Bernard Cribbins, It's Cold - and God Knows I'm Suffering

I am not happy.

I am the very opposite of happy - as I attempt to write, my eyes are streaming and my nose is doing likewise. Today I am at my special needs school where, as my services were not required in any class all morning, I have been slowly contracting a cold in the teacher's large staff room.

It is not heated. It is not insulated. It is freezing. It is the only staff room at any of my schools which is not heated, and I have been confined here for hours. This makes me angry. This also makes me sneeze, sniff and cough a great deal. My pack of Japanese tissues, designed to instantly dissolve upon contact with any kind of moisture, do not help very much either.

The bathroom next door has no hot tap and no towel to dry one's hands after washing them. It is, however, home to the only source of warmth at my disposal, namely the heated toilet seat, to which I have retreated several times in sheer desperation at feeling my buttocks go numb.

I taught one class in the afternoon - more song based stuff for the high schoolers where I was required to play guitar but was barely able to because of my sneezing. I may have passed my cold on to the students.

There is now just over an hour to go. I am really feeling quite ill. The staff around me are wearing ski jackets and woolly hats. This is not good. This is absurd. They say to me Samui desu, ne? - cold, isn't it? "No shit, Sherlock." say I. I'm not sure they understand.

I think I'm slowly losing the will to live. One hour, four minutes to go and counting...