Working with children lowers your expectations of decent behaviour. Someone working in an office might consider someone pretending to have Tourettes slightly barmy, someone working in a school might consider it an improvement.

Even so I couldn't help but be shocked when as I went to overtake an old lady on the pavement she spat down at the ground, missing my feet by mere centimetres, or in her language - inches. I don't think she was aiming for me, but I couldn't quite believe it. What next? Baseball cap wearing Granddads? Hoodied gangs of OAPs sat on park benches drinking cider from thermoses? Old ladies called called Chantelle-Maude-Britney-Barbarra?

I'll soon be scared to go out before dark.

Last Thursday's icey hockey observation provided the funding for my development into a fully functioning phlegm factory. In a break from convention the initial designs were produced by a bunch of teenagers. If it contributed towards the country's GDP then we'd be rolling in it. Money that is.

This is the trouble with teaching: you have to deal with horrible little organisms that attack you at any given opportunity, and it's even worse when they bring in to the classroom a load of germs. Every little dear has a different variety of the common cold (though seeing how this school is quite posh, perhaps the cold's aren't quite so common). Which means that at least I'll be some sort of super-immune being after a few years of teaching, even if I end up accounting for half of Kleenex's profits in that time.