I Smell A Rat

- literally, as it turns out. I noticed a smell at school on Monday but the kids told me it was the neighbours (!) Then on Wednesday, I smelt it again. I hunted through the boxes and junk on the shelf above the computers but found nothing apart from a very much alive lizard. The kids thought I was imagining things but my nose seems to be attuned to the very distinctive smell of rotting flesh. I attribute it to finding a dead sheep, stuck in a ditch and crawling with maggots, on the farm as a kid. Nice! On Thursday I looked again and found it - a dead rat, heaving with horrible grey maggots. Now, this area is meant to be swept and mopped every day so there is no way a dead rat would be missed if the job was being done diligently. I discretely disposed of the rat and had a quiet word with the cleaner on Friday so am hopeful that it won't happen again. There is a rota of about five or six women who clean the place before it opens. Normally, but not last week, the computer workstations have been yanked around so that the mains cords are straining at the sockets, so I guess that the cleaner, whose turn it was, was being a bit lazy.

In my last post I said I was feeling rough - well, I felt a bit better on Wednesday and returned to work, but all week my temperature has been wavering. Probably not by much but enough to make me feel odd. Even today, Sunday, it wasn't back to normal, but it's OK.

One thing I've been meaning to mention in this Blog but keep forgetting until now is that every morning I see people brushing their teeth in public! In their gardens, on their porches, on the roofs, in the street - they're all at it. I suppose there's no good reason not to, but when you first see it it seems most odd! I would take a photograph for this blog but it would be rude to stick a camera in someone's face in the middle of their daily ablutions!

It must be Spring here now. On Tuesday 27th January the wild Locust trees burst into flower. These are from the Robinia Pseudoacacia family - the golden "Frisia" variety is very popular in the UK. They look almost Wisteria-like from a distance and are a delicate pink - I walk under a row of them on my way to SISP, and very pretty they are too!