Here! We haven’t had a long story for a while, have we? How about this for one to help relieve the dreary grey cold wet February murk? You will need a brew, I think to indulge in this story. Has anyone ever had glandular fever?
Way back in another lifetime, the young Spongebob for reasons best known to, I don’t who, certainly not himself, embarked on a teacher training course in Norwich. For the life of me, even now, and I break out into a sweat just thinking about it, I still cannot work out why it was ever going to be a good idea. At the time I was a super shy introvert, consequently the very thought of standing up in front of a crowd and speaking out loud would cause my knees to tremble like ‘Billy-O’. Who would ever suggest that would be just the personal quality needed to be a good teacher, eh?
Anyway, suffice to say that teacher training and indeed teaching was hard. BTW I have teaching tales to tell that would make your hair curl – maybe for another day. The journey alone, back and forth between Uni and the school was horrendous, taking the best part of 2 hours each way. Crouched up, knees touching the chin, in those little yellow and red minibuses, the stuff of nightmares as they trundled all around every little street in Norwich before getting anywhere near where you wanted to be – aaaaaargh! I’d rather be watching a ‘bore fest’ that is Arsenal v Chelsea in the Carabao semi-final.
The kids!!! In furthest downtown Norwich, I thought they were foreign at first, because I couldn’t understand them. What an extremely strange accent that is, think Bernard Mathews and morph it ten times over. Communication was made even more difficult given my own unintelligible Bradfordian ‘dulcits’. Actually, and strangely, it worked, let’s just say that we came to an understanding, me and the kids. After less than 5 minutes of my very first lesson there as a student teacher, whilst I was in ‘mid-spiele’ about the Spanish Armada, the classroom door suddenly burst open. It was another teacher at the door, holding onto two 15-year-old thugs by their ears! Without a word, she then marched them into my classroom and dumped them at a desk at the back of my class and then stomped out. I thought WTF is going on? I mean, it would have been unprofessional of me to shout at her, Harry Enfield fashion “Oi you teacher wtf……”. So, it appears that it was school policy, if you have any disruptive pupils you can proceed to take them out and dump them in another quiet looking classroom. Sounds reasonable, and it worked but come on, a student teacher in his first lesson.
Sorry, I’m detracting, the point is, it was hard, the stress of the classroom compounded by long hours preparing lessons, marking books and writing up etc. To help me survive, the carrot was for me to get up to the bar every night as soon as I’d finished my work and to sling as many pints down my neck in whatever short time remained before last orders. Would you believe they had Websters (Halifax) and it was only 45 pence per pint. The weekends were a right-off as I would get blasted on Friday and Saturday nights, I was in the Post Grad football team, and the manager would come around hammering at my door early every Sunday morning to wake me up. I’m not sure how many games I played, if any, where I could vouch for being sober. I also had ‘love’ interests, believe it or not, it was certainly a good year for that! But, yes, it all meant that I was burning the candle from both ends.
It was certainly an incredible indescribable relief when I finally finished my last lesson of teaching Practice. My mum was seeing a bloke who kept taking her away on cruises and as it turned out my final week coincided with one of her holidays. So, I went back home, via a nightmare 10.5 hour coach trip on the National Express. This incredible journey seemed to visit every single village and town in East Anglia, the East Midlands and South&West Yorkshire. When I got on the coach there was just one free seat remaining because it had originated from Great Yarmouth and was full of returning holiday makers. The one remaining empty seat, although that is a loose description of the space was next to the fattest woman, the sort of apparition that might make an appearance in one of your worst ever nightmares. I reckon that I had about 2 inches of seat available to perch my bum on for the whole journey! Anyway, we survive these ordeals don’t we?
The idea of going home was so that I could cheekily borrow my mum’s car whilst she was away, then take it back to Norwich where I would have my last week spinning around Norfolk enjoying myself and to be able to bring all my junk home at the end of it. Incidentally, my mum’s car was a red Austin Mini-Metro 1300 Vandam Plas (that detail is included here as a nod to Phil, I remember that he used to appreciate car details like that).
Then it all got a bit weird, it was a Saturday night when I got home, and I went straight out with my mates to the usual local pubs. But especially given that it had been several weeks since I’d had a pint of the nectar that was hand-pulled Tetleys, something felt wrong because I didn’t want any and I could only manage a pint of still orange! Next day I drove down to Norwich and when I finally arrived at the Uni I went up to the canteen to meet up with my Uni mates, but again it was weird. I got a plate full for my tea (dinner) but I couldn’t eat it. Thinking about it, I didn’t have any breakfast or dinner (lunch) either that day either. I didn’t want a drink, didn’t want to go the bar and ended up going to my room and to sleep.
I remember waking up at some point, but I’d lost track of time and I got up to go to the loo which in them days wasn’t en-suite, it was at the end of a corridor. Coming back along the corridor, everything went black and my legs turned to jelly, I stumbled and fell against the walls as I blindly managed to crash my way back into my room and eventually managed to collapse on to my bed. Shjt! What was going on with me? Then, every time I woke up, I was drenched in sweat and I could only manage to stay awake for a few moments before falling asleep again. I was now terrified at the thought of trying to make the journey to the loo again. And I certainly didn’t feel like eating anything, not even persuaded by the prospect of a curry.
