Here’s the thing – I ordered Six’s winter school uniform and it didn’t turn up because the woman who does it (I use the phrase in its losest sense...) put me in the wrong ledger, whatever that means, and so I had to go into school and talk to some woman who looked like she was sucking on a lemon and who said to me, “don’t bite my arse off.” Frankly nothing was further from my thoughts, but it did send a shiver up my spine. Mind you, nothing compared to the shivering Six was doing as he tried to keep warm in his shorts.
Eventually, weeks later, the uniform turned up, well some of it. The lemon-sucking woman handed me over the strides (pants as they call them here) and five long sleeve polo shirts. I checked because that’s just me and the polos were all short sleeves. So, I took them back and she rummaged around the uniform shop (a shed without a lock which is apparently why so many bits of uniform seem to walk out of their own accord. Now, I’m no rocket scientist but I’m not sure I need a degree in astrophysics to figure that a lock of some kind would be good).
Anyway, I digress. This week the correct polo shirts turned up. Well, four of them, the fifth had apparently been given to some other child who I’m sure I’ve seen in the playground shivering, and who I now seem to be sponsoring. So, though I’ve paid for it all months and months ago I’m still one shirt short.
I went to the P&C meeting to vent my concerns and suggested someone look into all this and they looked at me like I was from Pluto and speaking Plutonese. “The ladies are volunteers,” one shocked woman told me. “Volunteer what?” I asked, but I got no answer, just some evil looks.
I also asked why this is the only school in Christendom that has no sign out front, you know the one that tells you which child has maimed someone most effectively in last week’s interstate judo championship.
“Oh,” said the headmaster, a man routinely referred to as Grandpa, “the lock is broken and so we don’t put anything in there because someone might come along and change the letters around.”
To be honest, having looked around, that level of academic ability is unlikely to be found in this area. I can imagine some could change the letters to read something like, “I’ll have large fries with that” but I doubt it would go further, and for sure the apostrophe would either not be there or in totally the wrong place.
I called the dishwasher bloke last week too to try and get a leak fixed. He said, stretching his words out like elastic, “Well, I’ll have to order the part.”
“Well could you do that, then?”
“But is it the door seal or the washer,” he pondered.
“Well I don’t know,” I said, “not being a dishwasher repair man myself.”
“Ah, I see,” he said slowly. “So what shall we do?”
I took a deep breath. “Can you come and have a look?”
A sharp intake of breath and a low whistle. “Well, you’re up the mountain, aren’t you? Well, I’ll have to see.”
I’ve tried to get Six enrolled in the local soccer team (I think I’ve mentioned before, rugby league is referred to as footy or football which must surprise the players every time they find the ball in their hands, but there you are).
The woman organising the team (I use the word organise in its losest sense, of course) keeps promising to get back to me once she has spoken to all of the teams. But the registration date has now been and gone.
I imagine she is saying, “We got this kid, he’s an Aussie but his Dad’s a Pommy bastard. That means he’ll try and organise things” (She would string the word ‘organise’ out for about a foot and a half). “Now, do we want that?”