47. Freedom!

Caroline and I had an appointment at an establishment in Kennington in South London the other day.  We were informed that there were parking spaces available and so I suggested to Caroline that I drive and meet her there. “Then we can drive back together,” I said.

“No, don’t,” she said.  “It’s south of the river.  It could take two hours and you’ll have to pay the Congestion Charge to go through the centre of London.   We’d also be coming back in the rush hour.  Why not meet me in Camden and we’ll go together on the tube?  You can use your Freedom Pass.”

This, upon reflection, made sense.   Caroline would already have bought a Daily Travel Pass as she would have been working in Camden all day.  

Camden is on the Northern Line – the same line as Kennington and I had my Freedom Pass that gives me free travel anywhere within Greater London.  Travelling by tube would save us money as well as being simpler.

As I’ve told you before (Brief Encounter), Winchmore Hill is not on the tube network.  The nearest Northern Line station is at East Finchley, four miles away but it is on the way into London.  

I drove to East Finchley, parked in the station car park and then caught the tube to Camden where I met Caroline.  By seven o’clock we were back at East Finchley, having finished our business in Kennington and were walking across the car park.  We hadn’t spent anything.

“Let’s eat at The Clissold,” Caroline suggested.

The Clissold is a pub where Caroline and I, with others, would often go for a drink after work.  In the five years we were in Cayman, it was completely refurbished and is now more of a restaurant than a pub.  The car park is much too small for the number of patrons that it has but otherwise, it is very good indeed.   It was on the way home too.

The next morning Caroline noticed a scratch running the length of the car.  It had obviously been done in the car park at the pub.  I took it to a BMW dealer yesterday and today they have sent me an estimate to repair the damage.

I can now produce a balance sheet for the day:

Money Spent
Travel Card for Caroline	£6.40
Congestion charge	$8.00
Total:	£14.40
Real Cost
Diesel to reach East Finchley and back	£1.00
Parking charge at the station	£3.00
Dinner at the Clissold	£60.00
Bodywork repair	£2165.77
Total:	£2229.77
Total Cost of using the FREE travel card:	£2215.37

 That Freedom Pass is a wonderful thing!

46. Christmas Cards

We received a Christmas card this morning - the ninth one this Christmas.  It wasn’t the ninth to arrive this year - it was the tenth.  We received a card from Nigel and Chris, nine months ago in March while we were in Cayman.  It had been posted in November for Christmas 2009.

There is one card that I know we will receive and which I am looking out for.  The problem is that these days, the postmark is either absent or indecipherable and so it will be hard to identify.  I suppose that it’s machine-franked now.  All that’s ever printed over the stamp are three or four wavy black lines.  No words.  I know where this card will come from.  It will be, if I can identify it, from Middlesbrough - or perhaps Teesside. 

I still have several envelopes from the sixties and seventies and on every one the postmark is clear and very easy to identify.  I have cards and letters that clearly originated in Lowestoft, Chislehurst, Norwich and Finchley.  They were hand marked but the franking machines nowadays are less efficient and designed differently.  

The first one that I picked up is postmarked, “Lowestoft 3^rdDec. 2.15 pm 1965.”  If you read ‘I’m Merely Observing’, you will realise that was another example of an observation, not a moan.

The card that will come from Middlesbrough will be from my daughter’s parents-in-law.  In the envelope along with the card, there will be a zillion, tiny, sparkly, reflective, shimmering, shiny little fragments - Christmas Confetti.  

It’s the same every year.  Irene’s got a thing about sparkle.  They are so small and so light that when I pull the card out, a few million of them will come out too.  Most will fall straight on to the floor but several hundred thousand of them will float away and get caught up in the small draughts and air currents of my living room, until they eventually come down to settle all over the house.  

Next autumn, I will still be finding those that made it up the stairs into our bedroom and finally came to settle in the folds and creases of the duvet.  They will have survived several outings to the washing machine and in June, Caroline will still be giggling as I get out of bed in the morning with one or more of them, sparkling away, stuck on to my bare bum. 

