1st September.
Ah balls. This really wasn’t the start I’d planned for: ten minutes late getting up, (but is there any other way, really, on a cold Monday morning?) and then an extra five minutes in the shower because of a reckless song choice, (Bohemian Rhapsody, while possibly the greatest thing ever to be created – apart from those socks with individual toe holes – is not a good option for a shower song when you’re already late and have an obsessive compulsion to finish every verse and guitar solo before getting out.) Breakfast was on the go, as I had a sneaking suspicion would become the usual case. The people of early morning London had better get used to seeing me marching down the road towards the Institute of Education, hair damp and flailing, shoes clacking embarrassingly noisily, scoffing a ‘healthy’ banana muffin into my gob every day. I say healthy but it was recently pointed out to me by my dear and lifelong friend-cum-ego-deflator, (fregodeflator? Can’t see that one catching on…) Katrina, that actually there was almost a quarter of my daily calorie allowance in one muffin and that my thighs wouldn’t be forgiving of that fact for much longer.
The IOE was massive, and absolutely teeming with people, despite the fact that lectures started a good fifteen minutes ago. Late, late, late! I hate being late! Although I suppose my lateness over the years will have provided me with a myriad of snide comments, questions and telling-offs to give to my own pupils when they’re tardy to my lessons.
So. Here I am, after months of applications and interviews[1], ready to start my training as…a history teacher! I know, I know, it’s not particularly glamorous or even that impressive. But I’ve wanted to teach all my life, even when I was little I used to make my stuffed toys line up and shout at them for being naughty before keeping them all behind at lunch time for passing round rude notes about me. Slightly sadomasochistic, especially as I too had to remain behind at lunch to ensure they were supervised. Also the notes, (all written by me, I should mention), could be surprisingly hurtful – one I found years after said “Miss. Catherines looks like a fish and will never get married.” Meow.
It’s just occurred to me that I haven’t actually introduced myself, even though this is my diary, I should know who I am. My name is Eleanor Catherines, 22 years old. Engaged to a man I was at school with named Jack Huxley, who asked me out so many times I eventually said yes out of exhaustion and an acute awareness that the school leavers’ ball was looming and no one else had asked to take me. That was five years ago and since then I have obviously grown to love him. What else? Erm… I have an almost pathological love of biscuits, which I have been trying to tame by only buying garibaldis, (seriously, who in the glorious history of the biscuit would ever choose to eat one of those over, say, a custard cream? No one, that’s who.) My best friends are my younger sister Hannah, who often gets mistaken for the older one in both looks and maturity, and my playschool friend Katrina, an up and coming magazine writer who, being a size 6, tall, blonde and incredibly ambitious lady I should be programmed to despise. For some reason I find I love her even more, maybe because she steals all the free perfume samples out of the mags for me and gave me the number for Benedict Cumberbatch’s agent so I could ask all the questions that have been dwelling on my mind[2]… And finally, I really have no way of judging social situations, which often means I say incredibly awkward things to people who don’t know me well enough to laugh it off as a joke.
Anyway, enough of that. Where was I? Ah, back at the IOE. They have those spinny doors there, and you’d have to be a robot not to go round at least twice as fast as you can. Apparently the people at the IOE are robots, because not one of them found it funny and not one of them even tried to beat my fastest spin. I was caught up in a sort of salmon-mating rush as soon as I was spat out by the door. I was being jostled and pushed in a direction I had no idea was right or not, so I just went along with it and soon found myself in the middle of the centre row of a lecture theatre, surrounded by upwards of one hundred people.
