Personification

 Tonight I feel, in a word, cold. In two words very cold. In fact, I feel so cold that I could, if the opportunity were to present its self to me, simply go on a long and tenuous descriptive journey purely around the subject of how cold I am. To accurately convey the sheer coldness of my current being, imagine that you are eating a bucket of ground ice, while sitting in a fridge, which is its self situated atop a boat floating in the freezing Atlantic Ocean. Just nearby the Titanic is sinking and desperate survivors are swimming up to your boat for help but you kick them away, I currently feel as cold as your dark twisted heart as you mercilessly dislodge a dying child clinging desperately to the side of your vessel.

 If I were to demand to see the cruel individual responsible for my frosty fate, I would more than likely be directed  to a mirror since it is none other than my own mind that made the conscious decision to go out and see fireworks at a local park with companions despite the temperature. However what I require at the moment is not the rational analysis of my own poor judgment (especially in not taking my thick woolen trench coat purely for the reason that it still stank of alcohol and punch which would have been a minor draw back with hindsight considering the heavenly warmth it would have provided) but some figure at which to direct my, unfortunately all too metaphorically, burning anger.

 I would currently give anything, well, my entire present monetary fortune (which amounts to about three pounds and twenty six pence) for Jack Frost to appear before me, a personification of the natural phenomenon which caused my legs to feel like ready made fish fingers before defrosting and my arms like pain flavoured ice lollies. Though I am not usually the physically violent type, far preferring to psychologically wound the opponent with skillful verbal jousting, I would readily kick the chocolate flavoured soft ice out of Jack Frost to vent my sheer frustration at this bone biting, brain numbing, scrotum climbing cold.

 All I can do however is stamp my feet, rub my hands and curse the current climate as well as the rising cost of gas and electricity bills. Two other things I wouldn't particularly mind being personified to manifest themselves before me as a subject of my anger at the generally conceptual, the Price Rise Pig and the Bill Building Bird. Perhaps I could design them, little fable characters for the new age kids living through an economic down turn. Goodbye tooth fairy who takes childrens' teeth, hello the fat fairy who causes child obesity. So long Santa Clause who leaves you presents, welcome Pawnshop Pixie who takes your stuff at night but allows your family to eat for another few days.

 So the moral of the story is, its winter so wear a jacket when you go out, even if it does have the repugnant scent of stale alcohol wafting around it like vultures around a dying animal. God, its cold.

Very Little

 Hold your mind firmly in one hand, tense your muscles and slowly draw back your arm, preparing for launch. Then very quickly turn one hundred and eighty degrees on the spot while strongly swinging your arm, releasing your grip as you do so. In this way, cast your mind back and perhaps you will remember, to the days of your childhood or young adulthood or just your adulthood (depending on what age you are at present) a certain particular juvenile tool of amusement.

 An arts and crafts type object given to children by parents in the vain hope of inspiring some creativity, basically consisting of a tube to blow through and a certain plastic paste which, when inflated with use of the aforementioned tube, formed a near (relative to normal soap bubbles) indestructible plastic sphere. This tough, thick, strong, rubbery, plastic, burst-proof bubble is the sort of bubble I mean when I say, "my school is an upper middle class social bubble."

 Nonetheless, even this seriously snobbish private school which proudly presents its self as at least in the top five if not one percent, still attempts to make some sort of gesture of compensation for the excessive use of wealth by organizing community service projects. There are many community service projects on offer, ranging from gardening to helping out at a disabled school to serving the aged and statistically close to death. However the one I have chosen to partake in this year, and which I also took last year, is possibly the least socially helpful of the lot.

 In no way does it give anything back to those less fortunate than us, at best it is the five percent being mildly helpful to the six percent in a patronizing and self indulgent manner. This most obsolete community service of all is "Minimus", teaching Latin to nine or ten year old children from a relatively wealthy background.

 Last year I was given the task of drumming a dead language into the minds of two nine year old girls, Anna and Mia, the former being a bright but irritatingly patronizing individual, the latter being a cheerful air headed snob in the making. To give an example of the difficulty in dealing with these malignant creatures, in the second week of teaching Latin to them (the lessons occur once a week every Friday), Anna, who had clearly not been impressed by my efforts in the first week, gave me a hand written ten bullet point list of "How To Be A Good Teacher". An outline of the skills that I had apparently been lacking, beginning with "be firm but kind" and ending on "Make the subject come alive!"

 However, despite my obvious sneering contempt of their existence and ever present insulting remarks which their juvenile brains could only hope to vaguely get the gist of, the two of them seem to have some affection for me. Hence this year, even though they can no longer be part of the Minimus course, they still send word to me via their friends who now attend the classes. It is through one of these friends that I learned something today which truly filled my heart with joy.

 Towards the end of the last year, the two children, Anna in particular kept insisting that I give some sort of present to them. Their pestering was so incessantly grating away at my sanity that I relented and, having quickly rummaged through my pockets, I lovingly gave Mia a well worn pencil (so internally fractured that it was probably beyond saving even with the full use of modern day medical technology) and Anna a rusted muddy bottle opener which I'd found on the ground that very day. Mia accepted the pencil as a sentimental gift and made no complaint, however Anna insisted that she deserved a better present. In order to keep her quiet, I sarcastically and dismissively told Anna that the bottle opener was magic and if she licked it, it would grant her three wishes.

 Today one of her friend's reliably informed me that Anna had in fact gone home and licked what was essentially a solid chunk of disease roughly sculpted into the shape of a bottle opener. This then directly leading to her skipping school for several days due to severe sickness. The friends accused me of being a malicious liar for telling Anna she would be granted three wishes but in my defense I would argue that, in the fashion of a self fulfilling prophecy, she probably did have her wishes granted. More specifically her wish that her temperature would go down, that her headache would secede and her nausea stop, which of course, after several days of pure sickening agony, it did.

 All things considered, I would say that I went above and beyond my call of duty as a teacher. Educating Anna not only about the Latin language but about some key principles in life as a whole, namely "don't unquestioningly lick things that a man tells you to because you will probably get a disease". Now thanks to my compassionate diligence and sheer excellence as a teacher, Anna is far less likely to get oral herpes.