Last year in a gesture of defiance and retaliation, I enclosed a few teaspoons of pure white, microscopically fine, Cayman sand in the envelope of the Christmas card that we sent to Dave and Irene.  They thought it was fabulous to get a little bit of a Caribbean beach at Christmas.  I wait to see what happens this year with some trepidation.

Our first card this year came a few days ago from David and Penny. A note written inside told us that having read ‘A-Z’, they were starting with the ‘W’s this year.

I wrote that it was a Christmas card that came today but it wasn’t really.  It looked like one, with a quaint cottage complete with a snow-covered roof and with a robin perched on a bush in front of it.  The message inside made no mention of Christmas.  

It wished us,“Best Winter Wishes.”  What!  What!   

It used to drive me mad when in Cayman at Christmas, people wished me, “Happy Holidays.”  I’m not religious and even though I was baptised as an infant, I would not describe myself as a Christian but the holiday is Christmas!  

Whoever they are, being offended by reading or hearing the word, “Christmas”, should shut up, concentrate on their own myths, legends and fairy tales and let the rest of us get on with our thing.  (That’s another observation - but I’ll admit that it could be mistaken for a moan)

I remember that when I was young, I used to hear on the radio the last dates for posting Christmas cards to various parts of the world. This information used to start in early November and it was all part of the exciting build up to Christmas.

“Today is the last day for posting Christmas cards to Belize,” was the sort of thing I would hear but in those days I never knew anyone living abroad and so that knowledge was of no interest or use to me. 

I went to the Post Office yesterday to buy stamps to put on the envelopes of cards that we are sending abroad.  We are sending cards to America, Jamaica and Cayman.  I hope it’s not too late.

Our local post office is tiny and only has two customer service booths but one of them is usually unmanned (womanned/personned)?  I joined a queue behind fifteen people (I always count)and I stood in line for twenty-one minutes (I always time how long I queue as my knee begins to hurt after ten minutes of standing still), becoming more and more uncomfortable until it was my turn to be served.  

I bought the stamps and the blue ‘air mail’ stickers to go on the envelopes.  Then I sat in the car outside to attach the stamps and labels.  The blue labels came in a sheet of eight and two single ones. The first one would not bond. I licked the second one.  It seemed to stick but then it fell off. 

“Bugger it,” I thought.  “I’ve got a dud batch.”   So, with a deep sigh I got out of the car and shuffled back to join the queue that was now even longer.  Twenty-six minutes later I was at the counter once more, explaining my problem.

“You licked them?” I was asked.

“Yes, of course I did,” I said, tetchily.  My left knee was really painful now.

“You should try peeling off the backing,” said the clerk, smirking.

Franking by machines and labels that don’t need licking.  It will be stamps next.  

OMG it is!

45. I'm Merely Observing!

I got an e-mail from Aidan, a friend of some thirty years. He is originally from Northern Ireland but is now retired and has been living in southwest France for the last six or seven years.  He finished his message by writing this:

Sunday mornings would not be the same without reading your impressions of life now that you are back in London. I use the term ‘impressions' rather than ‘views’ or ‘opinions’ as you say nothing of the 'state of the nation' which I feel certain must be a matter of great debate at the moment in the U.K. (not to mention Ireland which I plan to visit briefly in the Spring.)

Do you have any strong sense of things being ‘different' since you left for foreign parts now that you're back in familiar North London or is that too boring to talk about?

It possibly is.  As I’ve told you before (Half way? click to see), I am not a deep thinker. Any views that I have on life in London today are bound to be pretty superficial and as we live in a relatively prosperous and ethnically/culturally fairly homogeneous part of the city, my experiences are probably not representative of life in London as a whole and certainly not in any way analogous with the rest of the UK.

Caroline accused me the other day of moaning a lot.  “No I don’t,” I protested.  “I make an observation and then sometimes I comment on that observation. That’s not moaning.”

“Doctor Hatch said that you’re a moaner,” she countered, smugly.

“Huh, that’s because he knows more about livers than he does about hygiene,” I said. “When he thinks about it, he’ll agree with me.”

