Bluetooth (especially people who wear their Bluetooth headsets even when they aren’t using their phones)
Instant Messenger (especially Yahoo IM, which causes this computer to crash and crash and crash. And then, just when you have reached the limit of your ability to cope, gives you the Blue Screen of Death)
The Department for Education and Skills
Local authority traffic management (which, incidentally, proves that Satan has a magnificent sense of irony. I always knew he wasn’t American.)
Those particular cyclists (not the well-behaved ones) who think that being on a bike makes them ethically superior and therefore exempt from the Highway Code and allowed to shout abuse at you for not swerving out of their way fast enough (I think that the law should make it legal to drive over cyclists when they are in the act of committing a road traffic offense.)
Local radio
Royal Mail Customer Services (More irony. Got to give him credit for that.)

My satnav is beginning to piss me off.

When Darling Wifey and I went to Cornwall for? a dirty? weekend before Christmas, we popped in to see friends in Bristol on the way – and instead of taking me to their house, it directed me to Avon & Somerset Police Headquarters.

Later in the same weekend, we popped in to see another friend in Exeter, and the stupid machine decided that she lived at Divisional Police HQ.

And today, when we popped over to Leeds to see some great friends from ASDF, guess where my satnav directed us first?

Busyknitter? wrote something about how her eldest deals so well with having a brother with Autism, and Ali? followed suit with a few words about how her daughter copes with the demands of sharing a house with a kid with ASD. So I thought I’d join in.

On a couple of the occasions that the ASDF families have met up, everyone has agreed on a remarkable thing that happens: for all the bad reputation that Autism has, and for all of the tantrums, breakdowns, violence and destruction that all these families endure not just on a daily basis but, for most of us, several times a day, the time that these families spend together is amazing for its lack of incidents.

Why? Because (for some strange reason) having a sibling with Autism makes a child particularly gentle, considerate, understanding, patient, tolerant, good at communication, resilient, kind and very, very proactive when it comes to including other kids in their play.

These children are not abnormal paragons of virtue. They all have their moments; Little Madam, for example, is quite capable of reducing me to an incandescent blob of fury in about fifteen seconds when she wants to (I think it’s a woman thing. Darling Wifey uses the same tactic when she wants to assert her own superiority over the Y Chromosome) and since her discovery that pocket money is earned in this house, she has? ruled the family? with an iron fist? in order to maintain? her tidying and cleaning regime. And Tiny Flirt is relishing the effects? that calculated disobedience has on parents and nursery staff.

But these two kids are also capable of breathtaking generosity and understanding. This week, Little Madam has researched Child Sponsorship on the Internet (after it was mentioned in a lesson at school) and, with our help, has diverted £18 of her earned pocket money every month to support an 8-year-old Ethiopian girl called Negesu.

Trust me – I’m a teacher and I know what I am talking about. The kids whose siblings have Autism are all? a long way? above average.

The small god of demosticity strikes again!

This morning, as the family were staggering, bleary-eyed, round the kitchen in search of breakfast, I learned something about halogen light fittings:

If one of the four bulbs fails, then you can shrug your shoulders and deal with it later; if a second bulb fails, it really is time to pull your finger out. Because when the third bulb fails, the ring main for your whole house will be overloaded, and darkness shall descend.

And yea, there shall be much Autistic wailing and banging of heads.

The annoying part of the whole little adventure was the discovery that my ‘emergency blown fuse kit’ (containing a torch with spare batteries, assorted fuses and a small screwdriver, and kept under the fuse box) hadn’t been checked against the fuse box itself – which is so old that it doesn’t use fuses. It uses fuse wire.

So I’ve learned how to replace fuse wire. And Darling Wifey now finds me very manly and heroic…

Every day for? the last? year and a half, I have collected Little Nutter from the after-school club at his special school and walked past a broken steel bollard (which stops people from driving onto the children’s playground) and though, “Bloody dangerous, that.”

This evening, in the dark, I walked into it.

Little Nutter, in true Autistic style, said “Careful, Daddy” as he hopped into the car and sat in the passenger seat,? put his seatbelt on, and watched me roll around on the ground in agony.

Then I drove through rush-hour York without changing gear once and got Darling Wifey to drive me the rest of the way to casualty, where two very professional A&E staff reassured me that there were no broken bones.

“If you look here, you can see the bone quite clearly, and it is definitely not broken.” Bastards.

Then they gave me some very powerful painkillers, sewed the hole back up, and told me that drinking a glass of wine was not a good idea unless I wanted to sleep very, very well indeed.

And now there’s a hole in my brand new work trousers.

First, loads of thanks to Bart for updating my software (which I have always thought of as being something like fitting a new engine into your car) and also for rescuing the lost graphics for my page!

Anyway, I have returned to the ranks of the economically productive – after half a year of living off the out-of-court settlement my previous employer coughed up after I called a lawyer. I had to promise not to instruct the lawyer in return for the cash, but I think that’s a fair deal.

The hard part is having to work for a living again. Having said that, when your boss doesn’t wear a tie and your line manager interrupts your lessons to share filthy jokes with you, you know that your working life is going to be a little bit more relaxed than before.

And on the subject of filthy jokes – people have this misconception that, having been Head of Religious Education in a Catholic school, I wouldn’t approve. That’s prejudice, that is! I ought to take offense!

But back to work: during my first week I have been told off – for working too hard. I am used to the structured lesson plans that mainstream schools have been duped into thinking are the secret of education, but mentally disabled and SLD teens don’t care if the lesson is documented and cross-referenced on a two-page proforma detailing aptitudinal baselines, aims and objectives. What matters to them is that the activities are accessible and beneficial.

As my boss said, two things are important: what are you teaching them, and who is gaining the most/least benefit?

It makes me want to firebomb the DfES and blackmail the government into starting again with education policy. If I can paraphrase the Bard, ‘If you want education, kill all the bureaucrats.’

So what have I taught? Science this week was about ‘how materials change,’ and the government publications talk about melting ice.

Sod that. We melted chocolate.

The “Towards Independence” syllabus for children with SLDs is about road safety this week. We learned the Green Cross Code – but with an extra game. Do you remember “Frogger?”? It’s a? 1980s arcade game where you jump your frog from log to log across a river.

I looked on the internet and? found? a version with hedgehogs and a six-lane motorway. With sound effects. And my classroom has a six-foot computer whiteboard with stereo speakers. Nappies had to be changed after that lesson.

A good start.

I bought a side of salmon for dinner tonight – good friends are visiting.?

The fishmonger was shut (it being a bank holiday and all that) so I bought it from the supermarket. First time for everything.

The packaging is covered in more small print than a Microsoft authenticity certificate – and in the middle of it, in large red letters, is the message: “Allergy information: contains fish.“