Because every blogger is allowed one ranty moany whinge...

I try not to whinge and moan here, I really do, but it's got the better of me, on this, the annual low point of my year.
< / lame excuse>

I loathe Bonfire Night week. It's not the noise (although my cats and I could live without that), it's not the burning of effigies, nor the inevitable tales of fires, injuries and usually foreseeable but oh-so-sad personal tragedies that will appear in the press over the next few days. None of these things are the real problem. My own personal loathing has far more selfish roots.

It hasn't always been this way. I love looking at fireworks. I also appreciate the infectious excitement that my students were feeling today. As a child I loved Bonfire Night with a passion, but that was before I had worked it out.

You see, as a child I was always ill in November. Actually I was a pretty sickly kid who suffered from 'bronchitis' for most of the winter (and quite a bit of the rest of the year), so November didn't really stand out. Even so, I do remember asking not to go to a big bonfire party because I always 'caught cold'.

Nowadays my 'bronchitis' has been re-branded. (Asthma is just so much more 2009 dontchya think?) Most of the time you wouldn't notice it, I know how to keep it under control. But there are two things that really trigger it: chalk dust (yep, I picked a good profession) and fireworks.

The fireworks revelation happened in my first year of teaching. A fireworks safety lesson was planned in science, but there were a few bells, whistles and spectacular burny things to be incorporated. As a newbie teacher, I went along to run through the experiments with someone more experienced. 'If you've got any kids in the class with asthma, do this one in a fume cupboard,' he said. (That dates me doesn't it? *If* you've got any kids with asthma. *Rolls eyes*)

Of course that was shortly before I acquired my own personal asthma label. Very shortly before.

As my colleague demonstrated the experiment, my airways demonstrated the desirability of the fume cupboard option. The results: one rather poorly TLC, a provisional diagnosis of oh-so-trendy asthma, a loverley inhaler (hey - I could breeeeathe) and a lifelong love-hate relationship with those seductively pretty but insidiously gunpowdery fireworks.

So here I am, several years later, feeling a bit peeved and writing a rambling and moany blog post. I should be at my French class, something I really enjoy. Instead I'm hiding inside my house feeling a bit crap, warding off chest pains with steam, black coffee and Ventolin, losing my voice (an inevitable side effect of Mr Brown Inhaler, although not as bad with a spacer as it used to be without) and generally sulking.

Bloody Bonfire Bloody Night.

Bah.

< / pathetic moaning>

(BTW, please don't feel sorry for me, I feel much better now I've had a moan. Save your sympathy for poor old Mr TLC, who has to live with this grumpy woman...)