I had gone to the public lavatory at the Royal Free Hospital just before I had seen Dr Hatch, my liver doctor.  I had washed and dried my hands and then, as I hobbled slowly towards the exit, I had been overtaken by a man rushing past me still doing up his zip, who then pulled open the door and left.  He hadn’t washed his hands, the dirty bugger!

That meant that I, with my freshly washed and germ free hands, now had to pull on that same SOILED handle so that I could get out.  The hospital is not alone in this.  Nearly every public lavatory has the same design defect - egression by pulling, not pushing.

“It's ridiculous,” I told Dr Hatch ten minutes later, “that at the Royal Free Hospital of all places, the lavatory doors do not open outwards.   I should be able to lean on the door to open it but instead, I have to pull on a door handle, a door handle that could be and probably is, coated with several dirty buggers’ urine!”  If he is right and that was a moan, then it falls into the “Justifiable” category.

After the check-up, that I have every two months (I was going to write, “After my bi-monthly check-up” but bi-monthly can mean either ‘twice a month or ‘once every two months’. Isn’t that silly?), at which everything was fine, we travelled by public transport into central London and I was able to use my ‘Freedom Pass’.  

This is a wonderful thing that makes London different from virtually everywhere else.  It allows me free travel anywhere within Greater London by bus, tube or train and is available to everyone aged over 60.  It is a remarkably generous benefit and I’m very grateful to the Greater London Council who introduced it and the council-tax payers funding it.

Coming back on the Northern Line tube that evening, we were approaching Highgate.  A beautifully modulated, clear, calm and precise, female voice announces every station as the train approaches it.  “The next station is, Tufnell Park,” she informs us, followed three minutes later with, “The next station is, Archway”.  After Archway comes Highgate.  

Every English speaker in the world pronounces “Highgate” so that it rhymes with “dictate”.  This bloody Tube Voice Woman though, rhymes it with “Hatchet”.  
She doesn’t have to.  It’s an affectation and it drives me mad.  She can say, “Southgate” on the Piccadilly Line properly, so why does she insist on saying, “Highget”?

There you are.  My case is proved, because that was an observation and not a moan.

What follows is certainly not a moan either:

I love the British climate.  It is so much more invigorating and so much more interesting than that in the tropics.  In the five years that we lived on Grand Cayman, the lowest temperature we ever experienced was 68°F/20°C, just before dawn one day. The hottest temperature that it ever reached was 97°F/36°C. 

In most 24 hour periods the temperature would hover around 84°F/29°C during the day and only drop to 77°F/25°C at night.  That’s all right for a month or two but it becomes dull after a time.  

In London, I love looking out of the window first thing in the morning and trying to assess what sort of day it will be.  This morning, when I left the house with the temperature on -1°C, with two inches of snow on the ground and with a stiff breeze blowing, it was bitterly cold.   Dressed appropriately, it was wonderful.

On Cayman, I never drove anywhere without the air conditioning being on but then, I never really drove anywhere because there was nowhere to go.  The longest journey that could be made, from Rum Point to West Bay, lasted 55 minutes but there was a shortcut to be had that would take fifteen minutes off that time.  Here, you can drive and end up somewhere else. You can go places. 

In the UK, over the course of a three-hour car journey, the landscape alters as the bedrock and even the climate changes.  In three hours, you could see the gently undulating slopes of the glacial drift in East Anglia; the flat wetlands of the Fens; the rolling hills of the chalk lands and the bleak moorland underlain by the millstone grit of the Pennines.  In Cayman there is only limestone, no variable relief or climate and one part of the island looks like any other part.

British television is fantastic.   If you are in the UK as you read this you may think that I’ve gone a bit bonkers but you haven’t had to experience five years of Caymanian television which, to all intents and purposes, is American. 

It is dire! What they do, they do very well but the trouble is that they don’t do very much.

They have cop shows, game shows, soaps, movies and sport – and that’s about it.   There are a couple of 24-hour news channels but as all they ever report on is news from the USA, I found them to be fairly boring.  

In May, news of the change of government here in the UK was not reported until after the first ad break.  The ads on American television are another source of annoyance.  A one-hour American drama without the ads lasts just 42 minutes and the ads themselves are dull and lacking any kind of humour or even originality.

