Monster

I am keeping my beady eye out for the conservatory monster. This is a monster of considerable proportions: flashing eyes, waving tail, jumping up, big teeth, and much gnashing.

I need to be alert.

aprecious says, "Maud you are looking in the wrong place."

This surprises me. Since I was a little puppy and spilt my water over some litter in this very spot and made the whole place look like the battle of the Somme I have had to keep an eye out for the monster.

aprecious says, "Maud that is not where the monster is."

Time after time I have jumped up and down on the spot, seeking out the conservatory monster. I have to give a little shout whenever I run past after my evening constitutional.

That there is no monster there, is very big news.

I look half sideways at her... and ask, "Where is it then?"

She looks right back at me and aprecious says, "Maud, I am looking at it."

I walked right into that one.

She jests of course. She jests.

This is born out of a comment I made the other day on LadyM and possibly boldsans' journals about a time when I taught naughty boys. (If you are easily offended, look away now.)

One such boy, lets call him Harold, made my life hell. But one day, I got my revenge.
Now, any of you who have been to a comprehensive school or know anything about such schools, particularly those that have been left to ruin, will know that every single chair in such places has a willy drawn on it. I make no comment on boys' needs to do this, but it is so...

The conversation went like this:
Harold: There is a prick on this chair, miss.
Me: Yes, Harold, there is.

As a 22 year old straight out of college run ragged by boys chanting football songs and generally behaving badly, this amounted to a moment of triumph.

Another lad - who wrote stories about machetes and the Chelsea headhunters, and who was very hard work, once hooked a chair on some metal supports that held up the roof so that it dangled mid air as if suspended, "Look Miss," he said, "We have a poltergeist."

I never laughed. He wasn't the laughing kind.

I wonder what happened to these boys who will now be men of almost 40!

But at the very least they prepared me for life with Maud!!