Not a good start to term

Luciano Pavarotti died of pancreatic cancer in the early hours of this morning. Listen to him sing Nessun Dorma on YouTube. I have two left feet and can't coordinate the pulse of my beating heart with the pulse of music I listen to, but if ever I became an ipod runner, I'd put that song on the ipod. It's very uplifting - we should give the credit to Puccini for a wonderful tune, but Pavarotti's voice adds to its intensity.

The students came back to school this morning. I don't know how many weeks into term it'll be before the two-hour commute each way, four times a week, gets to me, but it's a good school, the work I'm doing is proper teaching - not policing students, watching the clock and hoping nothing goes wrong on my watch - which is why I stick with it. It's tiring though to leave the house before 7, get a full day's work in, then get home at 7 in the evening. After all that, I'm not always in the mood or feel energetic enough to get out to run. And this is in the summer - wait till we get to the winter when there's less light. I'll need to do something about that.

A Design-and-Technology teacher at school died over the summer. I didn't know him personally, but it was a little upsetting nonetheless. More upsetting was the news that another teacher, with whom I'd had brief contact over the course of the year, had killed himself with no apparent motive. He'd visited his native South Africa with his wife, met his family there, and seemed happy and - to those he spoke with on his return - was really looking forward to the start of term. Then his wife waited for him to pick her up at work, he never came, and when she got back she found him hanging in the garage.

I remember reading a couple of years ago (I think) on a blog about someone's brother who had committed suicide. It's an awful thing. Personally, I feel suicide is a transference of responsibility: the person who does it thinks he is ridding himself of all his responsibilities, but he is not - he is merely passing it on to his family, friends, and others who knew him. Still, it is sad when people you knew in one way or another leave the world. A reminder that life is like a bouquet of flowers: flowers all start from unimpressive seeds, and are cold and withered at the end of their life; we should live our lives as well we can, so people remember it, like flowers, for the bright colours while they lasted.