I became quite an expert on the storyline of one of the soaps – “The Young and the Restless”.  I wish it could be seen here.  It is wonderfully awful but apparently, very popular.  The fact that I am such a connoisseur is surprising as in five years I never saw more than a minute or two of any episode.  It was on for the half an hour before the Cayman evening news and ‘The News’ was the only TV programme in Cayman that I ever watched regularly and in its entirety.

The six o’clock news, working on Island Time, could begin at any time from 5:58 to 6:03 and I would turn on the television at 5:55 so as not to miss the lead story - usually the only proper “news” story of the day. This meant that I would always catch the last minute or two of, “The Young and the Restless”.

The actors are all ridiculously, physically attractive and the plot appeared to revolve around the fraught relationships between two families, their offspring and their companions. 
My goodness, there were tensions!  No actor ever smiled. They all stood or sat and addressed each other.  There were no conversations, only short speeches. No one ever gestured or interrupted anyone and the only things to move were lips.  Nobody ever walked.  It would have made good radio.  

Every episode ended with one of the actors gazing meaningfully and silently into the far distance or glaring menacingly at another actor for four or five seconds until the closing music started.  Gosh it was exciting.

Mind you, British television has faults. Something that’s been bothering me recently, is BBC Reporters out in the field.

“We’re going to our reporter, Jim Langridge at Victoria Station.”

“Over to John Surridge, who’s at Conservative Party Headquarters.”

“Polly Prior is outside number ten.”

“A report from Cyril Perkins, who’s in a field near Aviemore.”

No, they are not!  Not one of them.  They’re all sitting in a studio in Television Centre drinking coffee and eating vol au vents, waiting until it’s their turn to dress up and go and stand in front of the green screen and make their report.

“No. It’s colder than that Cyril.  Look at the snow on the monitor.  More shivering please.”

You can tell when the report is genuine.  There’s a time lag as the reporter hears the cue and begins to talk and there is always a little camera shake.  When the reporter really is live, the first thing that he or she says after the cue is, “Well George ….,” or, “Yes Sophie ….,” but the green screen brigade, who made the tape earlier in the day, just start to talk because they’ve probably got no idea who’s just introduced them.  

Also, when you are standing outside 10 Downing Street with the temperature -4°C, there is condensation from your breath.   If you’re in a warm studio, there isn’t.  In the same vein, at the end of their commentary, a reporter who genuinely is on location will sign off by saying, “Back to you Nigel,” or just perhaps, “Fiona.”

The biggest giveaway, however, are the people walking past.  You or I, seeing a film crew with lights glaring into the face of a reporter, would at least throw a quick look at it as we walked by. But yesterday, commuters, plodding slowly towards the camera at Victoria Station, never even glanced at it.  

We’ve all seen the attention seekers getting behind the reporter who is just trying to do his or her job (I’m watching protesting students in Trafalgar Square behind the reporter playing to the camera as I write this) but it never happens in some ‘live’ news reports.

I love it.  Caroline braces herself every time the newsreader says something like, “A report from Jim Parks, who’s in Oxford Street,” because she knows that I’m going to shout at the television, “NO HE’S NOT!”   It’s a good game.  I recommend that you play it too.

Basic economics say it isn’t so.  What is the cost difference between sending three people to Millbank in Westminster, compared with getting one person to stand in front of a screen?  Similarly, would it be cheaper to have a team travel to bleakest Scotland or to stay in a nice warm studio in Edinburgh or Glasgow with a wind generator set to ‘breeze’ a few feet away from a blue screen?

In case you’re confused - that was an observation and not a moan.  I never moan.

44. Sleepless Nights

Cricket: The Test Series started on Thursday.   Australia play England at the Gabba in Brisbane for five days with four more matches to follow over the next three months.   

With typical Aussie bloody mindedness and lack of consideration, they decided that play should start at midnight, UK time.   Consequently, for the last week I’ve been rescheduling my body clock to turn myself from a diurnal into a nocturnal being – a creature of the night.   

On Thursday I got up from my afternoon slumber at eight o’clock in the evening, had a light breakfast/supper and got everything ready for the marathon ahead.   I lasted until teatime there, which was half past four in the morning here. 

