A hall new experience

Every Tuesday afternoon for, oh, years now, I have arrived to teach Year 1 in the hall after lunch. The pudding is invariably jelly, the children invariably messy and health and safety rules unyielding.

This means that the floor has to remain unmopped until the cleaners arrive in the evening. Untrained operatives, like me, are banned. I assume this is because over-energic scrubbing might break through the patina of dirt and A-list germs that have lain undisturbed through the centuries and release anthrax spores and the plague back into the community.

"I don't see why the children have to sit in patches of old jelly," I say to one of the teachers, one afternoon.

"Look on the bright side," she says. "If it's really sticky they can't fidget as much."

"There must be something I could do," I say.

"Why don't you ask the catering manager if they have to have jelly on Tuesdays?"

There's another unspoken question behind this one. Suspecting it to be, "And when did you last see your lovely brain?" I disappear, leaving it forever (I hope) unanswered.

The catering manager is sporting an attractive hygiene hat in blue nylon netting. Too small to cover more than a smallish proportion of his head, it balances precariously on the crown, leaving almost all his hair free to shed dirt, shampoo droppings and small change straight into the custard. It's a mystery as to what exactly it's supposed to convey to the on-looker, apart from a profound sense of pity for the unhappy wearer.

"Do you think it might be possible for the Year 1 children not to have jelly on Tuesdays?" I ask. "It makes the floor really sticky and they have to sit there for music in the afternoon."

He gives me a long look and his face fills with sorrow.

"I just don't know," he says. "It's harder than it looks. We'll have to see how the menu goes."

He speaks in hushed tones. It's clear that to him, the menu is a sacred thing, eternal, unchanging and possibly handed down on stone tablets like the 10 commandments.

"I'm just an amateur in menu management," I say, "but wouldn't it just be a question of swapping one pudding for another?"

He opens his mouth again and I expect him to say either,

"Come midnight on the longest night, I will sacrifice the lasagne and read the runic kidney beans to see what the future holds for The Menu,"

or

"Jelly has been on the Tuesday lunch menu since 1635. We still keep the head of the last teacher who asked for its removal on show in one of the trophy cabinets,"

But he doesn't. Instead, he sucks his teeth, possibly wondering if they'd be an interesting addition to the normal condiments range, turns on his heel and disappears, to wrestle with the Mystery that is the Great Menu, a living, breathing organism with a brain of bright green jelly, whose internal construction is so complex that no mere mortal can tamper with it.

Sighing, I return to my piano and attempt to play the loud pedal. There's a loud squelching sound underfoot and a sudden burst of lime fragrance as a spatter of jelly rushes up my leg. The Menu has heard. The Menu is angry.........