Ok, so it seems my muse is either on vacation or infected with COVID, which means full stories are not forthcoming at the current moment.
I've decided, therefore, to focus on anecdotes and describing some of the more unusual people I've encountered during my nearly 40 (dear god!) years of life as a warm up, hopefully it'll help get me back into the swing of things.
I'm going to start with teachers, as that's a category of human I'm very familiar with, having been in the Educational system for my entire life, one way or another.
(I can hear 16 year old me muttering her dissatisfaction with that, but maybe I can placate her by actually doing some damn writing. Here goes...)
THE TRUE STORY OF MR M
Mr M was a history teacher at my secondary school. We weren’t taught by him for very long, maybe a term or two, but he has stayed in my memory because he was such an unusual character.
I remember being quite taken aback by his dishevelled appearance at first, being used to seeing teaching staff crisp and starched.
He would always appear draped in an oversized cardigan in some nondescript shade, his tie crooked, his shirt crumpled and sometimes stained. He looked like he had been forced into wearing clothing purely for decency’s sake, as if he’d have been equally happy to mould young minds in his pyjamas, or a bedsheet.
He was older than many of the other staff, and his face was heavily lined, like crumpled linen. What was left of his hair was a dandelion puff, white, sparse, and sticking up at all angles around his head. His eyes, magnified behind glasses as thick as the bottom of a milk bottle, blinked hard and rapidly, as though he doubted his own vision.
His teeth and fingertips were a dull, parchment yellow, everything about him spoke of something ancient, but if you got close enough, his eyes behind those thick, fingerprint smeared spectacles were a youthful, vivid blue, and sparkled with mischief.
When he walked into the classroom, the first thing he would do was heave his large, battered briefcase onto his desk and remove his prized possession, a gigantic jar of coffee grounds.
Mr M never went to the staffroom to join the other staff at break times, he kept a stained mug and a small kettle on the bookshelf next to his desk.
His precious jar of coffee, despite being pretty much catering size, would be empty by the end of the week, and be replaced by a brand new batch every Monday.
As you can imagine, both the man and the classroom smelt like his favourite beverage, which might have been ok if it wasn’t mingled with the equally pungent smell of the cigarettes he smoked out of the window at breaktimes, and the Fishermen’s Friends he sucked on to try, unsuccessfully, to mask the smell of both.
We were all reluctant to ask questions, as this might prompt him to leave his station at the front of the room, and come and look at your work. If he spoke to you directly, you would have to hold your breath until he was gone, his own exhalations could have instantly shrivelled a growing plant.
Despite not wanting to get too close to him for fear of asphyxiation, we all liked this strange little man. He knew his subject inside out, and would rant passionately about the lives of the humans behind the facts and figures required for the exams.
He was fair in his treatment of the students, happy to admit to any mistakes (I once got a merit for correcting his spelling, a proud moment for a preteen nerd) and, even when faced with hijinks that would cause other staff to go nuclear, I never once heard him raise his voice.
On the subject of which…I sometimes wondered if his voice was put on for effect, as I had never before encountered someone who genuinely sounded like the typical ‘old man’ from cartoons.
It was crackly and weak, like an old record played on a gramophone, and despite being British, his accent had a strangely American twang to it, particularly when he greeted us at the start of the class with his customary cry of ‘Siddoooown, folks!’
The memories of what exactly he taught us all those years ago have been lost, wiped from my mind with as much ease as he would erase the words from his chalkboard with the sleeve of that ugly cardigan, but one thing I will always remember about him is how he would deal with the inevitable chair tippers in his class.
Honestly, it was spectacular, I can only assume that in a previous incarnation, Mr M had either been a circus performer or an assassin.
He would first spot the offending student and ask them politely to sit properly, sometimes with that classic old line ‘A chair has 4 legs, not 2, young man!’ (not sexist, chair tippers are boys, trust me!) wait for them to comply, and then turn back to the board and continue scrawling about the Romans, the Black Death, or Flanders Field.
Two minutes later, the offending student would already be back in their original position, casually teetering on the edge of a fall, fingertips occasionally resting on the table for assurance that said fall wouldn’t happen.
Mr M couldn’t even have seen this, his back would still be towards us as he scribbled and waxed lyrical about the wonders of Ancient Greece, or the foulness of the Middle Ages, or what a cad that Henry the Eighth had been, but somehow, somehow he always knew the exact moment when those front 2 legs of the chair had once more elevated above ground level.
He would pause for a split second, take a half step back as though checking what he’d written, and pick up the large, wooden eraser from the little shelf below the board.
He would raise it towards the last word he’d written, and then just before it touched, he would pivot, lightening fast, and launch that eraser like a missile, directly towards the boy (seriously, look in any classroom, it’s always a boy!) and BAM! It would hit them square in the chest.
Arms windmilling in vain, the boy’s eyes would widen in shock, the chair would slide out from underneath him, and he would land, the air whooshing from his lungs, flat on his back, dazed, and with an imprint of Mr M’s weapon of choice emblazoned in brilliant white against the maroon of his school blazer.
A silence would fall over the classroom, everyone holding their breath in unison, and then, the boy would inhale, and the class would break into hysterical laughter and applause.
Mr M would calmly walk over, help the student to their feet, dust them off, pat them on the back, and then walk back to the blackboard, trusty projectile in hand, to continue his lesson.