I remember that some years ago when I was working, I looked forward to one day being able to stay up all night watching the Ashes series from Australia with no need to be up at any particular time on the following day.   But I was younger then!  I had stamina.   Maybe tonight I will make it right through until the close of play.

It was very different not so long ago.   I remember in the middle of the night in the early morning of New Years Day, January 1995 watching on Ceefax the changing score from Adelaide.  I watched as Mike Gatting’s score went up digit-by-digit, putting together big partnerships with Gooch and Atherton.

Two years ago, when the Ashes series was played in England, I was in Cayman watching the cricket there on Cayman TV.  I paid an extra $25 a month on my subscription for the channel that promised to show “every ball of every game.”

Cayman in August is six hours behind British Summer Time and the start of play was at 11:00 a.m. in the UK.  I set my alarm for 4:45 in the morning.   “Why don’t you sleep in the other bedroom?” Caroline whinged.

The decisive and eagerly awaited fifth test match started on a Thursday and I saw every ball bowled over the first two days.   But on the Saturday morning at 8:59, just after Jimmy Anderson had bowled the third ball of his over, the TV screen went blank for a second or two.   When the picture was restored we were at the City of Manchester Stadium just moments before the kick off between Manchester City and Wolverhampton Wanderers.

Not a word of explanation; no voiceover; no elucidation and certainly no apology.  Bloody football in August!

I was straight on the phone to Weststar TV, my cable supplier.   All the lines to customer services were busy and a robot informed me that I was eighth in the queue to be answered.

“Hi Mr Terry.  This is Cindy.  I recognise your voice.”   

Cindy and I were old friends and after a twenty-minute wait on hold, we were renewing our acquaintanceship.   She is an American from Alabama, married to a Caymanian businessman and is employed to placate stroppy customers like me.  She seemed now to be an old friend.   We go back three years.

The first time that we ‘met’ was when I phoned to make the observation that on BBC America that evening, the entire time from 7:00 p.m. until half past one the following morning, was taken up with showings of Gordon Ramsay’s “Hell’s Kitchen” programmes, one after the other.   “I do not pay an additional subscription for that kind of rubbish,” I told her.

“He’s very popular in the UK,” she assured me.  “The English here on island like him.”

“Do they really?” I asked incredulously.  “I think that you and your bosses should know that my scientific survey has come up with the result that 100% of the English people in this house, don’t like him.” 

“And anyway,” I continued, “The language is so heavily censored that all you ever hear is a succession of bleeps.”

“Yes, he does seem to swear a lot,” agreed Cindy.

“On top of all that,” I said, putting on my best English upper crust accent and trying to sound like Prince Charles attempting to be posh, “He’s a poor chef.  Have you eaten at Claridges recently?”

“Yes, last Easter,” Cindy said “and we both rather enjoyed it.”

Cindy had calmed and soothed me in the past when I had phoned in to complain that the England v Italy rugby match was not, despite trails that it would be, shown live.  At other times she had tried to explain why neither Wimbledon nor the Ryder Cup was not of sufficient interest to be shown on Cayman television.

“I’ll look into it.   I’ll just put you on hold,” she said after I had told her that the cricket had just disappeared without warning or justification.   After a few minutes she was back.

“I’ve got some good news for you,” she said, minutes later.  “There’s another cricket game coming on at eleven o’clock.”

“It’s the same match,” I said, grumpily.

“No, it’s a different game,” she said, “and it starts at eleven.”

“No, it’s the same game,” I said, wearily, dreading where this conversation was likely to go. 

“No,” Cindy said patiently, “The game that you were watching that finished at nine, started at five o’clock and the next game starts at eleven.”

“It started on Thursday.”

Cindy’s laugh was genuine and infectious.  It quite cheered me up.

“Oh Mr Terry, you’re so funny.  And I suppose that it finishes tomorrow?”

“Well it could do but it’s more likely to end on Monday,” I said.

“Oh, don’t be silly.  Look, I’ve got a lot of calls waiting.  Anything else I can help you with?”

