An education in mortification

As the old saying goes, 'When humiliation flies in at the window, self-esteem makes a quick, abashed departure down the fire exit.' Something like that, anyway.

And this week, it's as if some minor god, holding a giant rota - a bit like the one we have for break duty - has decided that it's my turn to experience a little soul-detoxifying mortification.

We're in the staffroom, mulling over break time topics like who ate the last chocolate biscuit or whether the child who unexpectedly pushed the door open to show us all her fabulously suppurating finger heard me shout a word unbecoming to the teaching profession as I accidentally photocopied 200 instead of 20 copies of my song sheet, when Mary suddenly quizzes me on my life.

'What do want to do when you grow up?' she asks me, quite seriously.

It's hard to know quite how to react. Should I obey my primal instincts and hit her very hard on the head with one of my ukuleles until she aplogises, or accept her question as a tribute to my inner youthfulness and answer it?

'I think I'd probably be doing the same thing, only better,' I say, equally seriously.

'Here,' she says, 'I hope I didn't offend you. I didn't really mean it the way it sounded.'

Next, towards the end of that same breaktime, I text Francis, starting with a casual endearment. Nothing too saucy, yet definitely tending towards the intimate.

Mary interrupts me to ask something about yesterday's lesson with her class and, as I press 'send', I realise that I wasn't paying attention - and that the dynamic new head of music shares Francis's initials and is next to him in my contacts list........

The phone has helpfully programmed itself to delete all sent messages after 0.0000000001 of a nanosecond, so there's no record. When I ring Francis to check, I get a recorded message.

'Help,' I say to the deputy head, explaining the situation. She laughs heartily. 'I know what to do,' she says and, without further ado, rings the dynamic head of music to tell him that if he's had a vaguely suggestive text from his older, dowdier, less dynamic colleague, he should immediately delete it.

'He thought it was hilarious,' she reports back, guffawing. 'And so did everyone else who was listening.'

'And had he got the text?' I ask.

'Do you know,' she says, laughing even louder.'After all that, I forgot to ask.'

But there's more to come. With a few minutes spare at the end of the lesson, I am overcome with the spirit of Joyce Grenfell and, playing some different styles of music to Reception, exhort them to be, successively, corn in a field, cantering horses and scarecrows.

At the end they line up and one of them puts up a hand. 'Mrs Philistine,' he says,'I know why you got us to be scarecrows.'

'Why?' I say, for once moderately interested and hoping for some penetrating insight that might enrich all our lives.

'Because you're wearing your scarecrow trousers!' he says, triumphantly.

'I'll have you know,' I feel like saying, 'That these came from Whistles.'

Instead, I smile weakly, send the giggling youngsters back to their teacher and head, once more, for the staffroom, arming myself with a ukulele on the way. The children do not know what they do, but Mary is a different story. One more crack about my Peter Pan approach to my career and she may need a bit of life coaching herself - in A&E.