Mumble’s Blog

We just found out our Head, Mrs Kerr, is resigning, with more or less immediate effect. The letter home said nothing about pastures new, so I’m guessing the post must have really not worked out as she hoped when she took it on. Whatever quibbles I may have had with the school, I know Mrs Kerr has given a large part of her working life to the school and you have to feel sorry it’s ended like this. Mrs Fisher, the acting deputy, is also leaving, to a promoted post in another school.

Recently there hardly seems to have been a time when the management team was all completely in place. First Mrs Kerr was Acting Head filling in for the previous Head on a - 2 year? secondment, then still Acting for a while before getting the substantive post. Meanwhile her post of deputy must have been filled by an acting deputy. Then when she was on long-term sick leave there was Jill Wareham as Acting Head except when she wasn’t there and the Acting Deputy Head Eileen Fisher became Acting Acting Head, and the Acting Principal Teacher became the Acting Acting Deputy Head, and…. Well anyway we’ve now got Freda Ross from Pencaitland Primary, who is Acting Head until the Christmas, when she’ll stop acting though possibly still available for panto. I heard it whispered in hushed tones this morning at the school gate that she runs Pencaitland like clockwork…all ears turned westwards for the sounds of ticking. Clockwork or not, I don’t see any way a new permahead can be recruited to start much before April, so there will presumably be another secondment to cover the spring term. It’s a lot of changes on top of what’s already been an unsettled few years. Does this mean the school will sit still? How much like Heads can acting Heads act?

I feel a certain amount of frustration about this as I was optimistic that the new Parent Council would have another go at reducing the lunch hour (and a quarter), either by ending the day earlier or having an afternoon break. Will an acting Head want to take a decision that rocks the status quo like this, or will any hope of change have to be put off until the new one has settled in?

It’s only a matter of time, I suppose, and here they are again, the visitors. We were warned about this in the newsletter, that it is VITAL that EVERY family must take responsibilty for them. Responsibility in this sense meaning eradication, rather than looking after. It’s all very well to take an interest in the minibeasts as long as they stay in the pond area, but once they start breeding on your head KILL KILL KILL is the order of the day.

I share this attitude, more or less. I have mellowed out a bit since I first saw one on my first child’s head - a medical emergency necesitating a midnight drive around Edinburgh looking for a chemist with shelf loads of chemical weaponry. I’ve had to - in one place we lived the bugs were so rife that if they didn’t have any by the end of the week I worried they’d fallen out with their friends. Familiarity breeds….well it just breeds. But basically, death does seem fair. I mean they eat your head. They have to go.

Unfortunately P3 boy, kind hearted as he is, doesn’t quite see it that way. In P1 I used to get away with removing them and putting them in a match box. But since then, he has spent a lot of time in the Jurassic period, and he now knows he is a habitat. Their only habitat. The dilemma - do I think medical treatment should be based on consent? Yes. Do I think he understands the issues? Yes. Am I too embarrassed to send him into school scratching his head? Absolutely.

Luckily, he still sleeps for longer than I do.

That is, except for nights such as October the 31st. What is special about this date again, remind me. Christmas, you say? Easter? No, silly me, I remember it’s - National Bug Busting Day. An excellent idea, choose a day and get everyone to get rid of the bugs simultaneously. What day shall we choose? October 31. Hello? Oct 31? Is anyone doing anything else then? What? Putting small children into scary costumes and pestering the neighbours? Apple-dooking doughnut biting parkin eating parties? Trick or treating? Oh surely the attractions of bug busting beat that. Whoohooohooo, here I come, this year I’m going as….a Nit Inspector!