Esmerelda

I arrive at the door and pause briefly to catch my breath before heading through to face whatever is going to happen next. I've spent the journey running through the procedures, the drills, the options I think I've got, but I know that whatever happens next may surprise me, could be the situation that lurks at the bottom of every cup of tea I drink for the rest of the day.

I'm ready.

I knock quietly, but enter decisively when there's no response and look around, expecting to find you somewhere obvious.

You aren't.

I pause at the door, searching for you, and find you where I least expect. You're on the floor, partially obscured by the duvet which has fallen off the double bed in the centre of the room - it looks recently slept in, the covers wrinkled and askew but cold to the touch. I'm temporarily halted by a sensory memory of the feeling of sliding in between cool, clean sheets at the end of a long, hot day, and when I bring myself back, grudgingly, to this dim and abandoned-feeling room, I worry briefly about how long I may have been standing and what you may be thinking about my strange behaviour.

With a sinking heart I realise I need not have worried.

You're blue.

Your eyes are open. They stare up - wide and huge, archetypally beautiful, with lashes which stretch up and out like feathers or wings. Your eyes stare up. Beautiful, black and lifeless.

I want to stop, be shocked and let my emotions stretch their legs. I want to wonder why you're on the floor and almost hidden, but I know I don't have time. Yet. So I move quickly, bending down and hitching my trousers up slightly at the knee to kneel beside you. I feel for a pulse, but there is none. Your skin feels... wrong. It is rubbery, thin and stretched tight like a balloon and it is neither warm nor cold, but simply wrong.

I notice with a lurch that your fingers are floppy, as blue as your face and utterly lacking in resistance or structure. I pinch you hard, and the slight squeak I hear initially makes my heart lurch back in the right direction, until I realise it was just the sound of the air within you shifting slightly.

I sit back on my heels, rubbing my eyes and pushing my glasses out and up and over my forehead.

I know there's nothing I can do, maybe could ever have done - you are who you are, and I can only question in dreams what might be if I had taken you with me.

But I didn't and that's for me, not you, to live with.

Standing up, my joints creaking, I turn and walk away, leaving you where you lie. As I close the door gently I feel your eyes on my back.

Wide, beautiful and black.

A Whole New World...

That's it guys, I'm out of my old school and into a new one and I can't actually describe to you what a difference there is having moved.

It's like a separate planet! The children not only don't swear at you, run away, walk out, threaten violence or refuse to work. They actually..... *smile*! They actually, and I could be wrong abou this, but they appear to actually want to learn.

Oh

My

God.

I feel like a different person after 4 days at my new school - I actually remember why I wanted to teach, and that is that I do fundamentally like children. Younger children in particular generally avoid picking up the terrible inhibitions and complexes that we adults carry around without really noticing. Of course, that is provided they've had the right input from their parents to make that possible, which sadly the children at my previous skill often hadn't. They were contradictory that they lacked of emotional maturity but often had a very jaded and cynical attitude which we associate all to often with "maturity". Fortunately, my new class don't have that problem - they're exacty as they should be and I couldn't be happier.

Children keep you young. They make you smile and remind you that the world is fascinating.

They are unashamedly keen, interested and enthusiastic - they don't pretend not to care because it's not "cool" to care.

They usually know more than you think they do, but you have to ask the right way or they keep it to themselves. Most children are capable of far, far more than we give them credit for.

Children are deeply honest about things you wouldn't consider saying out loud. If your hair clashes with your jumper they tell you so, not because they want to upset you, but because it's true and they think you need to know.

Every day I remember another reason why this is the job I want to do, and I'm so happy to have landed in such a lovely school. However I do think that this will all work out for the best: without the experiences I've had I might never have decided to go to Thailand, and I wouldn't appreciate "normal" teaching for the great job it really is.

Things are finally looking up :)

Aarayan's Day of Pain (Part 2)

As we headed off in the car to my tattoo appointment I yammered on about my trip Up North, my parents' new puppy, Meg, the difficulties involved in rehoming my many pets while Kal told me his various tales of derring-do in return. To be fair, his stories won.

Kal saw me into my tattoo appointment at 1pm at Venus Flytrap in Edinburgh and had intended to drop in and out, keep me company and consider whether or not he fancied a tattoo of his own. Unfortunately he was shooed away by what I assume was the apprentice, so went off to wander around, drink coffee and stress about his Paramedic interview for a couple of hours assuming I'd be done by 3pm, while I expected him to come back and see me at 3pm.

