James Proclaims!

As if oft the case, it is Saturday afternoon as I write this. Little Proclaims and I are sitting at the dining table, while Mrs Proclaims and Mini Proclaims are upstairs. Mrs is writing her thesis and Mini is taking a much needed nap (I’m not sure it was Mini herself who needed the nap so much as the rest of us who needed her to have one).

Little Proclaims is playing with some brightly coloured pipe cleaners, which have never been used for cleaning pipes, and which will, by the end of the day, be different types of ‘ceremonial’ headgear and/or what Little Proclaims likes to refer to as ‘decorations’. They will festoon our living quarters for several days, until sufficient time has passed that they can be discarded or returned to the craft box from whence they came.

Since writing that last paragraph, Little Proclaims has used some of the pipe cleaners to fashion a kind of ‘elephant mask’ and she is now running around the room saying ‘moo’. I don’t believe that elephants are traditionally associated with the sound ‘moo’, but I’m not sure it matters too much. I’m assuming, in the absence of any meaningful reference points, that this constitutes normal behaviour for a five-year-old. In any case, it’s something of a relief to see Little Proclaims with so much energy as she has been somewhat under the weather in recent days. It’s never nice to see your children unwell, albeit the lack of running around could be viewed as a silver lining of that particular cloud.

Because of her illness, Little Proclaims missed out on Friday night pizza and is very keen that we re-arrange pizza night for tonight. As I usually cook a proper meal on a Saturday, which takes a fair amount of time and effort, I’m happy to acquiesce to her demands. I missed out on pizza too, as I had to work late on Friday, which is entirely unacceptable for someone who works in a school. Early finishes on a Friday and lots of holidays are the main benefits of working in a school. Some will have you believe it’s the satisfaction of helping to shape future generations, but take away the early Friday finishes and the holidays and just see how many people stick around in the profession.

This Friday, I was asked by another school to attend a complaints panel as an ‘expert’. I have never thought of myself as an expert in anything, so I was quite surprised that the world might see me as such. I will be remunerated for my time, but there is not normally any fee that would get me to agree to give up my Friday evening. Flattery, as it turns out, will get me to agree to most things though. And it seems, having attended the panel, that I do seem to know my stuff, which rather undermines my daily efforts to seem like an irreverent slacker. It turns out that the only thing I’m slacking at is being a slacker.

I’m not sure how I feel about this. When did I become someone who can meaningfully contribute to my chosen profession? And how did this happen?

I am not, by nature, a hardworking person. Quite the contrary. I’m someone who craves an easy life. I think I accidently became good at my job through the realisation that people would leave me alone if I appeared to be competent and the only way I could achieve the appearance of competence was to actually be, y’know, competent. And this is, apparently, a slippery slope towards becoming a notional ‘expert’.

I’m not sure I am truly an expert, in spite of recent evidence. But I am thinking of buying a t-shirt with the word ‘expert’ emblazoned across it. I may not possess the requisite qualities to be an irreverent slacker, but I certainly intend to be an irreverent expert. I owe that much to myself.

Anyway, thanks to my eldest daughter’s illness and my apparent professional expertise, for one week only Saturday will be pizza night at Proclaims Towers.

Mini Proclaims will be especially pleased about this when she wakes up. Being in fairly robust health, she did get to enjoy Friday night pizza and will now get to do ‘the double’.

And if that wasn’t good enough, Saturday night pizza won’t be your common or garden supermarket pizza. Little Proclaims’ convalescence meant that we cancelled her usual Saturday morning activities, and when she woke this morning, seemingly on the mend, the Proclaims family used the bonus time to pop into town, whereupon I purchased some new trousers for work (to reflect my new status as resident expert) and we all enjoyed a cake in an overpriced cafe. We then popped into Marks and Spencer no less, to purchase the pizzas. That’s correct, at Chez Proclaims tonight, we’ll be enjoying M&S pizza, and we’ll be following that up with M&S profiteroles.

Does life get any better?