More Knives

The thing is with Brokeback Mountain and The Addams Family is, you can't turn your back on the treacherous bastards for a moment. Or put it another way, you think that you've discovered a modus vivendi, or at any rate can avoid them, when... whack! ... and there's a bloody big blade between your shoulder blades.

Briefly, in a classroom discussion in the final lesson before the exam, Brokeback Mountain was chatting away in Arabic even more than usual for him, and distracting the rest of the class. He's such an intractably bad student, that the only way to deal with this is to try to ignore it and soldier on, but I could sense deep emotions and asked what was going on.

I was told that he was warning them all about "the yellow", the appearance of bulldozers to enforce HUDC's government uncompromising attitude to breaches of planning permission. And then Brokeback said: "this college should be bulldozed with only the English people in it". I was too taken aback to say anything professional, so said nothing.

I told LM after the lesson. He too was nearing the end of his tether. He told PTI, Brokeback's nominal line manager, who apparently hauled him over the coals. I instantly wished I'd kept the remark within the four walls of the classroom.

Apparently, Brokeback excused the remark as a joke, and said that I was always joking , in particular about bestiality and hashish. Like all really good slanders, this had a grain of truth in it. One of the students had remarked one day that one of colleagues, I'll call him Aswan, a cheerful butt of most classroom jokes, must have been smoking hashish in the break, he was so disconnected from the rest of us. Over the next few weeks, like a bloody fool, I kept the joke alive.

Aswan, a few days before the English/bulldozing remark, had arrived at class with an eye infection. I asked him how he got it. He mangled the reply "I was working on a boat" to "I was performing a difficult task with my sheep." I can't remember if it was me or someone else who first saw the funny side to this, but we all laughed and it was clear that everyone got the joke. I referred to it again obliquely the next day, and there was great hilarity.

Big mistake. Suddenly I'm a teacher who can be painted as obsessed by drugs and sheep-shagging.

Meanwhile, we have the extraordinary rise and fall of "Janice", who soon appeared to be even more disassociated from reality than Brokeback, Old Gomez, and TOHH put together. Her inappropriate dressing got worse. Cleavage really won't wash in the workplace here. It seemed fairly clear that she wouldn't last long.

And indeed it turned out that when I got back from holiday in Blighty a few days ago, her contract had been terminated at the end of her month's probation - well, a bit earlier than that. HD told me and T3 the other day that he would swear that the person he and L&M Manager interviewed over the phone wasn't the same one who turned up here.

Also PTI. He's told the others that he was unhappy with the management of the project, and was taking up a job in "The International College".

Anyway, cut to this morning, HD asked to see me in private. A "group of students", he couldn't say who, had asked for all three of us to be removed. PTI and Janice for sins too numerous to mention, me for the sheep and the dope. The other two had gone , but he drew the line at me, he said. However, it would appear that I had been "culturally insensitive", and I bridled at this, having more experience of this country than the whole SMT put together.

I was angry. And then I was nonplussed that he knew nothing of the bulldoze-the-English remark.

The matter appears to have been wrapped up with a rather clever pair of letters, one to me and one to the college's local "Director" saying that the remarks had actually originated with a student, and admonishing me to be more culturally sensitive. In the circs, given that I fostered two jokes which I should have been aware could be wielded against me, and that I then foolishly blabbed about Brokeback's English bulldozer, I had to accept. HD then went on to say that he was out to get Brokeback now. We shall see.

I see the hand of Old Gomez here, too, and Pugsley - both of whom appeared to avoid me this morning during a cake-and-pop do for a student whose wife recently had a baby.

What's upsetting is that I am certain that no-one was genuinely offended by the sheep and hashish humour. But Brokeback is a thoroughly nasty bastard who would happily see me lumped together with fuckwits like PTI and Janice, and sacked. And I would get other work, but I actually really enjoy this job.

We had a meeting this morning, teaching, management and our former students, now hailed as colleagues, who were being exhorted to prepare their own teaching programmes over the next weeks. This is great news. You can't indulge in workplace warfare with students; but your fellow-teachers, they're game.