Say nay?

The past couple of weeks have been hectic. The usual kid icarus stuff as well as organizing the handover from two of my jobs as well as preparing for the other two I am going to keep.

Next Wednesday, from working four jobs I will only be working two and it didn’t really hit me until today when I got my shit ready for the upcoming week.

I know its hard to believe, especially coming from this online persona I posty under but I am a shit hot teacher. I know it sounds big headed but in every school I have ever worked in I have always been the best. It meant getting the extra classes, teaching kids with behavioral problems then being sent to other schools and training other teachers. Not once have I come across a better teacher than me.

And on and up kid icarus goes until he’s an assistant director of studies then director of studies and on until he’s teaching and running extra curricular departments as well as running the school website and all that jazz as well as cycling like a mutherfucker to local universities and highschools and writing and writing…

Then, in the frst two weeks of spring, I go a little nuts. The classroom is driving me crazy, I keep the windows as wide open as they’ll go, I’m bouncing off the walls and spending the least amount of time indoors. Slowly, slowly I shave off the hours of sleep I get until I get by on four or five. I study fulltime, do exams, race from Irlam to old Trafford to Chorley and every moment outside, at a speed faster than a walk, every time I’m using my hands and bellowing out commands over fields and hills a totally new person appears and grows.

Coming back to England is like stepping out of a timewarp, everyone I knew is either in prison or married or living with their partner and they whisper, guiltily, in starbucks to me that they wish they hadn’t rushed it. And ask me for stories of torn mountains and being chased by gangsters through shanghai and where I got all my different scars.

I know I should be settling down, and when people ask me what I do I give them a different answer/job depending on who’s asking.

And last fortnight, when I got the job, better money, doing what I love, all the naysayers came out of the woodwork.

Its as if I have made some personal affront by changing careers, the new Finn that snuck into the room with them quietly and secretly is a sudden stranger to them.

‘What do you do again?’ becomes the start of another confession, that they hate their jobs, their places, their ruts that they’ve dug for themselves. The idea of making such a bare ass leap into the unknown scares me but terrifies them. And I;’m not even thirty!

My contemporaries are older than their years. They dress in shirts from next and ties for topshop, they look forward to tiger tiger on Saturdays and fryups and sleep-ins on Sundays. At 5am I’m racing through empty fields, weights strapped to me like ammunition, covered in cobwebs and dew.