At eleven o’clock, as Cindy had promised, the cricket was back.   Jimmy Anderson bowled the fourth ball of the over he had started two hours ago.   There was no justification or explanation from Weststar.   Anyone switching on then would have assumed that this was live cricket.   I resisted the temptation to go to the BBC website to see the current state of play but instead I sat back and imagined that I was on a far distant planet, where radio signals take two hours to travel from the Earth and watched the rest of the day’s play ‘as live’.

As they promised they would, Weststar had shown, “ every ball of every game.”

Manchester City 1 (Adebayor 18’)  – Wolverhampton Wanderers 0, in case you’re interested and I bet you’re not. Hardly anyone ever was. 

43. Dialogue and Interrogation

On Tuesday, Caroline had an interview.  Actually, it was more of a meeting than an interview but at the end of it she has at last (and about time too), got a job. Caroline has had quite a few interviews during her career and she has never been unsuccessful.  I, on the other hand, had several during my working life and was only successful at three.

I was an appalling interviewee. I have absolutely no idea why. The last one was nearly twenty years ago when feedback afterwards was never given and so I never found out. I have some ideas though.

The first interview I ever had was when I was seventeen. It wasn’t for a job but for a scholarship. The Birds Eye frozen foods factory was one of the largest employers in Lowestoft when I was at school. Every year they granted an award of £120. This went to a male student in his final year in the sixth form at Lowestoft Grammar School. Very 1960s that wasn’t it? No girls were expected to follow a career in industry. That person would be looked on favourably if he were ever to pursue a career after university with Unilever, the parent company.

I applied but all I wanted was the cash. I didn’t want to work in a factory and I’m afraid that this became all too clear at the interview. The only question I can remember being asked was, “On a wet Friday afternoon would you rather be in a classroom studying history, or out on the sports field playing rugby?”

What an absolutely stupid question - and I told him that it was too. That was my first failed interview.

I acquired my first ever teaching position without having an interview. In the summer of 1969 after completing a teaching qualification course at the Institute of Education in London, I was working on Quality Control at Birds Eye. I had no intention of ever becoming a teacher.

I had applied for a place on the teaching course in order to have a year in London at the taxpayers’ expense – no student loans in those days!  The plan after that was: work at Birds Eye throughout June, July, August and September; pay off my £125 overdraft; save as much money as I could; go to New Zealand for the winter and play cricket; come back to the UK in the spring of 1970 and then think about getting a job.

But my plans were thwarted. The sequence of produce to be harvested and then frozen at Birds Eye during the summer was:

1 - Peas (June/July).

2 - Runner Beans (July/August).

3 - Strawberries (August/September).

At the beginning of September, tragedy struck.  The strawberry harvest failed and I was laid off.  There I was on Thursday September 4th with no job and no prospects.

“You could teach,” my dad said, clearly alarmed at the prospect of having to support his unemployed son. “Go down to the Education Office. They’re always desperate for qualified teachers.”

So that’s what I did. “Be at Roman Hill Secondary Modern School on Monday morning,” I was told.

Just think! If late summer 1969 had been a little warmer or maybe cooler, wetter or drier, windier or calmer, my whole life would have turned out differently.

Eighteen months later, I applied for a job at Creighton School in Muswell Hill, North London.  Also there for interview was a young Scottish woman.  We sat together in a small room chatting awkwardly, waiting to be called and I suddenly realised that she had absolutely no idea where she was.  She knew that she was in London but when she told me that if she got the job, she intended to rent a room from her sister in Reigate, which is a town nearly 30 miles and more than two hours away and on the other side of London, I knew that for a potential geography teacher, geography was not her strong point.

I had one tricky moment during my interview.

“Tell us about the pastoral system you have at your present school,” I was asked.

“Just because we’re in Suffolk doesn’t mean we all keep sheep!” I retorted indignantly but the Scottish girl must have been even more stupid than me.

Three years after that, married and with a baby daughter, I had an interview for the Head of Department job at a school in Harlesden. There was a shortlist of six and after a tour of the school, the interviews were held in the education offices of the borough council.  Of course, being a ‘W’, I was the last to be seen.  

