Opera North brought one of their semi-staged concert performances to the Phil in Liverpool with Wagner's Der fliegende Holländer.
The last three weeks of the school year felt like an eternity. There were some very pleasant events but also a lot of wearyingly negative events as well.
Year Four went to Notre Dame to attend a Junior Music Festival. Everything went well until the end when the children just went hyper and I simply froze. Luckily for the children, there were two other teachers with us and they stepped in and we got everything back on track for departure. But there could so easily have been an accident. Which makes my blood run cold.
My colleague and I were asked to attend a meeting about the Notre Dame episode. I already felt bad about it all. Being torn a strip off didn't help but it didn't feel unjustified. My colleague felt the need to try and justify herself. I was utterly shocked. I don't think she has any concept of the idea that some times you just keep quiet and suck it up.
I had a lesson observation: it was not wonderful - it was not bad.
Year Four went to Liverpool City Library. After Notre Dame, my heart was in my mouth for most of the duration but they all got back on the bus at the end of the visit without any mishap.
I had a meeting with the School Head and Liverpool Human Resources about flexible working. They offered me the chance to reduce my time to three days a week. I explained that I had done my sums and knew that Ross and I could not manage with ease on that reduction in salary. What I was hoping for was four days: I've been told that they will have to think about is and that they will get back to me.
There was an afternoon Summer Fayre and I got roped in for being a goalkeeper on one of the stalls. The kids paid 20p for three shots on goal and if they put the ball past me they got a prize. Most did.
My colleague and I were asked to attend a performance management meeting and were told that our year group's progress was below expectations. As is her wont, my colleague tried to offer up reasons and justifications and was quickly shut down. I just felt embarrassed and upset.
We had a Leavers' Assembly for Year Six and also staff who would be moving on. My colleague received a big bouquet of flowers and was cheered. My smile felt like a rictus on my face.
Just before the final day of term I was requested to attend a meeting with SLT and was given notice that formal competence proceedings would begin in the new academic year. It feels unfair but I'm too tired to bleat.
And so my first school year as a class teacher finished. And I feel both elated and shattered. Whatever the "evidence" says, I know I have made a difference to those twenty-odd children and mostly that has been positive. In incredibly difficult circumstances, I have battled on and done the best I can and done it with as little disruption to the children as I could manage. But I am shattered by it all and I know that I could have done everything much, much better.
Now, the task is to re-charge the batteries before September.
Opera North brought one of their semi-staged concert performances to the Phil in Liverpool with Wagner's Der fliegende Holländer.
I may not dislike the piece as much as I dislike Lohengrin but I still find little to really enjoy. It has the virtue of being relatively short for a work by Wagner as well as possessing a variety of episodes, action and set pieces. It can have the sense of an express train careering out of control towards disaster in the right hands and Richard Farnes made a very good attempt of whipping up the orchestra into a storm of sound.
I was very taken with Alwyn Mellor's Senta and the rest of the cast was decent.
The projections and coloured lights helped give a sense of theatricality to the enterprise.
Go Set A Watchman is Harper Lee's long awaited (like 55 years) follow up to To Kill a Mockingbird.
I'm not sure what I was expecting from the book. Probably more in the Mockingbird vein. Instead, what you get is something far more seditious.
It's as though the narrative has grown up just as Scout has and the work looks back over all of the homeliness of the first novel with a far more jaundiced eye. Where, in the first novel, Calpurnia tells Scout to stand up because her daddie is passing, by the time of this work she is retired, bitter and complaining.
And I got a punch to the stomach from the almost incidental news that Scout's brother Jem had died of the same heart condition which killed their mother, Dill is only mentioned obliquely and Atticus Finch is viewed as more of a time-serving craven appeaser than a daunting crusader for human rights.
I feel that I need to read the book again along with Mockingbird in order to get to grips with its ambitions.
Out of the blue, Paul contacted me. I guess he must have reached for his contact list to see if he could make a bit more money for something or other. Anyhow, I quite fancied another crack at him.
We made the arrangements but then late in the evening I got some sort of run around which kept putting the arrival time further and further back. And then communication just went dead. Eventually, I simply went to bed. It was 2am and I wasn't in the mood for a shag any longer.
In the morning, I got a heap of complaints that he'd arrived and had been unable to find my location.
I'm not impressed.
I did however get to meet up with Kyle once more and he proved to be not only accommodating and possessed of a nice round ass but also able to dip his back thus raising his arse so as to be particularly inviting. I felt invited.
Reader, I took him with alacrity.
And I discovered that he is also possessed of a very pleasant soft whimper which matched my attentions thrust for thrust.