Jihad

Back to school, and, yesterday, back to Glyndebourne for a meeting with the boss. It was a very odd experience travelling back to Lewes. The last time I was there, I left work and was a bloody mess in A&E a few hours later. That was in July 2006. Apparently, amongst my very first incoherent ramblings was an exhortation that nobody should tell Glyndebourne, as I felt I’d be making it back shortly. It now appears as if, audition notwithstanding, I will finally make it back in March/April 2008. Almost two years after the accident. I was quietly hoping that I might make it onto this autumn’s tour, but I must admit that, if I was my own boss, I wouldn’t have hired me for September. So I can’t really get cross about it. The tour is going to be a tough one, and everybody else will have learnt the operas this summer. And the biggest production – Macbeth, in case we needed any more bad luck - is in kilts. I'm not sure the delicate opera-going public is quite ready for the public exposure of my right calf. So, come July, I will potentially be without a job until March, and trying to persuade a new set of people that I am a fine employment prospect whilst hobbling in to an audition room looking like an extra from Casualty. You have to be tenacious to be an opera singer. But things are starting to get ridiculous. Until somebody writes ‘Emergency ward 10 – the opera’, I am screwed.

In the meantime, it’s back to teaching. My pupils were universally thoughtful enough to find my broken hand hilariously amusing. I can’t say that I blame them. My early attempts at marking homework might just have well have been in runic for all their legibility. I am having to nominate board scribes. And, after my own makeshift coat-hanger splint, St. George’s finally provided me with a plastic, scoop shaped affair that makes my classroom rhetorical gestures look as though I’m cleaning crumbs off a table.

Things that become impossibly difficult whilst wearing a hand splint:

1. Shaking hands with people. The question about the left handed shake then arises. Does it have Masonic connections? Along with my recent enforced predilection for one-legged pairs of trousers, is there a theme here?

2. Changing William’s pyjamas at 2 o’clock in the morning. All those poppers. Ridiculous.

3. Using two crutches. Apparently, according to my physio, a good thing in the long run, but leading to a great deal of not insignificant ankle pain.

4. Driving. So I have to walk a mile from the station to work. See no. 3.

5. Chopping food. I got as far as mixing the curry paste the other day, before realising that chopping onions was going to be an insurmountable obstacle. We had some cold beef in the fridge. I resorted to tearing at it like a Neanderthal. Satisfying, but ultimately quite uncivilized. As for using a knife and fork in the staff dining room, I have been in real trouble. Very difficult to hold a serious conversation whilst gnawing a complete chicken breast on the end of a fork.

6. Using button flies. Which adorn the only pair of decent trousers I have that fit over my leg. Insult. Injury. And quite serious indignity in public toilets.

All of which serves me right for breaking my hand in the first place, I suppose. Though I am now suspecting a cause for all this bad luck. In an idle moment, I googled ‘blegspot’. And found this site in Arabic amongst only five or six results. Is it Jihad? Am I the domestic front of some middle-eastern terror campaign? Was the sofa tampered with? Or do I need to rediscover a sense of persective? Now that I've broken my hand, maybe I should change my blog's name. To Blandspot? Maybe not.