Calum the tattoist had drawn up a transfer based on the original design I'd given him (which I nicked of the tinternet - here is is on your left) but when I saw it I didn't like it. This tiger is more feline, slinky and fluid, whereas his was stockier, more masculine and fiercer. He rightly pointed out that mine looked like a tabby-cat, so we compromised on something in the middle. It did mean though that he had to free-hand the tiger on my leg in pen, going over and over it to refine it to the point where it could be inked. Redrawing it took about an hour, so we got started tattooing at about 2pm.

We stopped at 4.30.

Two hours of sheer hell. I have a huge tattoo already on my back, so I thought I was prepared, since whilst parts of it hurts like hell, on the whole it wasn't too

bad.

I wasn't prepared.

Not at all. The tattoo is on the outside of my left calf, coming up from my foot to my knee and there's just not a bit of that that doesn't hurt like a bastard. The skin is thin: bones and tendons are all too near the surface and fat is relatively scarce which is guaranteed to pinch. I wont bore you with the details of my shameful behaviour during those 150 minutes (9000 seconds, each one counted), but it boils down to quivering, whimpering, flinching, and trying to claw my way over the back of the chair without actually moving, since I did, I vaguely remembered, originally want (and had to *pay*) for said tattoo.

An hour and a half late, tattooed beautifully and a mere £140 out of pocket I met Kal, who was understandably grumpy, having waited for an extra hour and half in his car because I didnt have my mobile in my pocket to tell him how long I'd be, and I in turn hadn't realised he wasn't coming back at 3pm. Ooops.

Now that the cling-film is off and healing is underway it looks, I think, fantastic. And here's a picture to prove it:

So... Whaddya think?

Aarayan's Day of Pain (Part 1)

Every now and then you come to a point at which you have to do numerous horrible things and sometimes it's better just to smoosh them all into one day and have done with it.

Such a day came about yesterday when I found myself with a dental appointment in which I had to have 4 or 5 fillings at 10am, followed by a 3 hour tattoo sitting at 1 pm. Ouch.

The dentist was.... horrible. The dentist herself was a lovely person, but the dentistry was horrible. I have a deep-seated and not entirely irrational fear of dentistry after a series of trips to the dentist a few years ago. The first thing that did it was meeting..... the Dental Hygenist.

No. You didn't read it right. Read it more like in a booming, tombstoney kind of voice. Like...

...The Dental Hygenist.

He was an absolutely huge, hulking man, with the delicate touch of an obese rhino, and his way of showing me that my gums weren't sufficiently healthy was to lean over me with his hugeness, poke my gums really hard, repeatedly, with a sharp and pointy metal thing and say "You see how easily it bleeds? See? See?!"

After that came the wisdom teeth. Yes. Two wisdom teeth were removed under a local (LOCAL!) anaesthetic, and a couple of hours of listening to bones being shattered with a hammer and pulled out of your skull with a pair of pliers will pretty much put you off dentistry for life. Just to hammer the nails in to the proverbial coffin, I got an infection after the procedure and my face swelled up to the extent that I couldn't open my mouth wide enough to get the anti-biotics in. I had to drink soup through a straw. For days.

So, it was with some trepidation that I arrived at the dentist yesterday. It was with considerably more trepidation that I watched the ABSOULTELY HUGE needle being inserted into my mouth to numb me up. Getting numbed up hurts like hell - it makes your jaw ache for days after, and unfortunately I have really high tolerance to medication. This means that I need loads, and regular top-ups, so I needed about as much anaesthetic as a small horse with a drug habit. After three goes I was finally, and blissfully rendered numb from nose to ear and everything in between.

Drilling commences and I spend 30 minutes literally stiff as a board, fingers arranged in a grotesque, rigormortis-like pose, stomach muscles quivering, fighting the strong, strong urge to shut my mouth and bite the dentist.

Fillings duly done, shaking like a leaf, I headed home to meet Kal. I had to go home via the shop to buy straws because I had discovered when the dentist asked me to rinse out my mouth that I was drinking with the fluid ease of a chronic stroke-victim; pinkish bubble-gum scented liquid merrily and attractively dribbing down my chin.

We had tea (tepid and through a straw) shared stories and laughed at my atempts to smile, lick my lips and speak, all of which made me look like I was attempting to audition for an amateur dramatics production of the Elephant Man.

Then it was time to head into town to get my new, shiny and beautiful tattoo...

Pictures and story to follow :)