Scary scolopendra

The other day as I was standing in a stuffy classroom waiting for the kids to arrive, feeling sweaty, tired and stressed, carrying a hundred folders and dropping my photocopies all over the floor, a little boy came running up to me, beaming, and whispered breathlessly in my ear, ‘vous êtes sublime’, before throwing himself into his chair, arms folded, sitting up straight, and waiting excitedly for the ‘hello song’. Well that pretty much made my day. Though I think he has a tiny teacher crush after an incident that happened last week...

There’s no nice way to say this but this little boy smells of wee. He is the class ‘wee kid’. You know the type - every school has one or two – small, usually looking somewhat malnourished, probably having horrendously neglectful parent(s), and smelling quite distinctly of wee. And understandably the other children never want to talk to him when we’re doing group and pair work. So last week when we were doing a survey asking each other ‘what’s in your pencil case?’, I saw him sitting on his own at his table, head in his hands, staring at his carefully drawn survey table with a melancholy glaze in his eyes. I went over to see what was wrong (that’s when I realised that what I had previously taken to be the generalised urine stench of the classroom was actually emanating from him alone) and he said that no one wanted to do the survey with him. So I asked him who he wanted to interview and then collared the unfortunate chosen ones and make them sit with him. And he looked so pleased to have company that I stopped feeling sorry for the ‘victims’ and simply enjoyed the fact that he was joining in with the lesson. So anyway I think that’s why he likes me.

I remember not wanting to be anywhere near the wee kids when I was in primary school – but I also remember the strange air of sadness that hung around them too. Why do people have children when they don’t have the means or will to take care of them? It’s very sad.

I’ve got limited internet access at the moment, hence the long absences.

Can’t really do much about it though.

Oh my goodness! I nearly forgot to mention the latest ‘beastie’ to wend its weary (AND VERY UNWELCOME) way into my house. Voici le scolopendre. I woke up in the middle of the night needing a glass of water, to find this terrifying thing scuttling around my living room. I've been warned about it. Apparently its sting is one of the most painful you can encounter on this island, and therefore the best thing to do is stamp on it hard and kill it. Unfortunately I don’t sleep in shoes, so I grabbed a broom and, with a feeling of silent hysterical terror, beat it close to death and swept it outside. Then I went back to bed (where I didn’t sleep thanks to creepy crawly thoughts.)

In the morning Lisette saw the mangled corpse and asked me if I’d killed the beast. Suddenly thinking she might be angry that I’d left its carcass right outside the house, I freaked out and denied all knowledge of ever having seen it. She wasn’t angry at all - she said Meat Cookie must have had it, and that it was a shame it wasn’t me that killed it, because the slayer of a scolopendre is purported to come into money quite soon after the slaughter.

Yay! Money please!