My god it’s cold. My house is doing a fantastic job of being draughty and hard to heat up. The heating is on, the windows are shut, the curtains are shut… and yet it’s still not warm. I’ve even done the trick of tucking the curtains behind the radiators. I bet there’s no insulation between the floors or in the roof.

I woke up this morning to a cold house, froze my arse off getting dressed, and it wasn’t until I’d been sat in a hot computer room for an hour that I finally warmed up. Between getting up and being in that computer room I’d sat in my car for half an hour with the heating on full blast.

This theme of cold continued into my form room at school where the heating doesn’t do anything until about mid-day. It’s one of those situations where opening a window would probably make things warmer!

I think having a glass of cold water out of the fridge might have been a key mistake this morning. I might add half an hour extra to the timer on my heating, if I can do that without having to totally reset the entire system. My heating being designed by someone who hates end-users, it would seem. Do one thing wrong in the sequence and the heating either never comes on, or never turns off.

Bear in mind that I used to live in the Lake District or Scotland in the cold. I also used to jump into lakes and rivers wearing nothing more than a few layers of clothing. It’s that same persistent kind of cold – not cold enough to make me shiver, but enough to be irritating. The weird draughts that go around the walls are quite annoying.

School breaks up on Thursday at half twelve. My kids are making Christmas cards in Microsoft Publisher. It’s a nice, simple lesson to keep them amused and contained. This time last year I was getting the kids to make animations with Macromedia Flash. Kind of strange to think that a year ago I was coming to the end of my first teaching placement, and now I’m doing it for real. How time flies and all that.