Grammar Grandma says…
“Today, I want to talk about…
YOU’RE.
‘You’re welcome’ means…you are welcome.
I’ve spotted ‘your welcome’ many times.
Using ‘your’ when you mean ‘you are!’ (YOU’RE) is like putting Bistro Gravy on your profiteroles.
IT DOESN’T MAKE SENSE.
The brown liquid may look right- it might pass as the right thing- but gravy on those profiteroles will make your sweet tooth shudder!”
September is the Marmite month of the year.
I say this with the utmost respect for Marmite (our salty but sticky friend).
My husband is a teacher and loves to hate September: he likes the buzz of keen minds first thing in September but loses faith when those same minds lose interest by 2.30 on the first day back.
Parents whose children are about to start school are picturing September with dread: their child is no longer little, it’s the start of a new mummy era. Tears prick at their eyes when they picture those school gates.
On the other hand, parents of children who are entering years 2,3,4,5 and 6 do an energetic conga round the living room or a mad, hyperactive pirouette because the summer holidays are ALMOST over.
The summer wedding season is over: stinky sandals are now at the bottom of the wardrobe and the only remains of evening barbecues with Presecco are your FB photos. And looking at them doesn’t help as you notice how, already, your tan has faded.
So September is like marmite, or marzipan (which is yuk, by the way!) Whatever your September turns out to be, I hope it includes some decent sunshine!
Thanks for reading my post,
Kathryn Player.
‘I might have trouble with this list!’ hubby said.
In light of my last post, I have no excuse!
I had to laugh at a news story about a taxi driver who was fooled into thinking that a dressed mannequin was a ‘sleeping’ passenger. Normally, a good taxi driver’s ‘customer service’ equates to traffic chit-chat and general exchanges of football results. Therefore, for a taxi driver not to notice the plastic ‘skin’, the stiffness of the joints and the lack of ‘breathing’ from his sleeping passenger would suggest that he didn’t just ignore his passengers, he was asleep, or ‘sleep-driving’. The result? He became £140 out of pocket because when he arrived at his sleeping passenger’s destination, he realised that his ‘living passengers’ had scammed him. It’s a lesson in what happens when you offer poor customer service. Unfortunately, I am an expert in poor customer service.
Customer service has never been my strong point. As an eighteen year old till girl, I was always keen for my fifteen minute tea break. In my mind, speed was everything. If I had a customer and my break was already due, I sped up my work like a Duracell bunny on Speed. People want to go quickly through the checkouts. Right?
Wrong. The middle-aged couple whom I served complained about me. And you know you’re NOT QUITE an adult when the shop floor manager grabs you by the wrist and drags you into the back corner of the till line (the super market naughty spot?) to tell you that your customer service is unsatisfactory.
Apparently, I put this lovely couple under pressure, ‘you obviously scanned the food too quickly, Kathryn!’ my manager said.
‘I thought we were supposed to put customers through the till quickly,’ I said, a typical slouching teen.
She glared at me over her specs, ‘if I hear the smack of raw meat landing on the conveyor belt, you’re going too quick!’
Perhaps I’d watched too many episodes of ‘Fawlty Towers’.
Ten years later my customer service skills didn’t see much improvement.
As a teacher, I loved helping my students and worked hard in order to get the best results out of them. However, this didn’t stop me from being a scatty mare. Unlike the unfortunate snoozing-taxi driver, I wasn’t out of £140 but I did have to face the wrath of 30 teenagers when I temporarily ‘misplaced’ their reports. And rightly so! Thirty angry, stomping fourteen year olds are not forgiving when you explain that you left their reports in the staffroom food tray trolley. However, I was extremely apologetic. And, yet, my poor teaching ‘service’ is nothing compared with what doctor surgery receptionists get up to.
When my friend talks about her episodes with ‘that woman’ working at the doctor’s surgery, I rub my hands together and await the next instalment of pursed lipped receptionist versus my friend’s terrier-like ability to chew someone up (I’m not sure I even mean metaphorically). It makes the spats in EastEnders look like bunnies buffing up their tails. This receptionist behaves like a ‘heavy’, as if she’s protecting the Medical Mafia (my friend’s doctor). This receptionist interrogates my friend over every medical detail whilst throwing in medical jargon and citing ‘guidelines’ (she is sqwaking whilst flexing her feathers).
Someone like this could be very useful. Who needs a bodyguard when you have a pursed lipped receptionist? It’s a pity that taxi driver didn’t have one.
Thanks for reading my post,
Kathryn Player.
I read in the news that, in Moscow, a police suspect (‘a fugitive thief’) failed to turn up at court. Now where do you think he went? Somewhere distant? Abroad? No. This ‘fugitive thief’ hid in his fridge. Apparently, the police detective work was sparked by the fact that the fugitive’s mother refused to put her last pizza slices back into the fridge. One police thought led to another and they opened the fridge door and found the thief hidden inside, shivering away. So at what point did hiding in the fridge seem like a good idea? But then I realised we’re all guilty of doing stupid things.
Now, picture this. A school does a rehearsal for their Christmas carol service in the local church and the teacher in charge decides to move things to improve the performance. So what does he move? The musicians? The pupils? The conductor? No No No. He flexes his muscles, bends down and tries to lift the altar. He moves the altar an inch before a shooting pain drives through his shoulder forcing him to drop it. He spends the next day in A & E because he has a torn muscle along his shoulder. I like this story. It’s a pretty picture of poetic justice.
