Skin(2)

I taught adults and teenagers English for about a year, on and off, after training as a TEFL teacher. I spent slightly longer working as an Early Years teacher, in classrooms where the majority of children were E2L (English as a 2nd Language). Those experiences, plus having a best friend at school who was born in Nairobi and spoke Portuguese until he came to the UK, have equiped me with the ability to rapidly if roughly assess an E2L speakers language competencies.

Sometimes, it's a scarey skill.

For example, I can say with a fair degree of confidence that the new GP at my Health Centre struggles to understand spoken English because his passive vocabulary is short on idiom, and his listening skills are poor - he hasn't properly grasped how to listen for gist. Instead, he listens on the basis of what he expects to hear, having already assessed the situation by observation. That's not a very professional way to take a history, and that's why he diagnosed me as having 'contact dermititis'.

Nothing has changed in terms of contact, as I pointed out to him, whether it be soap, clothing or jewellry. Having asked me to repeat myself twice, I think he just gave up, treating my views as ipso facto irrelevant. What has changed, recently, is life looking after my autistic son just got considerably more stressful, thanks to you-know-who (I don't mean the NHS - I will simply see another GP in the same Centre). I'm not sure whether the rash is eczema or psoriasis, but it's one or the other and almost certainly stress induced. As well as on my neck, I now have rashes on my arms, thighs, and even on my balls. Yeah, it's a really sexy condition.

So I'd like to say a big thank you to the morally defective superheroes at the Trotters and Apple Court, for making my life that much tougher to the extent that my own body is now fucking up. You ineffectual bastards should be facing gross misconduct procedures, but instead you're sitting pretty, still telling lies, some of you earning more than some graduate professionals despite having failed your GCSEs. You're a human disgrace.