Good Work

"And what's that noise?" asks Sasha, as the school wends it way, rather fussily, into the hall.

"It was me - I was just re-arranging the class." says Mary, the assistant, implying that with just a little work, she could transform the children into an attractive table decoration.

"The children shouldn't NEED rearranging," says Sasha. Mary looks downcast.

"I can see this is going to be a cold prickly day instead of a warm fuzzy one," adds Sasha, before launching into a lecture about the 'Good Work' sticker system which some of the children who are clearly aiming for starring roles as Heroes of the Resistance have started to subvert.

Get a good work sticker from a teacher and you get a warm fuzzy symbol stamped on your card. Get twenty warm fuzzy stamps and a giant warm fuzzy symbol bearing your name and photograph is stapled to a board in the hall. And.....er....that's it. But so keen are some of the children on reaching the hall of fame that they've taken to shortcutting the process, buying the same Good Work stickers as the school's and giving them to each other at playtime, then appearing for lessons like heavily decorated war veterans and causing the Warm Fuzzy board to fill up so quickly that a second is having to be pressed into service.

"Was that you, curled in a foetal position on top of the ukuleles in the cupboard under the stairs, suppressing a primal scream?" I ask Mary, after a long fifteen minutes in which counterfeit Good Work sticker wearers are taken outside to be stoned to death with Cold Pricklies.

"No," she says.

In that case, it must have been me. I wondered who it was.