However, there are strange people in other ‘walks of life’ who also do stupid things. One woman working at ‘Pets at Home’ was on her lunch break and couldn’t find her cigarette lighter. What do you propose she did? Did she go to the shop round the corner? Did she ask to borrow someone else’s lighter? Did she go without her cigarette? No. She lit her cigarette by putting it in a toaster, only the toaster wasn’t plugged in. So she unplugged the freezer in order to plug in the toaster to get her nicotine fix. However, she forgot to plug the freezer back in. As a result, the bosses at ‘Pets at Home’ wanted to skin her alive (politically incorrect for a pet shop, I know) because half of their food stock for their animals went off. I mean, what pet is going to eat rotting rat?
Finally, I admit, I have done many stupid things but it’s hard to narrow it down to one stupid thing. As a teacher, I did walk out into the school corridor with my skirt tucked into my knickers which prompted shrill shrieking from two colleagues who ran, much like those supermodels in ‘Baywatch’, to grab me by the shoulders and drag me into the nearest closet. I thank my lucky stars it was the only the caretaker who’d been walking behind me and not the pupils. Thank God for that because, then, I really would have looked stupid.
The first obvious truth that we try and hide, at some point, is our age. Bizarre as it now seems, I lied and said I was older when I first started teaching at 22 years old. During my Teaching Practice, I lied to my sixth-form class (my nose grew Pinocchio style) and told them I was 28 and had several years of ‘excellent’ exam results (how else was I going to get them to take me seriously?) If I told them the truth about my age, they would soon see that my claim about exam results was ridiculous as it would mean that I started teaching the day I got my GCSE grades. Now, I’d rather lie and say I was extraterrestrial than lie and say I was older.
In the past, I have lied about my music tastes. When I first dated my husband, in order to impress him, I lied and said that I liked bands such as ‘The Clash’ in order to sound trendy and ‘totally in there!’ However, when he referred to the album ‘London’s Calling’ I thought he was talking about a London newspaper or a taxi firm. Thankfully, he saw the funny side of my lie. I didn’t dare tell him that Jason Donovan’s first album (Ten Good Reasons), on tape, was hidden in the glove compartment of my car. Some truths must stay hidden.
Another truth we try and hide is just how well our children sleep. When talking about the girls’ three o’clock feeds, at one baby-something group I went to, one mum insisted that her baby ‘went through the night’ at 6 weeks and has slept like that ever since. Hmmmmm (there’s a strong desire to scratch one’s hair-less chin!) That child must have no teeth (no teething experience) and the strongest immune system known to man. If one of mine have a cold then I’m up several times because they’ve coughed themselves awake and it means that lovely sleep goes bye bye!
However, the most secret truth we keep hidden is our dress size because, ridiculous as it seems, our dress size can make us want to blush. At one point, a friend and I were shopping for work clothes and, well, I’d obviously had one too-many barbecue burgers because I’d gone up two dress sizes since the last time I shopped. When my friend called out over the curtain and asked what larger size I needed, I whispered the size.
‘WHAT? I CAN’T HEAR?’ she cried out.
‘One four!’ I hissed.
‘Yeah, that’s a GREAT code!’ she replied, laughing.
Despite the crimson faced lie concerning your dress size, all in all, the worse thing to lie about has got to be your age. If you want to lie and say you’re five or ten years younger then there is a price to pay. When I turned 30, a friend kindly said, ‘it’s best if you change your date of birth on Facebook,’ as if now I was 30 I had reached the end of the earth. Needless to say I didn’t change my age. I didn’t want Facebook friends thinking that I looked 30-35 when my new date of birth informed them I was only 25. That’s like putting a chain-saw to your face: damaging and misleading. Why would I want people thinking I was a haggard looking 25 year old? I would have boxes of ‘anti-wrinkle’ cream sent to me in their truck loads, sent by well-meaning old (smug!) friends. No, it’s best to just tell the truth.
If I induce a headache, please don’t sue me. I mean well.
I’m constantly in turmoil over whether I should return to teaching. I have been out of the profession for 2 and a half years. Should I teach or should I brave the unknown and start something new? Could I do something new?
Teaching was my bread, butter and jam for ten years but I’m not certain that it’s a career I can handle whilst being a mother of two young children. Being with teenagers during the day and toddlers during the night might set the blood pressure to an all-time high. Teenagers are lovely but they can be draining when, for example, it can take 10 minutes JUST to get an aggravated spotty giant to sit down in his seat; toddlers, although far cuter, have the same hair-greying effect.
Plus, as an English teacher, I am through with teaching poetry. I hear you all gasp; sorry if you’ve spilt your tea. The fact is, I don’t want to talk about rhyming couplets with sixteen year olds any more than a doctor wants to talk about his bowel movements with his patients. Teaching poetry causes grief and boredom. Teaching poetry is like trying to stir concrete with a whisk.
And, I have no idea what all the new Education terms mean. My husband casually injects teaching terms into the conversation and I nod to look like an intelligent being who instinctively can read her husband. But, it is only later, I admit that like a chicken with no head (in my case, no brain) I have not a bleeding clue about what is going on.
So, the future doesn’t look bright; it looks to be teaching free.
Thoughts of a curly-haired Essex bird 