My sister spits the dummy

My younger sister in NZ sent me this story by email this week. It deserves its place in the hyper-sun. She is in a marching team for older adherents. It's a bit of a family tradition. Our mother was a member of one in her 60s. If you have little or no experience of competition marching. It might go over your head. Be warned.

We had to be at the stadium by 9.30 in the morning and of course this in itself is a bit of a mission, trying to get 10 (older) woman organised to be somewhere on time!! It was made worse by the fact that nobody actually knew where the marching was. We eventually found the Police Station and one of us went in and asked where they thought the most reasonably expected place it would be, was. We got there about 09.40. Not bad for us.

We were on third, so nearly all of the teams who were participating were watching us. We had been practising a new plan that I wrote, but only for 8 weeks. It started off well and I was the "Stand in Leader". Somewhere after the 3rd movement one of the girls got lost and was wandering around the field trying to remember what her counts were. Three others chipped in to try and help her and they got lost as well. One of the others totally lost the plot and walked off the field.

By this time it looked like someone had taken a gang of senile inmates for a stroll, so I stopped the team ...Told them to get into line...Walked up the line and told each girl what movement we were up to ... Then said, "pull yourselves together." I started us off again and away we went and finished our plan.

I was so angry that they all avoided me for about an hour and a half. (My husband) had videoed it and when I watched it, the whole messy bit was only about 30 seconds long, but it felt like forever at the time.

We may not have won anything on the field, but we did win the best dressed prize that night at the 'do'. We went as toddlers...tantrums, dummies, bonnets, and all. So we did eventually have a good time.

Basketball, Not TEnnis.

When you do contract teaching here in Queensland, one has dubious honours thrust upon one. But sometimes it is other people who have to suffer the dubiousness. (dubiosity? dubiety? The dictionary says all of the above.)

At the beginning of this school year, in January, I was offered a teaching contract replacing Jason Smith who took a position as acting Head of the English department at another state school on the Coast. Jason is a multi-talented multi-faceted teacher at my school, and I got to step into his at times very comfortable shoes. One of the roles I got to take on was assistant coach for the Open Boys Basketball team for weekly sport.

I am 5'2". Just keep that in mind.

We are a Touch school. (That's Touch Football, as opposed to Football Association, Rugby, Rugby League, Australian Rules and certainly Gridiron) Jason had built up basketball while he's been at the school, but there is a dearth of coaches. His assistant, David, was therefore plugged to step into the coach role, and I would assist him. This was the plan as envisaged from the staffroom on the other side of the school. If there had been any consultation, I am unaware of it.

So for the first week, David and I shared the mishmosh of the basketball Boys A and B teams. By the third week I think we had settled, somehow into him being responsible for the Bs and me for the As. Really we were largely irrelevant to what boys were playing where. We just turned up with balls, first aid kit and ice. It became obvious that I knew, marginally, more about the playing of the game than David. I was good at keeping track of the scores on paper, and David upskilled in electronic scoring. But most of the decisions about play were made by the boys. I tried interfering, but was happy to be persuaded not to. Tom's the captain. He's 6' 8ish.

David is about 5'10". At least he could see as far as the chins of our tallest players.

In my role as paperkeeper, I started noticing a trend. The As kept winning. It is always much more satisfying to be coach of a winning than a losing team. Or even the mascot. I started motivating the boys with external rewards for playing well, as well as trying to get those who were far more qualified to ref than us teachers to ref, using carbonated refreshment inducements. During the season the As lost only one game the week we had three of the six players sick or injured.

Both the A and B teams made it to the semi-finals. The As won. The Bs lost. The next week I took the As, and the Bs stayed at school. At the final, Jason made an appearance and coached them during the game. (Is that a correct usage of the term 'coach'?) They played well. I kept score brilliantly. My team won. This had been a good season.

