THERE were times in primary school when your teacher was clearly suffering the after-effects of a rough night – you were just too young to notice these tell-tale tricks.
Television
There was no bigger giveaway that your teacher had spent a night on the piss than if they stumbled into class pushing the school’s giant box television on a trolley. You could focus on classic episodes of Rosie & Jim instead of learning how to spell, while they focused on not being sick in their lap.
Morning ‘quiet time’
Being hungover is agony. Being hungover while 30 small children scream at you is enough to make you want to walk into the sea. Your teacher may have dressed this up by calling it ‘meditation’ or something similar, but really it was just to get you to sit quietly while they desperately necked paracetamol and Lucozade.
Colouring-in
After some dogshit results in your times-tables test, your teacher promised that – the very next morning – they would spend several hours going over multiplication. Instead they come in smelling like a bin, looking like they’ve slept in a hedge, and tell you to do some ‘colouring in’ instead. Thank God for their troubled home life.
Homework
You would count your lucky stars when, having not done a nonsense book report or whatever and gone into school expecting a bollocking, your teacher slumps into their desk and mumbles that everyone can ‘do homework’. Though you didn’t know it then, you owed a lot to your local pub’s Thursday 2-for-1 happy hour.
Impromptu playtime
If your teacher immediately ushered you all outside to the field to ‘play’ in the morning, they’d spent a night on the sauce. This would be some of the least supervised play-time of your lives, as you ran riot, climbing trees unsupervised, while your teacher vomited behind a skip.
