Look, I PLANNED to be up and dressed by now...

Today my laptop and I are planning to spend some quality time together installing and then probably uninstalling new technology. This will end, as with all other technological activities when combined with my innate klutziness, with me stalking away from the laptop, fists clenched and mouth pursed up like a cat's bottom.

I won't be doing it yet because I have yet to recover from my lie in today. I woke up at 7.30 feeling wide awake and ready for action. However, as today is a Sunday I showed immense dedication to the cause and remained in bed for an hour without moving or opening an eye until my traitorous body clock regognised its heinous error and allowed me to fall asleep again. It's now 4.00 and I have not yet bothered to get dressed or move away from my bed except to get cups of tea and scrambled eggs. I am deserving of this extreme laziness for I am a teacher.

Let me just explain to all you people who go on about the money and the holidays and so on, exactly what being a teacher entails. Yes, it is a wonderful profession with all the benefits of moulding and shaping young minds, and at least three or four times an hour, if you're as silly as I am, you will laugh until tears run down your face. On the flip side is the fact that your brain has to be on the go all day. Those little moments when you suddenly think, 'ooh. Where was I?' and get on with what you were doing? Not happening. If you should happen to succumb to one of those, then you will suddenly find that in your brief 4 second absence, anarchy and terrorism have seized control. You have to keep about 50 things in your head at once, including any or all of the following:

1. Who needs the toilet? This also includes identifying those who actually are close to bursting and those who just find your work uninteresting and in which order they have asked to go in. God forbid you should let one go before the other. Mutiny. Right there.

2. Who doesn't understand the question? There might be a sequence of around eight questions on a range of topics from the purpose of the Sikh turban, how to draw a plan of the classroom including a relevant key and the features of writing a playscript without descending into 'AAHHHH', 'GNARRR', 'EEEEEEEEEEEEE'. That was my last lesson on Thursday, by the way.

3. Is everyone concentrating? Who is gazing blankly out of the window? Who is engraving their name in a pencil on a wooden desk? Who is about to punch someone else? Who appears to be attempting to gain access to their brain with a finger through the nasal cavity?

4. How much time have you got left in the lesson and what things that you have forgotten to do need to be crammed into the following...*checks clock*.... four minutes?!

The last four points probably cover about a minute's worth of classroom time. My brain is literally firing on all cylinders. Then at the end of your teaching time, it crashes into an unattractive gibbering heap inside your head and refuses to do anything sensible, like planning or marking and just wants to be taken to the staffroom and given coffee until it recovers somewhat.

Tell me again, I don't need six weeks holiday. I need at least four weeks of that for illnesses I didn't have time for during term time.