I have been working at the main island primary school for a year and a half now, and am still overjoyed by the amount of holidays that this new job gives me!
Previously I would get a precious 2 weeks in the summer and otherwise a few odd days tagged onto bank holidays or weekends, but nowadays I have 3 x 2 weeks breaks at October, Christmas and Easter and the BIG ONE in the summer for 7 weeks!
I have been enjoying the lead up to holidays – where everyone in your workplace is on the same count down. The daydreaming and planning (or not) for holidays – ‘Got any plans?’ ‘No, none, just how I like it’.
And its arrival – the feeling on that Friday when it stretches out in front of you for so far you cant see the end of it. The feeling on a Sunday night when you don’t have to smarten yourself up to face the world on Monday morning, unless you want to.
(This holiday however I’ve been up at 5 a few mornings to take various boys to the ferry. Austin was home from Dundee for a few days, which was gorgeous – I still miss him – And Morris went on a camp to the mainland just as storm Kathleen arrived, extending their trip for another day when the ferries were cancelled. Always an added challenge of island living.)
The holiness of this holiday was immediately brought to my attention by a few random and synchronous occurrences. The school intercom began playing a strange electronic tune, never heard before , to serenade us on the last day of term. On drawing 3 raffle winners to Morrises fundraising raffle, prizes all went to people immediately within our vicinity so that we could deliver them there and then to very deserving recipients. The winner of first prize had been the main person tasked with selling tickets in the local shop – he had commented the day before the draw that he was unsure whether to get any tickets himself because “If I win everyone will think its a fix”. As it happens, he won and I say there’s no arguing with fate!
However, fate has also played a harrowing card this holy-day, with the death of someone very dear to a very many people in our community. She was a key figure in the church and was destined to become a female church elder when the years ticked by, but after a very short illness, she was taken from us all earlier than expected. Again, there’s no arguing with fate….
Her funeral is on Tuesday, within the school holidays so a chance for even more people to attend, children included. The church will have everyone tightly seated as people will come from far and wide for this one. Personally I can’t believe it has happened, she is always involved in everything that happens in our area, a rock of opinion and organisation. We had heard a couple of days beforehand that after her initial diagnosis she had been moved to a hospice and may not last the weekend, but I mentally argued with fate that she could pull it back at the last minute and we would all learn a lesson on resilience and survival. I felt that would be a suitable ending to a dramatic turn of events in this life’s story. But it didn’t happen that way, I suppose it was never going to. How did I think I could change fate, I was just entertaining an idea that everything happens in some poetic way like it does in the movies. But in life, as Austin so eloquently told me at Christmas, sometimes things just happen – there is no meaning or pattern to them.
I may have chosen to imagine that the school intercom was sending us a greeting from the other side on the last day of term – but I’m not sure how to interpret her death other than a sudden full stop mid story. Ishbel herself would have had a very good take on it and would have told me something clever and new and inspiring to make me think about it from a whole new perspective. But sadly I’ll never hear that now.
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