November 23 2010
In the midst of
all this drama we receive a Skype update from No.1 Son, currently teaching
English in a private school in South
Korea
He has broken his
toe, he informs us, in a game of barefoot beach football after a couple of
beers. Unwisely, you might think, he slide-tackled a friend who was playing on
the opposing side, making contact not with the ball but with a beefy shinbone.
Sounds like the
kind of thing that would have got him sent off in a proper game.
On this occasion
it got him an appointment at the hospital, where the lower half of his leg was
put in a substantial plaster cast, only for him to find that the South Koreans,
being rather smaller of stature than your average Brit, don’t make crutches
long enough.
He was despatched
to a specialist crutches shop (yes, there is such a thing) with no joy. Result,
my 6ft 2in blue-eyed boy has been hopping awkwardly between his flat and the
school where he works for the past couple of weeks.
Now he’s given up
and had the plaster taken off (he says at home they’d have simply taped it up
and stuck an ice pack on it anyway).
Now I can’t claim
for a moment that his injury impaired his teaching technique.
Yet his disciplinary
skills clearly leave something to be desired. Apparently the headteacher came
in to his classroom, several storeys up a tower block in Busan, the other day
accompanied by an officer of the law, who complained that a shoe had plummeted
several floors from the window of said classroom to the street below, narrowly
missing the head of a startled pedestrian.
His girlfriend,
who is teaching at the same school, told me she doesn’t really suffer from
behavioural problems in her class of little girls – because she lets them play
with her long dark curls.
The boy’s got
curly hair, too. Maybe he should grow it ……………
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