Tuesday 11 December 2007

Hoodie or not

This evening after school I had a few errands to run. I was dallying around the shops nearest to my home, and at one point had to nip through a badly-lit car park. I'd seen a group of youths hanging around outside one of the shops but ignored them, as you do. They wouldn't go to the school I teach at, so they just become a group of anonymous hoodies to me. But as I left the cover of the street lamps I noticed a couple of figures following me. I shrugged it off as coincidence, but vaguely became aware that there I was, chatting on my new mobile phone, in an shadowy car park with two youths following me.

I emerged into the next street and turned towards the doorway I was about to enter. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed the two youths. Then one of them said, "Oh it is you! I thought it was. 'ow are ya?" I turned to face them full on. One of them was a face I recognised, a boy who had been in my GCSE group for about five minutes after he'd been turfed out of one school, before he was kicked out of ours too. He'd spent most of the time in my lessons scowling, messing around and refusing to do a shred of work. Yet here he was, grinning inanely, and chatting quite coherently too, so not apparently under the influence of anything illegal or otherwise. And what did he want? Well supposedly he did a scribble of coursework for me which he just now has discovered that he wants, so very lucky for him that I happened to be walking past at that very time, miles away from his old school, just as he realised he needed it. Strange that he hadn't thought of it in the six months since he left, but there you go.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

have to get a fake beard or other disguise for out of hours work.

Anonymous said...

I think you will probably find they were going to mug you but realised that when you recognised them they would probably get caught. They probably weighed this up and realised they didn't want to spend Christmas on a free 'realignment' holiday in an all-expenses-paid-by-the-taxpayer five star hotel in the Maldives so came up with something about homework. Bring back the cane!!!!