Bit of a Break
21 February

I'm getting my half term a week late since our next placement won't start for another week.

How lovely! It's a Tuesday today. Normally, I'd be to a strict timetable. Not today. When I got out of bed, it was light. I've had a leisurely breakfast. I don't have an imminent deadline looming. I wasn't up til late writing a planning document or a reflection. I haven't laminated anything in over a week. I've had time to notice the snowdrops and crocuses in my front garden. Bliss.

I've been over a week out of school now and I'm liking the change of pace. The first thing I did when I got home that Friday evening was to turn off my bedside alarm - actually, hold that thought, the first thing that I did was to go for a drink with my fellow student. I did get my final assessments from my placement school and emerged with a mark of Good overall which I am very pleased about.

Then it has been a case of getting my head down for the second assignment which I handed in yesterday. During the week of producing it, I kept finding that I had an urgent need to do things like clean the grouting in the kitchen rather than write the sodding thing. It wasn't an assignment; it was a nightmare project. We had to complete an audit in school around our Special Interest Area (for me, ICT) and then draw up an action plan for improvement. Well, in my school, the Interactive Whiteboards didn't work because they couldn't afford the money to license the software to run them.

Anyhow, we had to write an essay which had to include a literature review but, frankly, the bulk of my essay was analysis and discussion - I'm honestly not all that interested in what the literature says even though I know that this is an area which they will be looking at in detail. I decided back in 1976 that I didn't want to be an academic and, to me, all these essays are about training me to be an academic when really I want to be trained to be a teacher.

One of the things I gained from checking out the group's Facebook pages was the knowledge that, however at sea I might have occasionally felt myself to be, I really was a model of organisation and preparation in comparison with some of the cohort.

There was all sorts of conflicting information from too many different sources. However, the official guidelines were labelled as "generic" with the advice that more specific guidance would come from our SIA tutor. In ICT, we didn't get any hard and fast guidance so my assumption was that, providing what I wrote bore some resemblance to the title and the generic guidance, I could pretty much do as I wanted. And that's certainly what I shall argue if it comes to the toss. I'm also pretty much resigned to the fact that what I have written really wasn't very good anyway - but I'm attempting not to stress about it.

Anyhow, most of my fellow students did not seem able to use the wriggle room. They wanted hard and fast rules to work by. I just felt that there was enough latitude in all of the different advice that we'd received for me to be able to justify my strategy. So, my word count included the body of my essay encompassing lit review and rationale minus long quotations, captions and references. Outside of the essay was the reference list, the audit, the action plan and the appendices. In total, 3,643 totally unsparkling words.

At the end of the week I had my profiling session with my personal tutor which went well. At the end, I asked if my placement evidence files would ever be needed again. Basically, I said, I want to know if I need to buy a million more plastic wallets.

She said no. All that evidence against standards has now been signed off. No-one will look at it again but she advised me to keep it as a resource for myself. So, I'm going to be taking all that paper out of those folders and stacking it neatly in a box file of two. And then setting the wallets aside for the next information/evidence gathering excerise.

How glad am I now that

• I resisted the temptation last night to spend a long time obliterating the names of the children whose work I had marked
• I didn't spend hours writing and polishing a second, in depth class profile and three extra child profiles
• I that I didn't spend time backfilling all of the reflections which I had neglected to write up after each lesson
• I stuck with the school planning form and didn't bother duplicating the work with the Hope planning document as well

Just goes to show how much of what we are being asked to do is cosmetic rather than essential. After all, it's not as though they are going to keep me in at break and ask me to explain myself in one of those calm but disappointed voices that make you feel bad inside.

Elsewhere...

Well, it was my parent's 62nd wedding anniversary. Linda and Mary were up. I went over for a fish and chip lunch and showed off some of my work.

I also took the opportunity to, in the old parlance, get my end away by driving up towards Preston and availing myself of some paid access to the glory that is Scot.

As well as the shaggerama that has become the customary process of our time together, Scot took a little time out to tell me some stories of his sexual life both paid and unpaid.

For example, he apologise for the slightly wobbly nature of the bed but he and his partner, Mal, had broken it the previous week in an outpouring of frenzied lust. He also explained that, whilst he is normally a supreme power bottom, he can, after a quantity of alcohol, morph into a rampant top. Mal had been on the receiving end of the battering that broke the bed.

He also regailed me with a tale of him and Mal having brought a young man home with them and, in the course of the night and way beyond the hours of dawn, each of them had topped and bottomed the other, each of them had been spit roasted by the other two in both variations and each of them had been the meat in various sandwich combinations and positions. And Scot had taken both of them together several times in sundry configurations.

Having proven his ability to take two cocks simultaneously with Ross and I, he confessed to wanting to try three (which can be achieved, apparently, by having two guys (of reasonable length) position themselves inside the recipient's colon followed by a third guy (possessing a cock of prodigious length) then inserting himself between the two cocks already in residence).

In his professional life, he explained that there had been a day in Manchester when, having gone into town for a midday booking, he then received a beckoning text message for another assignment. As each subsequent meet ended, another booking came in and so, consequently, he ended the day's business having taken seven different men over the course of twelve hours and drove home with over £2,000 in his wallet. He says that he likes that sort of excess.

He also gave me a clue as to why he is more than happy to meet up with me. I interact with him as simply another human rather than treating him as a paid chattel. Scot told me about a client in his senior years who had booked him for an hour. The two of them got down to business quite rapidy and the client spent his seed within the first five minutes. The client told Scot that he could go. Scot, ever the gentleman, explained that he had been paid for sixty minutes of his time and so he was quite happy to stay and chat for while. The client, witheringly, responded that their business was complete. Scot left the house and has never been back.

Ross and I took in The Woman in Black which had been adapted from Susan Hill's novel, which has also been made into a successful play which Linda and I saw in the West End in 1994. James Watkins has directed an effective little Hammer Horror film that had plenty of brooding atmosphere and some jump out of your seat moments. Janet McTeer and Ciarán Hinds led the charge from the acting point of view but the main reason for going was to see how Daniel Radcliffe managed away from Harry Potter and he was most creditable. Unfortunately, the ending, which featured a railway station and an afterlife. had a ghostly reminiscence of Deathly Hallows about it but the whole was pretty much alright.

Series four of Being Human has started up. There have been big changes in the cast. Only Lenora Crichlow as the ghost, Annie, remains. We have a new werewolf in Michael Socha as Tom (he was in the last series a bit) and Damien Molony, as the new vampire Hal. So, far it's OK and actually, I think, better than the last series. I'm not sure how the new over arching myth of the baby who will kill all the vampires is going to turn out but I'm happy to go along for the ride.

Series two of Sherlock with Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman was very good value for money.

Series eight (and probably the last series) of Hustle got Matt Di Angelo out of many clothes as we are likely to see. Adrian Lester, Robert Vaughn, Robert Glenister, Kelly Adams and Rob Jarvis kept the team spirit going.

Ross and I finished listening to Barchester Towers for yet another cycle. This time, we had followed it through one a month on a new set of CDs. The clarity helped and it was nice not to have to worry about a tape jamming.

Finally, Tom Daley is in full preparation for this summer's Olympics. We hope to see a lot more of him before then.