Crop tops

It's 8.00 - an hour away from Harvest Festival kick off.

I'm in the church sitting on a wobbly, too high piano stool and being interrogated by the priest. “Where have you come from?” he asks. Perhaps he's hoping to start a Creationism v Darwinism punch up. If so, I foil him by giving him my address.

“He means, what sort of background do you have?” hisses the special needs teacher who has volunteered to sit next to me and tap on the piano like a driving instructor to make sure I make an emergency stop at the end of each hymn.

“I just wondered if you had a theological degree?” he continues. “I always like to know if there’s someone in the congregation better qualified than I am”.

I look at him blankly, just managing to stop a trail of imbecile dribble trickling down my chin. So far, my teaching career has consisted of a series of questions which are either rhetorical, unanswerable or just plain odd.

And I have other concerns. I know I can play the six Harvest Festival hymns all the way through at home. This is my fourth Harvest Festival and I'm still not convinced -and experience has borne me out on this one - that I can play them in a church full of children, parents and teachers all singing along, too.

8.50 am.
Most fathers are in suits but one bucks the trend with a T-shirt featuring a bull with outsize testicles. It may be intended as an indirect reference to plentiful crops but it doesn’t go down well with the vicar, who gives the wearer one of the killer looks he has so far reserved for screaming babies.

The children walk up the aisle with their offerings, expensive olive oil and balsamic vinegar tastefully arranged in home-decorated cardboard boxes and wicker baskets that must have taken hours to get ready. Presumably home-made food in shop-bought boxes is out of fashion, though I am pleased to see one child lovingly adding a plain tin of tomatoes to the pile.

The vicar gives me a nod, I pick out a few random notes and cobble together an introduction to “We plough the fields and scatter,” and we’re off.

"The best way to be happy is to be grateful," says the vicar during his address. It's quite obvious he doesn't believe it and nor does anyone else in the congregation. Apart from me. I am both happy and grateful that despite transposing 'All things bright and beautiful' up a major third in the first verse, at which point the congregation temporarily stopped singing, en masse - I have, on the whole, begun and finished the songs at the same time as the singers.

The children roar out the words to “Oats and beans and barley grow” even when I accidentally read the words instead of the music and forget briefly who I am and what the piano is for. But I recover, and the event, only three weeks into term, is a success.

Although the children are all exhausted, the rest of the school day has to be filled. In my case, unfortunately, with a recorder class.

The recorder book pre-selected by the school is harder to understand than a set of IKEA flat pack instructions. It starts off by asking the child to shade every note in a different colour, depending on the pitch and note duration, defined by the author as "Taaaa" "Taa" or "Ta Ta" notes.

Fortified by wine, I spent a good two hours one evening trying to decipher the first 5 pages and then threw the book across the room.

"Are you using the book?" asks the now retired and deeply scary head of music, who has paid a surprise visit to the schook in order, I'd surmise, to find some small children to chew on so she can sharpen up her incisors.

"Well, I do find the way it starts with the hardest notes first a tad confusing," I reply. "Oh, I never bother with that page," she says, dismissively. I draw a line through it.

"Then it does A, and it doesn't get to B for ages." "I always leave those pages out, too," she says. I draw a line through those pages, too.

She flicks through to the last five pages. "Now, I always start about here," she says, sounding faintly surprised that I haven't thought this through for myself.

The parents are as baffled as I am, though why they bother reading their child's recorder book is a mystery to me. I get a note from one of the more obsessional mothers written in a fairy hand on the smallest post-it note I have ever seen: "Bill and I are both rather confused about recorder homework and require more guidance," it says. I draft several pithy but impossible replies before settling on a note suggesting that any parents who are worrying desist forthwith and try to get out more.

No book, however good, would help me deal with the children this morning. Out of a class of 22, 14 have left their recorders at home. Marnie bursts into tears because she has a sore throat and Able uses his recorder as a nose flute. I make a mental note not to borrow it for demonstration purposes. While the rest of the class tries hard to play alternate Bs and As, Tilly holds her recorder upside down and produces shrill squealing noises to see if she can make everyone else laugh.

The second time I give her back her confiscated recorder, I warn her that this is her last chance. Next time, it will stay confiscated until the end of the lesson. 30 seconds later, I have her recorder again and she is hitting her head repeatedly on the desk.

"Tilly," I say. "What are you doing?" "I'm drunk," she replies, and carries on. Perhaps she, too, has found the recorder book more than she can bear.

Back in the staff room, we agree to hold the first Christmas planning meeting immediately after half term and I am given a box of chocolates and a thank-you card. Despite myself, warm and dangerously fluffy feelings course through my system. I excise them quickly and leave.