Lawrence Ray saved my life

Gratuitous picture of poppies, no link to the post at all.

At the beginning of the week I was feeling under the weather, sore throat, feverish, I know, I mentioned it, but I bounced back quite quickly. I really thought I was going to go down with something major but fortunately not. Canadian Karen however has been ill and has not recovered so quickly. I think the reason for this is that she has had to still go into work intermittently whereas I was able to just feel sorry for myself at home.

The topic of whether to go into work when ill is certainly one that used to bother me. I had a morbid fear of being off sick when I was working, partly because I didn't trust one of my underlings, partly because I feared Jerry Springer. Yes, daytime TV. It has a magnetism - for about a day. Lying on the sofa or in bed watching complete crap had a limited appeal, but the appeal certainly was there. After 24 hours however, my experience was of going stir crazy. I needed to see people again, get on my bike and get going. I'm NOT a patient patient.

The first flat I lived in in Southsea, my little hobbit-hole by the sea, I'm pretty sure made me sick. I loved that flat, but the flat smelt damp, my clothes smelt damp, and the smell was so ingrained in everything that I didn't even notice it until I wasn't in the flat. I had a pair of shoes that smelt as though someone had been sick in them. I bought Febreze and sprayed them. It seemed to work, but as I wore them and they warmed up, the smell came back.
And the fact was that the whole of the time I lived there I was either ill or incubating something. There would be a cycle of fever, tonsils up, sinuses on fire, chest infection, it would come and go.
But it was chronic, it rarely confined me to my bed. In fact the worst and only time it truly did that was when I was visiting Kevin. It was a couple of months before the SARS outbreak, luckily for me.

I arrived at Heathrow already ill, feverish. I lay on the floor in the toilets in terminal three. I was flying through Toronto and by the time I was there, standing in what seemed like a cattle market to get through immigration, I kept feeling I was going to faint.
The pilot on the flight from Toronto to Vancouver was Québecois and a law unto himself. The flight was so empty that at some point he told us we'd have to all move up the plane or down the plane for take-off and landing, we didn't but at last I was able to lie across two seats and sleep. I awoke to see the welcoming lights of Grouse Mountain and the pilot didn't mention anything about descent or landing until his wheels were touching the runway.

I spent that entire trip in bed, and not in a good way. I was still ill when I arrived back in the UK. Fortunately we had an INSET in another school. I was jet-lagged, aching and still feverish, I don't think I cut a very dashing leadership model.

In spite of this ongoing mystery illness, throughout the four years I spent in Portsmouth I only had two days off sick. I was able to survive because of two factors. One - a lab stool that had made its way into my classroom one night and which I never allowed to leave. Two - an actor called Lawrence Ray.

If you look up Lawrence Ray on imdb.com you'll see that he doesn't have a very glittering career as an actor, in fact the programmes that he was in that saved my life are not even there.
Channel 4 produced a series of educational videos called 'Extra'. They were most extraordinarily well done. The series was like a sitcom. Sam, an American pen-friend of the German/French/Spanish room-mates, came to stay and over the series, learned the language. There was a different set of actors for the different languages, but Sam stayed the same. Sam was Lawrence Ray and he spoke French, German and Spanish and in between times had to pretend to be American. I later saw him in a TV series called 'The Book Group' in which he spoke Dutch.

So when I was ill, I would sit up high on my lab stool and direct the classroom, remote in hand, and Lawrence Ray would very ably teach my lessons for me. What a star. I'm pretty sure the kids enjoyed his lessons more than mine, understandable, I enjoyed his lessons more than mine.
When I had to teach Spanish, a language I know only a little of, Lawrence was there for me and I knew exactly what was going on because I had seen it so many times in German and French.
Sadly, it became clear to me that the concentration of the kids was proportional to the attractiveness of the actors. The German actors were very good-looking. The French ones quite good-looking and the Spanish ones were what the pupils called 'mingers'. Oh well, Lawrence Ray remained the same, he saved my life. I wonder if he's teaching languages somewhere.