Aviva Kidd (dot) com

Having attended a whopping total of two school in my life, I’m probably not best placed to discuss the varying nature of staff rooms in different schools. All I remember is that at my primary school the teachers’ communal area was practically sacred ground, where on the rare occasion students were allowed within the room, they would remain tremblingly silent and walk on tiptoe for fear of being rounded on by a teacher and exiled to the cold, yellow corridor outside.

It’s a completely different story at my high school, where there are close to a dozen different staff rooms, and (except perhaps for the Principal’s office), students generally have no hang ups about knocking (or not) and entering to generally pester or be pestered by teachers. As my mother, the human ATM and Excursion Note Signing Automaton, is a new resident in one of said staff rooms, I have had frequent occasion to go and visit her, and in the process have had all my prior beliefs in the existence of her scholarly and mature behaviour, and that of her colleagues, dashed upon the staff room’s table — for it was on that surface that I first laid eyes upon their hideous creation, their mascot: The Anthropomorphic Lemon.

Although I have yet to identify any rituals the teachers perform in honour of their deity, I live in fear of what will happen when its inevitable rotting begins, and in what manner they will vent their report-writing angst next. Caveat Citrum.