The six of us sat in a small, bare office and left one by one to be interviewed by a panel made up of governors, education officers and senior teachers, in a large room at the end of the corridor next to the toilet.

After the second person had been interviewed and returned to the room, someone said that they’d both been gone for exactly 5 minutes and thirty seconds. When the third person also returned in five and a half minutes, we all sniggered a little. Eventually it was my turn.

I sat through and responded to some mind boggling, unimaginative, dull questions. I noticed that one of the seven interviewers had not only failed to acknowledge me when I introduced myself but that he spent the entire time with his back to me, gazing out of the window watching the traffic and pedestrians outside.  When I stood up to leave, thinking that I had acquitted myself very well, he continued to ignore me, staring out of the window.

Once in the corridor, I looked at my watch. 5 minutes 20 seconds. That was amazing. I would be gone for exactly five and a half minutes too.  Then I had a brainwave. In those days it was the custom for the candidates to wait while the panel discussed things and came to a decision.  Sometimes you could sit and wait for an hour or more waiting for a resolution.  My ruse wouldn’t improve my chances of getting the job but it would give the competition something to think about. I went to the toilet.

I sat in a cubicle looking at the second hand of my watch moving slowly around the face. After five minutes I was bored and decided that I had delayed things long enough to earn some respect.

As I turned the handle of the waiting room door I couldn’t help grinning. Eleven minutes since I’d left. Tee hee! But the room was empty!

I was confused. It was now about six fifteen on a dark November evening and as I walked out, I could see that the offices I passed were empty but then, through the big window of one of them, I saw a face I recognised from the interviewing panel.

“Oh, there you are,” he said as I walked in. “We thought that you’d gone home.”

“So, I didn’t get the job then?” I said.

“No, but it was close,” he lied. “It wasn’t easy.”

“Wasn’t easy?” I asked incredulously. “You came to a decision in less than five minutes. It must have been the easiest decision you’ve ever had to make – or a complete stitch up,” I added darkly.

“Now, now,” he said. Things are always fair and above board here.”

“Come off it,” I said. “It takes about five minutes to say the internal candidate’s name and I suppose that she got the job?”

“Mrs Azikiwie Gbadamosi-Olanrewaju was appointed, yes. But I assure you that no decision had been made in advance. We are very strong on equal opportunities here in Brent.”

“Yes, obviously,” I muttered.

For the next few years, I didn’t apply for any promotions. I was never ambitious. Then one day I was asked to see the Headteacher in her office.

“Oh God! What have you done now?” one of my colleagues asked.

“Nothing that I can think of,” I said but that was hardly reassuring. The last time I had been summoned to see the Head, I could tell as soon as I walked in that she was furious.

On that occasion, “I will not have racists on my staff,” were her first words.

“Good,” I responded, thinking that was the right thing to say.

“I’ve received a report from a parent that yesterday you made a racist comment to his daughter in the new first year class.”

“Did I? I don’t think so.”

“You referred to her racial origin.”

“Oh no,” I thought, “She could be right.” It was early September and I’d spent all summer playing cricket with and against loads of Australians. I call Australians, ‘Aussies’. Did I call a Pakistani girl a ‘Paki’?

“What did I say?” I asked with some trepidation.

“You called her a Jew.”

Suddenly I felt relieved and a lot happier. “I certainly did not,” I said emphatically. “I wouldn’t know if a kid is Jewish. I can’t recognise Jews and even if I did, I would never refer to it.”

“She says that you did. Her friends say you did, and her parents are making a complaint.”

I felt dreadful again. How can you prove that you didn’t say anything? And there were witnesses too. I seemed to be in big trouble.

“What shall I do?” I asked.

“Well, you could start by apologising and see what happens then. The girl’s outside.  Would you like to speak to her?”

Into the office came an eleven-year-old girl who sat down and gave me the sort of look of utter contempt that only Muswell Hill kids can produce.

“What did I say?” I asked her.

“You called me a Jew,” she said.

“No, I didn’t. Are you sure that you’ve got the right teacher? I don’t recognise you.  What did I say?”

“In geography yesterday you said, “Turn round Jew.”

