Aviva Kidd (dot) com

Those of you living in the Northern hemisphere or anyone who is basically ignorant of standard weather patterns (whatever that means these days) may not realise Winter is in full swing in Melbourne at the moment. In my little home > school > home microcosm, that means about forty minutes spent in bed every morning contemplating how cold it will be when I manage to get out of it, and then a good portion of the rest of the day cursing and stabbing newspaper images of politicians with bobby pins for not funding government schools properly and making us work in unheated portables (though the good news is that D12’s air con can now produce cold air, which will be much appreciated in Summer but is of absolutely no use to us now). There are, however, parts of the school, oases if you will, that provide much-needed relief from the barrage of wintry days. And thus, at Shakespeare’s expense, I dedicate this blog entry to one who has held my affection throughout my May-August schooldays:

Ode to the Art Room Heater

  Shall I compare thee to a particularly sunburn-inducing summer’s day?

  Thou art more steely and more temperamental.

  Rough winds do issue from thy darling vent decayed,

  And summer’s lack of ozone to you is all too inconsequential.

  Sometime too hot thy gaseous flame burns,

  And often is my cold complexion reddened;

  And every sprocket from sprocket sometime churns,

  By antiquation, or lack of recent servicing, steadened:

  But thy artificial summer shall not fade

  Nor lose possession of that powerboard thou hog

  Nor shall I heed what the warning bell bade

  When externally there is fog

  So long as students have exams and remain unfree,

  So long lives school, and by thine side I’ll be

(And yes, I totally stuffed up the iambic pentameter and made up a word or two, but when it comes to heater love that kind of thing just doesn’t matter, OK? Also, I realise that heaters probably don’t have sprockets, but it’s better than the original draft, which was on about “cogs”).