There are as many different kinds of teacher as there are people, which is no coincidence as many teachers are people. But for general purposes, teachers can be divided into the following groups:
1. LIBERAL TEACHERS. These are the teachers who started out with the best intentions – to change the world through education, to bring out the best in young people, and to instil values like fairness and equality in new generations. Time has not been kind to these teachers, and they spend breaktime behind the staff room smoking like murderers and taking large gulps from the school hipflask. Despite being on exactly the same wages as their colleagues, they somehow manage to look poorer than everyone else. Even the strange kid who lives in a skip with his grandparents and goes to school in a coal sack points at these teachers and says, ‘Him be poor! I ate a bogie pie.’
2. STRICT TEACHERS. Once upon a time strict teachers ruled the world. They bestrode the plains of academe snorting great balls of flame from their hairy nostrils and giving detentions to everyone they met. They were even allowed to hit children, something that only other children are allowed to do nowadays. This seems astonishing now, but until the European Court of No Fun abolished corporal punishment, strict teachers were the caning, whacking, ear-twisting, Chinese-burning kings of school.
Now, however, they are, figuratively speaking, the castrati of education. Left weaponless in charge of a class full of future serial killers, their only weapon is sarcasm. Which is sadly only effective on the more sensitive and emotional pupils. All the other kids are immune to sarcasm, and will later burn down the teacher’s house.
3. ARTS TEACHERS. These aren’t really teachers, because no maths teacher ever said, ‘Okay, kids, everyone just, like, do some maths until the bell goes, dig?’ No French teacher ever invited the class to pretend to be an ant for half an hour. But this is what the people who teach drama and painting and sculpture and musical appreciation do. How can they stand the boredom? Because they’ve had some smack, that’s how.
4. GAMES TEACHERS. Again, not really teachers. Not really people either. Just sort of machines for standing in fields shouting. And then, later, standing in changing rooms shouting. Sometimes, when all the children have gone home, games teachers can be seen running round the sports pitch, shouting at themselves.
5. HEAD TEACHERS. Once they were teachers, but now they’re sort of managers, like the round bald man at Asda who spends all day telling off the checkout girls and staring wanly at the canned-goods section. Heads fill their lonely hours by standing at the window looking at the empty playground, going on conferences where they fail to cop off with other heads, and making long, incoherent speeches at assembly.
Heads like to pretend that they’re modern, efficient figures who wear power suits and stride meaningfully down corridors both real and metaphorical. In fact, they secretly hanker for days of old, when they were called headmasters and headmistresses, and would stand in front of a Union Jack, dressed like Will Hay, and say things like, ‘Some boy has been chewing in the fives court. If the culprit does not own up, the lower fifth will be hanged.’
PEOPLE WHO HATE DAN BROWN BOOKS
An extraordinary writer, Dan Brown is notable for many things, not least of which is the fact that he has a name so boring, so dull and ordinary, that he might actually be a committee and his name might be an acronym. Did A Novel, Broke Records Of World Novel-ness. Something like that, anyway. But because of his huge success, notably the Da Vinci Code and lots of others called things like The Retard Sanction and Atlantic Moss, many people profess to hate Dan Brown.
True, he’s not the world’s greatest writer. True, he writes sentences like: ‘Hell!’ cursed Senator John Donkey as he slammed the phone slammily down. Fifty-six and silver-haired yet still with the youthful good looks that belied his many years working the oil rigs of the Persian Gulf, the senator cursed rudely and realized realizingly that he was – without question – trapped forever in a sentence from which he could never escape.’
But he is very popular and he writes what we used to call ‘yarns’. Big, floppy adventure stories with cardboard people in them, that are escapist, ridiculous and page-turnerly. So why is he – and all the other lesser, not quite so wealthomatic, blockbuster people – so reviled? Is it because his books are easy to read, and easy things must also be bad things? Is it because he is successful and all successful people are bad evil murderers? Or is it because by hating Dan Brown and the rest, you are saying, ‘Look! I didn’t like the Da Vinci Code! And if I go on about it, people will think I must be really erudite and read only early twentieth-century Vorticist novels; when in fact I am an ill-informed snob who once got halfway through Pride and Prejudice and had to start again because I’d forgotten what it was about.’ (See JANE AUSTEN.)
CELEBRITIES
If Andy Warhol had said, ‘In the future everyone will be famous for bugger all’, he’d have been even more right. We have long passed the point where people are even famous for being famous. That’s long gone; now people are famous for wanting to be famous. They’re famous for failing to become famous. Some are famous for knowing someone famous. It’s revolting. What we thought was the Z-list turned out to be just the tip of the arseberg.
Jorge Luis Borges, who was famous for being excellent, wrote a story about a lottery that controlled every aspect of human life, where the wrong ticket could result in your execution and the right one could make you a king. Celebrity-wise, the world’s not far from that now. Soon people won’t actually have to do anything to become famous; they’ll just be able to sit at home, waiting for the letter or email that says, ‘Congratulations, Mister Thompson! You have been selected from millions of idle gimps to be famous! Tick here if you want as much publicity as humanly possible!’
CYCLISTS
They’re still incredibly self-satisfied, smug, vain and humourless. Anyone who dresses like a condom on wheels has to be. Cyclists used to be wonderful features of British life, pedalling around in small family groups, smiling at the slothful pedestrians, looking forward to stopping at a country inn for a glass of dandelion and burdock and a lettuce salad sandwich. We were so fond of the bicycle that we made the police ride them, even though all the villains were driving large foreign cars or stealing trains.
But then a bad thing happened. The bicycle became a symbol not of eccentricity, but virtue. Owning a bicycle meant that you were an honorary eco-warrior (see PEOPLE WHO CALL THEMSELVES ECO-WARRIORS) and loved the Planet Earth, or ‘Gaia’ as you would call it after a couple of organic dandelion and burdocks. Riding to work at your overpriced wholefood store let you off all other duties, ecology-wise. You may be dressed like a corking tosser, but you were on a bike, and therefore almost Christ-like in your excellence (the phrase ‘Christ on a bike’ may derive from this idea, although it doesn’t).
The worst thing is that bicycles are in fact secretly very bad for the environment. Their tyres are made of barely sustainable rubber, ripped from screaming plants in the Burmese jungle. Their frames are forged in huge furnaces, gears smelted in burning fires and factories in over-exploited developing countries, and the covering for the saddles is made of the hide of little baby mice. Probably.
RICKSHAW DRIVERS
The very name ‘rickshaw’ is something of a misnomer, as it used to conjure images of determined Eastern pedalcab drivers, ringing their bells to scatter traffic as they conveyed their human cargo either to Raffles Hotel for a chota peg, or to the ancient temple to warn Sing Lu Sen of an attempt on her life.
The British rickshaw driver is not like that. He is usually a visitor to these shores too feckless to get bar work, who spends his days cycling about tinkling his bell at any woman he sees and then, when you have given in and agreed to go for a ride in his far-from-silver machine, reveals two things. One: he has never heard of where you want to go. And two: he will charge you twenty quid for the privilege of not getting there.
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