A couple of days went by, and I wasn’t improving, so I decided to make a big effort and do something about it. On one of the hottest afternoons, I slowly made my way over to the medical centre. It meant clinging on to walls and doors along the way. I almost collapsed into my seat in the waiting room, then wasted away for 2 or 3 hours in a semi-comatose state, dripping in sweat before being seen by anyone. It would be good, wouldn’t it, if I could report that it had been a helpful experience, but no, it wasn’t. They didn’t know what was wrong with me, but also to make matters worse they forbid me, quite rightly, from driving. Oh no! what now, my mum was going to get home from her cruise to find that her car was missing, I was really in it now.
As it turned out my mum was fine, in fact, after returning from her cruise she arranged for a rescue party to come and get me, which was basically my whole family in two cars. I just wanted to curl up and die somewhere although I was very grateful to be ferried back to the safe haven of home. A measure of how vacant I became was when I was waiting my rescue party to arrive, I bumped into my old mate from Preston (the Post Grad “team manager”) and after talking we believed that we’d won £50k as we thought that my half of a ticket matched his half of a ticket. Bearing in mind that I would never see this character ever again, without a care, I just gave him my side of the ticket and left it there by saying “send on my winnings”. My mind was at a stage where I didn’t fig, and anyway when it came to it, I would always trust someone from Preston, any day. It turned out to be a false alarm anyway, as he shouted out to me as we drove away, we’d read the competition details wrong – doh!
It was a tortuous journey home, where my only focus in the moments when I was awake was on getting home asap which was different to that of my family who were hoping to take in some sights on the way at a leisurely pace. As soon as I got home, I went straight to bed and slept and sweated buckets for hours. It had been days since I’d eaten anything.
The next day I staggered down to the Doctors in my local village. Those were the days when you just turned up and waited to be seen. I remember being called into the Doctor’s inner sanctum where I sat down and tried to explain what had been happening to me. His secretary came into the room and they both stared at me, I recall her saying “Ooo! He doesn’t look very well does he?”.
The doc didn’t know what was wrong with me, he suggested that it might be something to do with my kidneys and as such we shouldn’t mess about. He asked me how I’d managed to get to the surgery, fully expecting me to say that I’d got the bus or a lift and he nearly fell off his chair when I said that I’d walked. He said that I was to go to hospital to have some tests and then asked me how I would get there. Unfortunately, my mum was at her work, so I said I’d have to go on the bus then walk up. The doc wasn’t having any of that and told me that he was going to arrange for hospital transport to pick me up from home.
I persuaded him that I would be o.k. to walk home and then wait for a taxi. Well, blow me, just as soon as I rounded the corner at the bottom of my street, an ambulance came tearing up the road with sirens blasting and lights flashing. I didn’t even get chance to go into the house before being whisked sharply off to hospital. When we arrived at hospital, they bungled me into a wheelchair, and I was wheeled off to a ward where there was a bed with my name on it! I said, “What’s this? I’ve only come here for some tests.” The nurse replied by asking me where all my stuff was, to which I questioned “What stuff?”. That ‘stuff’ would be my overnight ‘stuff’ like pyjamas and toothbrush etc. All a bit excessive for some tests!
It was my first stay in a hospital, and it wasn’t a very appealing prospect. I remember, a really old boy in the bed opposite me, he was almost skeletal and he kept on trying to escape his bed. The poor bloke, he was somebody’s dad, husband, brother and will be long gone now. They let me phone my mum, poor mum, she must have been worried sick. She promised to bring me my “stuff” after work, whilst they took half an armful of my blood and a pot of pee away analysis.
Then events took a surprising up term when having just traipsed back from having had a pee, the nurse told me that they think they had found out what was wrong with me but they needed another pee sample first before they would confirm it. I pointed out that I’d just been! But in typical Spongebob fashion I set about draining all the water jugs to try and expedite my body to produce another pee sample. Once I had done that, they confirmed to me that I was, in fact suffering from glandular fever!
Glandular fever! There was no treatment, other than rest. You catch it from kissing apparently. On my journeys to and from school, I used to sit next to another student teacher on the bus, and it turns out that she also had glandular fever which for her meant that she couldn’t complete the last couple of weeks of her teaching practice. I didn’t know that at the time, I’d just heard that she’d had to pack it in due to being ill. I was guilty of sitting next to her on the bus; I didn’t kiss her though – uuurgh!
It took 4 to 5 months to recover to some kind of normality. It was a slow process. I remember, lying in bed trying to read a newspaper where I would read a paragraph and then fall asleep. After an hour or so I’d wake up and read the next paragraph, and so on. I had absolutely no appetite and I lost almost 4 stones in weight.
It was a nightmare! It couldn’t have happened at a worse time because as a newly qualified teacher, all the available jobs were advertised around that time of year and obviously I was in no state to apply for any. By the time I’d recovered there were very few jobs available, which is how I ended up on the Isle of Man. They might have been more desperate than me, they were looking for someone to cover a teacher who was going on maternity leave and took me on. So, it’s ‘Spooky Do’s’ again because on recently researching my family tree I have found that some of the previous Spongebobs lived on the Isle of Man. To think that I might have been related to some of the brats that I taught there!
If you have got this far, then go claim your medal π.
Cheers
Spongebob