This week I am knee deep in boxes of all shapes and sizes, and somewhere at the bottom of one of them is my planning file, my diary, and my USB memory stick.
This chaotic predicament is not doing much for my organisational skills. My excuse, for all those meetings I am forgetting to attend, and all those lessons I am forgetting to teach (whoops), is that I am going through that heinous process of moving house.
I doubt there is such a thing as good timing where property buying is concerned. This was all supposed to be done and dusted in the summer holidays (ha!), but after the many false starts, financial traumas, and impatient telephone conversations with solicitors, I am finally upping sticks, months later than expected, at the end of the long, busy term. And unless they put feng shui on the curriculum, I will temporarily be slummy teacher number one: too distracted and too tired to bounce around the classroom being inspiring about homonyms.
It may be weeks before all the very essential items are unearthed from their boxes, and, of course, there will be that unsteady diet of takeaway food. Not to mention, the uncomfortable mattress on the floor, all those crumpled work clothes pulled out of bin-liners, and the time that will be wasted forgetting to drive the “new” way home each day.
The light at the end of the tunnel is that life will get back to normal and I will have a shiny new house.
Well, nearly. More like a house that is in need of “redecoration throughout”. So I guess it is highly probable that my time-consuming obsession with rightmove.co.uk will simply be replaced by a slavish dedication to interior design catalogues. And the lesson for today, children... which of these paint samples best matches my new curtains?
Louisa Leaman is a London teacher
