You know that nightmare you have where you’re back at primary school and you have to dance in front of the class, and everyone else knows the dance moves and you don’t, and the teacher is dancing too and you don’t want to but you still have to dance, dance, dance, and also you’re naked?
Well that actually happened to me this week.
Not the naked part, thankfully. (I suspect this would have threatened my most recent DBS check). But the rest of it was totally true.
EldestGirl’s school held a lovely morning where parents could stay and watch an average morning for the children. “Great,” I thought. “A bit of pottering round the reading corner, a sneaky cup of coffee and then off home to get some work done.”
No such luck. The morning started with some abomination called Jump Start Jonny, whom as far as I can tell, is basically Mr Motivator for primary school children. He wears shorts that don’t leave much to the imagination (not that I was looking), and seems to run some sort of subscription-based service to schools where a selection of pop songs are danced to – and the children join in. So as our darling Reception children pranced around, knowing all the moves to Feeling Hot Hot Hot, and indeed even YoungestGirl made a good go of it, I pondered at which point my life had deviated from school to uni to a sensible City career… to jumping round a classroom and making a tit of myself in front of other grown ups. Most of whom looked as though they had been doing sneaky practising with their children.
A bit later on, a little girl – let’s call her Sally – wanted to play chase with me, but at that exact moment, YoungestGirl fell over and cracked her head on the concrete and bled a little bit (and laughed, but that’s just YoungestGirl). “Sorry Sally – I can’t right now, I’m just seeing to YoungestGirl.”
“Fine,” said Sally, in a tone that very much suggested it wasn’t fine AT ALL. “I will tell my Mummy on you and you’re not my best friend anymore and you’re not coming to my birthday party.”
After making a brontosaurus out of lolly sticks and getting to YoungestGirl 0.5 of a second too late to stop her tipping an entire bucket of soapy water down herself, it was sadly time to leave.
I have to be honest, I am quite glad my school days are over. Even if I do have an appreciation for Jump Start Jonny’s shorts that is totally lost on the children.
