Teacher training is terrific fun. Oh yes, I am thoroughly enjoying myself on my evening course at Guildford College. Don’t worry, I’m not actually becoming a teacher. The Snowflakes of Britain are safe.
No, I hit upon the idea of running a writers’ group. But of course you can’t just run anything in this country any more.
Once you look into the Kafkaesque nightmare of having strangers in your house or of hiring a venue in which you will interact with other human beings, you start to fall into a dark and terrifying pit of equality and health and safety legislation.
Naturally, the first thing anyone wants to know if you are offering to come within 50 paces of a ‘student’ or ‘learner’ is that you have a DBS. This could stand for Don’t Be Silly. But in fact it stands for Disclosure and Barring Service and this, according to the government’s own website on the matter, ‘helps employers make safer recruitment decisions on more than four million people every year’.
Yes, of course it does. In any case, once you’ve been checked out by the secret police for dangerous tendencies you can market yourself better, because at the time of checking you had not committed any criminal activity. How many bodies you’ve buried under your patio since you had your DBS check is another matter. But let’s not split hairs.
The next thing you have to do is enrol on a course that gives you an entry level understanding of all those rules, regulations and codes of practice that come down on you like a ton of bricks once you innocently decide to try to tell a small, random selection of people how to do something you know how to do.
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