The phone conspiracy spreads and needs urgent attentioin

16/07/2008 by April First.

If men can’t dance, then who am I going to dance with? 

I put the question to Mrs Marchmount and she told me to forget men totally – they were all self-centred lying toads who represented the worst in humanity.   I thanked her for her carefully considered opinion and asked what had happened to the man from the Highlands.   She said he had proved unreliable, but would offer no insight into his abilities on the accordion.

Clarius however can dance…  I bumped into him (not quite literally by near enough) in the corridor outside the office, apologised for not looking where I was going (but it was entirely his fault – I always do that and must stop) and said I had been distracted by a problem.  We walked into the staffroom and I told Clarius of the “dancing dilemma” as I had decided to call it.  He said it was no problem.  “It’s like anything,” he said as we partook of the brew which is laughingly called coffee in this room.

“How ‘anything’,” I asked, trying to make two words sound intellectually stimulating.

“Ninety percent of people can do it moderately well if they try.  Five percent have no sense of rhythm and will never get it, five percent have some naturally occurring ability which makes them able to fly.   But at the same time, you have to want to do it, even if you are in the ninety percent.  Only ten percent try, and only half of them keep trying.”

I fell silent, unable to cope with the percentages upon percentages.

At that point Binky walked in.  “How’s the mobile?” Clarius asked, in a marginally amusing reference back to the start of term – a detail fully covered in my diary in April.

Binky took it in good heart, and started explaining how O2 had just sent her a new phone, and it looked really smart, but she couldn’t get it working properly because it only wanted to deal with her in Italian.

I asked if she had ordered the phone and she said no it just turned up.  Clarius asked if she had an account with O2, and she said that like me she was with Orange.   So with have a conspiracy.  It is a good job I am planning to work with MI6, so that this issue can be investigated fully.

I asked Clarius when the ceiling was going to be repaired in the staff room (another reference to Binky and her mobile).   “In the summer holidays,” he said.

“Does that mean you have to come in and work during the holiday?” asked Binky.

We looked at her as one does a young child who wants to know if she really does have to go to school today.  Then I remembered that Binky scored more points than me in the quiz team at the Bollard last week, and told her about the difference between teacher contracts and the contracts for the rest of the staff.

Binky was outraged, telling us how unfair it all was.  Clarius suggested she could go on strike in sympathy next week, and to be fair to Binky it only took her 30 seconds to recognise that she would be on holiday next week.

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