Personal Blogs

I was sitting in my annexe [it's the Munich exchange ceilidh] listening to 'the dancing', doing topology, when a teacher came into my office. I was a wee bit surprised to see her, she hadn't struck me as the ceilidh type and she was a maths teacher.

[I should explain that my office isn't really my office, it's just the place I sit when I'm in the annexe. It's someone else's office really.]

She had left her memory stick in the main school and was going away for the weekend. Strange how often we forget our memory sticks. So we toddled over to the main school.

"You could store stuff on drop-box."

"The school system doesn't let you." Odd, I don't much do it but it works for me. Then I do have admin rights—geekiness must have its privileges I suppose.

I'd heard sirens in the distance as we walked, you don't listen though, do you? We retrieved the memory stick and exited the school to see the sight of five fire engines lined up in the playground and firemen milling around everywhere.

"See, I've arranged some firemen for you Jo."

"We've had a report of smoke coming from the building", one of them said.

Not again I thought. When it gets cold the boilers come on at night and what seems to be a plume of smoke rises from the school. We get a couple of reports every year. This was the first time that I'd been on hand to see the response, a pretty impressive one I'll admit. [If the building is open they come in and tell you.]

Then I started to have second thoughts—it wasn't that cold, the pumps might come on but the boilers shouldn't, and I didn't see steam where it should be. A worry developed. Could it...?

I had a sense that the building wasn't burning, after all I'd just been in there, it would have told me, wouldn't it? But still...

While logic was beginning to cut into my mystical another fireman appeared and said that someone was burning waste in a garden behind the school.

Panic over, back to topology and Scottish country dancing for me then.