Suddenly it made sense. “Yesterday was the first lesson you’ve had with me, wasn’t it?  And as we’d never met before, I didn’t know any names.  You misheard me. What I said was, “Turn round you.”

This time though, I wasn’t in trouble. I had been called in to be offered a job. I became Head of Careers at Creighton School by default. The post holder had resigned and nobody had applied for the vacancy. In desperation (as she told me later) the Head asked me if I’d take it on. I wasn’t at all interested but as it would mean an extra £2500 a year on my salary, I said yes.

When Creighton School closed a year later, amalgamating with another school to re-form as Fortismere, we all had to apply for our old jobs but neither I nor the Head of Careers at the other school, who was leaving the area, applied for that Careers position.

Four external candidates were interviewed and as I knew the layout of the school and the department, I was asked to show them around during the afternoon before the interview in the evening.

The next day I found that I was not very popular with the newly appointed Headteacher.

“What did you say?” he spluttered.

He told me that the interview panel hadn’t met as all four of the candidates had withdrawn within half an hour of the end of my tour. They had asked me a lot of questions and I must have been too honest in response I suppose.

There was one job that I expected to get but didn’t. In the first year of Fortismere School’s existence there were 190 teachers but only enough teaching for 155 of us. We all had a lot of non-contact time and I was sent on a one-day-a-week course on Pre Vocational Education at Roehampton College, twelve miles away in West London.  Every Monday morning for nine months, I would leave the house at 6:30 in the morning and crawl slowly around the packed and crowded North Circular Road.  I would get home at about seven o’clock in the evening.

It was tough and an intense course but I stuck it out because, as the Head had told me when he persuaded me to follow it, “You’ll be the school’s expert on the subject when you complete it.”

Consequently, I was a little surprised and more than a little pissed off to see a paragraph in the Staff Newsletter in May informing us all that someone else had been appointed to the post of Head of CPVE.

“Isn’t that the job you promised me?” I asked the Head. “Shouldn’t you at least have advertised it?”

He wasn’t even slightly embarrassed.

I was once offered a position after being successful at interview but declined it. I was interviewed for a senior position at a neighbouring school. After my interview - I was the fourth of four shortlisted - I sat and chatted with the other candidates while we waited for the decision. After about half an hour, I was called back in and offered the job.  I turned it down.

During the wait, I had found out that one of my competitors was applying for her own job. She had resigned two months earlier, intending to go with her partner to North Wales where he was relocating for a new position.  Then he had dumped her and as she no longer had any reason or desire to leave London, she had tried to withdraw her resignation. The Head, however, told her that she was too late and she would have to apply along with anyone else who was interested.

As soon as I informed the panel of my decision the Headteacher went into a mini tantrum and accused me of wasting everyone’s time.  I was immediately certain that I had done the right thing, as I would never have got on with her.

I was appointed to the very last post that I ever held at Fortismere after an interview but in reality, it was virtually by default.

The post of Co-Ordinator of Examinations and Assessments came up and the day before the deadline for the receipt of applications, I was told by a very senior member of staff that there was only one applicant and that I should, “Please, for God’s sake, apply for it. We can’t have him.”

I did apply, mumbled my way through the interview and that became my job for the last fifteen years that I worked.

Interviews are a load of bollocks anyway.  I was on the interviewing panel for jobs at Fortismere a couple of times. During one interview, assessing only internal candidates, we had to keep score surreptitiously on the responses.

After the last candidate had been seen we sat in an embarrassed, awkward silence. At the end of the procedure one candidate stood out way ahead of the others according to all our score sheets. “We can’t appoint her,” someone said. “Could you work with her, Terry?”

“No,” I said. 

The post was as my assistant and the person who had starred at the interview was a deeply unpleasant and universally unpopular woman both with the staff and the students. Some people excel at interviews and in the teaching profession at least, they use that ability to make rapid career advances and continue to do so until they reach their level of total incompetence.  Unfortunately, by the time they get to that level, some of them - but not all and Caroline is an obvious exception - have caused and continue to cause, huge damage.

Knowing that I will never experience that rejection dejection ever again, is deeply satisfying.