What a week!

This week has been really hard work, mostly because I've been doing a life-guard qualification that lets me take kids (or anyone for that matter) into the school pool. Over here you need a 'ticket' ie. qualification for anything, there is so much red tape & everyone is scared of potential libel action. It's a far cry from the good old days of St Peters when I used to take kids swimming, & the school pool was never actually locked. Us on-site tutors had some great midnight swims under the stars! Aahhh, the memories...

Anyway, we had training from 6-10pm on Monday & Thursday night, then the assessment which took a couple of hours on Friday night. We had a theory test, then CPR, then the pool stuff which included land-based rescues (chucking ropes, reach poles etc.) & water-based rescues (contact & non-contact tows, rescue breathing in the water etc.). Then it was my least favourite bit which was a 3m dive to the bottom of the pool to bring up a 'body' in the form of a submersible manikin. The last test, the 'initiative rescue' was the scariest because you had to take control of a class of kids & start them off as for a swimming lesson. Then you had to react to a situation as it unfolded in front of you. I was quite lucky with mine, I just had a student get cramp. He was in the shallow end so it was very straight-forward to get him safely out of the water & then deal with the cramp. Anyway, I passed, so I guess it was all worth it. On the Tuesday I had touch rugby training, Wednesday was normal rugby training, then Friday night straight after my assessment I had a formal dinner to attend, so it made for a very busy week!

This morning I got a nice lie-in, my tennis activity this term is second session so doesn't start till 11:40am which is very civilised... It's really enjoyable, I've got the loveliest group of boys, & the numbers are good so I can usually manage to have bit of a hit. The weather today was glorious, you wouldn't think it was still April! After tennis I sat in the garden for a couple of hours getting the only school-work I had to do this weekend out of the way. I was in a singlet & shorts so it's not too bad doing work when you can work on your tan at the same time! I then spent a few very enjoyable hours pottering around my garden. I planted up my 5 hanging baskets, so they should be looking good in a few weeks. I know I've said it before, but I really do love the growing season in the UK. It's much more impressive than spring back home. My sunflowers are coming along well, I had to thin them into separate troughs today. They are one of my favourite flowers, so happy...

The photo above is one that Will took during our defeat to Wimbledon last match. I'm number 1 & prop during the scrums, but stand in at hooker for the line-outs. Tomorrow we've got our last rugby for the year; a 10's tournament at Camberly. It's going to be hard work if the weather is anything like it was today. The grounds are really hard at the moment as well as we haven't had any decent rain for ages. No doubt I'll be a bit battered & bruised by the end of the day... My black-eye from the last match has only just disappeared! I'll be quite glad to see the back of the rugby season, & can't wait for our first touch game on Wednesday.

Next week at school should be far less busy than the last, then we've got exeat (where all the boarders have to go home, so no Saturday activities) to look forward to in the weekend. It happens to be the May Day bank holiday, so we also get the Monday off. A large group of us from school are attending the Reading Beer festival on the Saturday. We've all managed to get free VIP tickets by doing the real-ale trail which I talked about earlier. We'll probably go on the Saturday, about 2pm, so it promises to be a great afternoon/evening. There is over 400 ales to sample, so we'll be doing well if we try them all! No doubt you'll hear all about it in my next post.