My form group can be a miserable lot. I’ve had such lovely form groups in the past, who have been full of beans and brimming with enthusiasm, all battling to stand for election for this or that, or begging for quizzes or challenges. But the group I’ve got this time are generally sulky faced – or in the case of the girls, caked-on make-up faced – that I can’t wait until registration is over and they sliver out the door without a backward glance, as they try to escape unnoticed with contraband earrings and turning deaf ears to instructions to tuck in their shirts.
However, there’s one part about it all that is guaranteed to brighten up my day, and it’s not actually
one of the kids – it’s the kid’s mother. I’ve only met this woman once or twice and she’s nice enough, but
she is incredibly dopey. Unfortunately for the kid, the dopiness is apparently hereditary, or at least
learnt by example. But what brightens up my morning is if the kid shuffles over to me with a note from the
mother. For these missives are usually the most amusing things I read all week, and when you plough through
as many “schoolboy errors” in exercise books every week as I do, that’s saying something.
Mrs Dopey can’t just write me a note like the other parents, one which says her kid will be absent for a
dental appointment or that the kid was away because of a cold or stomach ache. No indeed. With Mrs Dopey I
receive an often highly entertaining and convoluted story that brings the scene at the Dopey household alive
for me every time. In fact, I have a collection of notes from Mrs Dopey that I use to entertain visitors,
and I only wish I’d started to file them away a long time ago instead of leaving them to the mercy of my
untidy desk drawer.
Take, for example, the time the kid was away with stomach ache. That fact alone was not enough for Mrs Dopey’s note; instead I had a whole sorry tale of why she hadn’t been able to ring the school in the morning, because she was in the bath, and then the doorbell went, and she had to nip up the road to see to a neighbour, and by the time she got back she’d completely forgotten until it was too late. Then there are the sorry tales of the kid having to miss an afternoon of school to go and visit the estranged Mr Dopey, who is painted as a bit of a cad and a worthless so-and-so by Mrs Dopey, who feels the need to share with me, via pen and paper, the disintegration of the relationship and her best efforts to keep the kid in touch with the father, for what that’s worth. And so it goes on: the unfortunately timed doctor’s appointment, with the whole saga of in-depth negotiations with the doctor’s receptionist to get an appointment at a reasonable time; the expositions on local public transport, which the Dopeys rely on and whose bus and train scheduling means that the kid has to leave or arrive at certain times after visits to the orthodontist’s. All of this will be minutely detailed for me, including the nitty-gritty of which teeth have to be removed or shuffled around at that day’s visit. Bless. I’m not sure that the kid even knows what goes into the letters, and I’m sure the kid would be mortified to realise how much information the mother volunteers. Still, it makes a change from the scrawled and scribbled scraps of paper that other kids toss in my general direction of a morning.
added 4/12/05
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