Ties that bind

This is my least favourite work day of the year!

Why would that be?

Is it because:

• today is the start of the new academic year and the commencement of the longest, hardest term – a grim slog through to Christmas?
• my journey to work immediately takes an extra half an hour (or more!) each way as all the schools go back and the roads fill with yummy mummies transporting their precious little darlings half a mile or so to the school gates in their Chelsea tractors?
• the phone is ringing off the hook with a thousand and one requests for assistance and all my good work over the summer at purging my mailbox is undone by the encroaching tides of fresh pleas for help?
• after enjoying the tranquility of a blissfully empty campus for eight weeks it galls now to have to share it with the returning – and irritatingly freshly bronzed – teaching staff and pupils?
• of having to queue for nearly ten minutes inside the school grounds before being able to park my car in just about the furthest possible corner of the campus from my office?
• having to get up a little earlier in the morning has brought home all too clearly that the nights are getting longer and that I will soon be rising in the dark again?
• getting home a little later shows all too clearly that the nights are drawing in and it won’t be long before my homeward journey has to be accomplished in darkness?
• the summer (well, at least we’ve had a summer this year) seems soooo short and the winter soooo desperately long?

Is it – in short – any or all of those things?

No!

It is because – after very nearly four blissful months of exquisite freedom – I have once again (sob!)… to wear a tie!!

A shocked pause so that you can join me in silent mourning!

A Google search on the phrase “I hate ties” returns 98,400 items. I’m not surprised!

I could regale you at this point with a diatribe on the iniquity of imposing on the male of the species the pitiful privations of being appareled in such pointless appurtenance – or of the unfairness of the adverse judgements that seem oft-times be made on those who prefer not so to do. I could also whinge on for a while on the theme that no woman would put up with this sort of encroachment.

Trouble is, I can already hear – in my febrile mind – the Kickass Canada Girl opining that perhaps one doth protest too much (though doubtless in somewhat pithier language!) – so I won’t…