I’m feeling out of sorts and in need of someone to take pity on me, but Mrs Eddison is too busy. She stomped out of the door an hour ago to attend an morning fee-earners meeting at work. Every month, she and other senior employees are herded into a boardroom and subjected to a sustained barrage of coffee, Danish pastries and bollockings for not meeting targets.

My own misery is more ambiguous and can be traced to several health issues. My arthritic joints are unhappy with winter and have stiffened their resolve against it. I have a lingering cold and a persistent cough intent on depriving me (and Mrs Eddison) of sleep. The psychological effects of this have been made worse by some particularly challenging environmental factors.

We are in the process of having a new kitchen and it’s taking longer than anticipated. A frenzy of destruction saw the old one disappear in hours, but the new one is still in boxes waiting for the plaster to dry. As a result, we have no cooking facilities and no downstairs water supply. Washing pots by hand in the bathroom sink, while your entire living area disappears like Herculaneum under an accumulation of dust, is a depressing experience.

One way to escape it is to go to school, but when I step out of the front door, I find that my windscreen is bearded with frost. I eventually clear it using a combination of cheap plastic scraper and vapour-clouded curses, but now I’m running late and the usual routes are crawling slower than seems kinetically possible. I arrive at school with seconds to spare, only to discover I left my joie de vivre at home under a dust sheet.

The backpack of injustice

With only a thin smile covering my sombre disposition, I face the frozen hordes. School playgrounds are not always happy places, and the age of austerity isn’t helping. Brydon creeps unwillingly into class like a shadow. The backpack of injustice weighs heavily on Declan’s shoulders. Hostility snarls from Shania’s lips. And just when I think the last of my spirits will sink without trace, Kyle arrives. Now is the winter of my discontent made glorious summer by his beaming smile.

Life’s not easy for a boy who can’t do the things boys like to do. Not having the capacity to kick a football onto the school roof, or to hang upside down from the monkey bars, or to escape lessons by climbing the perimeter fence, is enough to make anyone feel downhearted.

But Kyle’s having none of it. From his wheelchair he laughs in the face of cerebral palsy; giggles at the inconvenience of living with coordination problems; chuckles at speech and language difficulties and beams at the trivial consequences of having poor eyesight and impaired hearing. By the time that his mum manoeuvres him inside our classroom, my sorts have returned, and my own frustrations have paled into mere self-indulgence.

Steve Eddison teaches at Arbourthorne Community Primary School in Sheffield