There was something awesomely forlorn about it, almost eerie. The table, obviously abandoned in haste, was dotted with crumbs of mince-pie and marzipan. A quartet of unwashed mugs stood like the last pieces of an attritional chess game. The electric fire lurked down below, in the past pressed into service to defend the realm of ageing feet against a cold snap, but now glumly mothballed. Even the venetian blinds looked bereft - some open, some closed, frozen in a gruesome fenestral wink at the approaching solstice.
Such is the staffroom during the Christmas holidays. A place redundant and without purpose, you would think, but you'd be so wrong. Forget your Lough Dergs and your Croagh Patricks, your Mellifonts and your Mellerays. For this is a place of pilgrimage and retreat so ordinary in its exposition that a vacational visit is a must.
If ever a national plan for in-service training is begotten and, more crucially, implemented, prominent on that plan should be a mandatory annual visit by all teachers to their staffroom during a holiday and, preferably, the Christmas holiday.
Preferably, simply because the innate gloominess of a winter's day accentuates the loss of what a school is really all about - life. Gone is the banter and the slagging. Silent are the snifflers and snorters. Nowhere can be seen a pair of outrageous socks. Where, oh where, is the beauteous sound of barb and bitchiness? What wouldn't you give to have that door thrown open by, literally, a bleeding infant.
Napoleon was getting C-minuses at Waterloo when Tom Moore was synthesising that feeling of loss:
I feel like one
Who treads alone
Some banquet hall deserted,
Whose lights are fled,
Whose garlands dead,
And all but he departed.
Sitting there, nothing intrudes but the howl of the wind and you make a New Year resolution, nay, a vow that you will never again whinge about this being a lonely profession, and how isolated one becomes.
Slapping your thighs in new purpose, you set about draining the driodair of tea down the sink. And, in a spirit of expansiveness towards absent colleagues, you do something that you wouldn't be caught dead doing during term-time - you wash their mugs.
