Summer Holiday

My summer holiday comes to an end today. After a mere 5 weeks and two days, I am once again being expected to get up in the mornings, dress in smart trousers and shirt and do the job I’m paid to do. I know, I’m outraged too. 5 weeks and two days? Who can possibly be expected to return to top form after such a short break? Back in my good old public school days, I lazed around for a full 9 weeks and so, frankly, it beggars belief that I am supposed to be at my best after only just a little over a month’s rest. It’s almost like they want the children to fail…

To celebrate the end of the summer holiday, here are 5 things that are great and 5 things that are frustrating about summer holidays:

Great

1) We get to see the Mastercard advert with teachers leaping into the pool while Alice Cooper’s ‘School’s Out’ rings out.

2) When you make sandwiches for lunch, you get to put them on an actual plate and eat them within a few minutes of making them rather than squishing them out of shape so that they fit in an ice-cream tub that won’t get opened again for at least 4, perhaps 5, hours.

3) Lying in bed while your wife gets up early to go to work.

4) Being able to beat your record for ‘number of times I have refreshed the Facebook page today’.

5) Having the time to make two websites, complete a monologue collection and write regular blog entries (by the way, the websites are still alive and well and looking forward to being visited if you haven’t had the chance to do so yet…).

Frustrating

1) People expressing their horror that teachers get 6 weeks off (5 weeks, 2 days actually…), as if this is a new thing that has just started and that no-one knew anything about. We all went to school. We all lazed around for 6 weeks (well, 9 if you went to a school that had its assemblies in a 900-year-old Cathedral…). We all considered becoming teachers for a brief moment when we remembered that they too got the holidays we got – but, and it’s a big but, you decided to go and do something else…

2) Rain – we’ve spoken about it quite a few times but, really, what is going on with the clouds at the moment? I’m sure August used to be nice. What did we do to it to make it like this?

3) Children are on holiday too.

4) In a non-World Cup or European Championships year, there is simply not enough football to watch. Why stop the football season when we’re finally around to watch it all?

5) False hope – we begin the holiday feeling as though we’ve come to the end of work, as though we’ll never need to enter that office again, and yet within a few weeks you’re beginning to realise just how few days you have left before it begins all over again…

Well, I’m sitting here looking at the rain soaking the BBQ I forgot to put away last night, waiting for my co-screenwriter to turn up for a brainstorming session to come up with an Oscar-winning storyline for our future film. By the way, has anyone actually dumped the word ‘brainstorming’ like we were supposed to and begun using the term ‘thought shower’? Personally, I don’t really think that people in England need another reference to rain and isn’t there something a little contradictory about having a shower while doing some ‘blue sky thinking’?

Right, time to make the most of every minute of my last day of holiday. I can feel a Facebook and Twitter check coming up, followed by regular refreshing of the ‘stats’ page of my blog to see how many people have read this within the last 5 minutes…