But no. There are three 'bunches' of school sports competitions on the Coast, four if you count the private schools. The winner of our bunch of schools plays the runner-up of the 'fat' schools competition. (Fat as in schools with 2000+ students) So my team this week had to face an extremely well-coached open boys team from a well-resourced school. One of my boys was sick on the day, so we snaffled a player from the 15s. An excellent player, but unused to the cut and thrust of the opens. He got used to it quickly though. Just as well. Our other skyscraper, Ben, was fouled off after 5 fouls during the second half.

I lost sleep before the game in trepidation and after from guilt. They lost. I wish I had been a better coach for them. They deserved one, but ah time passes in only one direction. I may not be too old to blog, but I do think I am too old to gather the necessary skills to coach basketball.

This is the Old Post Office building at the south end of Victoria St, Hamilton, NZ.

DSW in the 1970s

See, I can even add things to the site, but I'm not sure I could repeat it if I had to.

Something else about Ennis as a name is that I once worked at the Department of Social Welfare in Hamilton, New Zealand with two other people who shared my name. But they had Ennis as a surname. One was a social worker called, I think, Harold. He used to be a teacher at Ngaruawahia, and moved into social work. I always wondered, in that part of my brain that I don't visit very often, whether or not he was happy with the change from teaching to social working. At that stage (I was in my early 20s) I thought it would have been worse being a social worker. But now that I have been a teacher in the state systems of both New Zealand and Australia, I am not so sure. Secondary school we are talking about. At least in social work you are often dealing with adults who can have input into solving their problems.

The other was a girl. There is a fine difference here between a woman in her early 20s and a girl who had just left school. Looking back from my late 40s, now that I have found myself in situations where I have been 'of the same age' as women not 3 years younger, but 10 to 15 years younger, the difference was negligible. I don't remember much about Barbara. She was in one of the other buildings.

There were three buildings at the time I was working at DSW. I started out in Family Benefits in the old Post Office building. Do you know, I think the manual exchange for the telephone service was still operating in a building behind ours. The Social Work Division, as well as Weekly Benefits and Records were in our building. Whenever I see the letters PSW, I still think automatically Pregnant Single Woman, from the cards in Weekly Benefits. They were paid a Sickness Benefit from the time they were 6 months pregnant, depending on income testing of course. Then over the road, Victoria St, in the Odd Fellows Building, was Admin and Maintenance. The third building didn't come into operation until I went to Christchurch in 1978ish. The rest of the Benefits and Pensions Sections of DSW were on other floors in the Oddfellows Building. It wasn't called the Odd Fellows Building, but that was the name of the building as it was recorded on the lift: The International Order of Odd Fellows. Funny the things you remember.

So now, there is no more Family Benefit, phased out in 1991. The phone business has been privatised and is no longer part of the postal service. And I am sitting on a laptop in Australia writing about my memories of working in the 1970s.

Seems like history.

What's in a name?

So now I've got started with a web presence, I have to come up with a reason for being here. It's not good enough just to be here and take up space. You have to have a reason for being . Very existential I don't think.

So, what's unique about my experience of the world, apart from the fact that the rest of you just exist as furniture in my world?

My name is pretty unique. And that's a pun because the meaning of my name is: unique choice. But I didn't find this out until about 5 years ago. All this time I've had to say: Yes, it is unusual. It's Irish. The name of a city that's the capital of County Clare. And it's a boy's name, but my mother, whose ancestry was Scottish, thought it was too pretty a name to waste on a boy. (Hence Jim, Andrew and Robert) Dad must have agreed, because even though it was his second name, he was happy to saddle his first born daughter with it. (People have usually got sick of the self-absorption that this speech has demonstrated by now. But for the really polite, there is more): So I am named after both my parents. My father's second name and then my mother's. Although, she was known by her second name. My father was named for his mother's brother. So really, it didn't come down the Irish side of the family anyway.

There was a site that said that my name meant island. That's pretty dull and wrong. Maybe it's the name of an island somewhere. No, I prefer the relationship to Angus, Aonghouis and hence first choice.

Good for the soul to have a neat name.