't going to let it beat me and I have to see it through to the end. The truth is that I hate it. I absolutely despise every minute of it. I hate the kids, I hate the environment, I hate the other teachers, I even hate my subject. Now just looking at the cover of a novel fills me with loathing. This is really sad because I used to love books.

I know this sounds very self-pitiful and over-dramatic but unless you've been through it yourself, or watched somebody else deteriorate before your eyes as they go through it, it's difficult to understand how emotionally and pyhsically draining it actually is. However, I intend to stick with it for a while, at least until I'm fully qualified. I've got an interview for a teaching job in a couple of weeks' time, so we'll see how that goes.

But now, as it's Easter Sunday, I'm off to eat some chocolate because that will lift my spirits, at least a little bit.