SUNSET REFLECTIONS...

Here is a picture of a Portrush sunset…

I believe the younger generation call it ‘a soft launch’.  I kind of have some news to share, but it’s only ‘kind of’ until it’s really, fully, official.  But my colleagues were told today, and I wanted it to share it with my friends here too.

After pretty much half of my lifetime to date in a job I love and a school that always felt like home, I’m calling time this year.  I’m in limbo (though very definitely not dancing) at present, because my ill-health retirement application is still in the works.  But I’m signed off until whatever retirement looks like is finalised by the Department of Education, and then I’ll be packing away my GCSE and A Level set texts, handing back the keys to my beloved EN4, and permanently deleting the weekday 6:11am alarm on my phone.  

I’ve suffered chronic pain since the start of my thirties, which is a long time.  In recent years it’s got an awful lot worse: Shakira said that ‘the hips don’t lie’, but in my case it’s more a case of the feet, the ankles, the knees, the elbows, the hands, and sometimes those terribly truthful hips as well. My bones have got more brittle too. Long Covid a few years ago meant that the asthma I always forgot to list on health condition forms began to make its presence much more evident. I’ve just had to google the lyrics, but Shakira sings (in a very different context) that she’s ‘reading the signs of [her] body’.  That’s what my (marvellous) GP has persuaded me to do, for the good of my health.  It only took her a year to talk me around. 

I’ll write much more about all of this when I receive final decisions from the Department of Education, but, in the meantime, here is a picture of a Portrush sunset.  If I start to thank the generations of colleagues and pupils, both at Loreto College Coleraine and at my previous school (Mount Lourdes Enniskillen), I’ll write pages and pages, and it’s not long since I reapplied a little mascara after my lunchtime swim.  More of that hereafter.  

In the meantime, I’m doing what generations of leavers have done, and referencing the Loreto Prayer.  ‘This day is full of promise and opportunity, / Help me to use it well.’  Leaving a job which was one of the great loves of my life has not been an easy decision to make.

Maybe, one day soon, I’ll reset my alarm and be up early enough to take a photo of a Portrush sunrise.

Signing off for now,

CL x