Well, the head of the English department looks shifty and avoids my gaze every time I encounter her. This doesn't bode well for the school acting as a base for me during the graduate teaching programme, since the headmaster told me (and her) last week that the decision was basically up to her.

I joined the union today; they came to give us a talk about advantages of joining, and the thought in the back of my mind is that if the school tries to get rid of me because they feel I'm not in it for the long haul, I may have some recourse if I have the union behind me.

And I also sent a letter to the head of Steve and Em's school, enquiring about the possibility of doing the graduate teaching thing there. I'm not terribly hopeful about this option, though.

But, I do feel that, one way or another, things will work out, so, oddly, I'm not too worried about any of this.

I am, however, distinctly annoyed by an email which my sister-in-law has just sent me. The subject line? "FW : Only read if u have time for God". Could you get a more annoying header? The sin of evangelising, compounded by the evil of multiple forwards, and containing the ultimate heresy of the cutesy "u" - surely there is a hell reserved exclusively for insensitive ungrammatical religious fundamentalists? The body of the email is even more annoying. It's a morass of blinking, flashing, nauseatingly syrupy anecdotes, bad poetry, and exhortations to pass on the email to prove you're not ashamed of your religion and/or to save the souls of sinners. Makes me head hurt, and, interestingly, has precisely the opposite effect on me to the one it intended.

I'd never foist my religious views on my sister-in-law; I wish she offered me the same respect.

Oh, one last thing - is the picture in my last post invisible to everyone, or just to Lisa?