6th July: Thanks for the sweaty memories

             One essential for today is to deliver a letter to Claudio Ranieri, my favourite football manager.  I’ve got the world’s least achievable idea to celebrate Leicester City’s Premiership win by getting supporters to write poems about the players, the team and the city.  The best way to motivate folk to do this is if the players do it first – role models with footballs, pens and notebooks.  I just need to do a poetry workshop for Vardy, Mahrez and the rest of the boys in blue, and before you know it, the whole county’s creative juices will be flowing.  That’s the theory and for the sake of a sheet of A4, an envelope and the sound of another of my daydreams crashing through the stratosphere, it’s worth a try.

            It’s about seven in the evening when I drive to the Walkers Stadium and look for a letterbox in the glass fascia to deliver my ‘Poetry for Players’ missive. As I scan the building I feel a tingle of warmth and probably blush, remembering a very happy moment that took place here.  It was nothing to do with football but a little to do with scoring.

            Three years ago I was seconded to a school in the poorest ward in Leicester which the recent Education Secretary, Ed Balls, had described as being “deeply, deeply in Special Measures.”  I had no particular talents except teaching English and being naively determined no matter what the data says.  This applies not just to failing schools but my bank balance and my history with men.  But this odd skillset had somehow landed me a job where part of my job description included spending a few hours a week coaching some ‘Teach First’ student teachers.  These are new teachers with impeccable academic qualifications who are parachuted into struggling schools after just six weeks of intensive teacher training. 

            One of these teachers was Luke, a twenty-four-year-old with a Master’s degree in World Literature from Cambridge.  And he was also a great teacher, easy-on-the-eye, charismatic, charming and any other positive adjectives that a soppy Newcastle University graduate, middle-aged and with a second-class degree, could come up with. 

            This building, The Walkers Stadium, now towering above me with new-found biblical presence, was the location of the Year Eleven prom for our Special Measures school on one unforgettable and balmy night at the end of June 2013 BC (before Championship).  Luke and I had been chatting on the balcony when he asked me if I wanted a cigarette.  I looked at him perplexed.  I didn’t smoke. He knew that.  I didn’t say yes or no and the moment was lost. However, some fuse wire in my ancient brain had been singed and when he asked me the same question half an hour later there was no hesitation. We ran down some steps together, him in his black-tie garb and me in a full-length (forty per cent off) Reiss number. We turned one corner and then another and then we were alone.  Cigarettes were produced, he lit mine, I breathed in, I coughed, we laughed.  And then, because I had delusions of being a gun-slinging hipster from Hoxton, we talked about flying to St Petersburg (photo) to get tattoos, maybe in March the following year.  “Should we get a twin room or a double room?” he asked.  This was one of those job interview moments when it’s all been going swimmingly well but then you’re drowning; brain does not compute. I could tell him how to improve GCSE outcomes for students in economically-deprived areas and the application of Bloom’s Taxonomy when teaching the fifteen poems in the poetry anthology, but should we get a twin or a double? This surely translates as did I want to share his bed?  Mumma help me.  Did I want to share his bed?  If that sentence could be photo-shopped I’d add those sparkly twinkly things. He was twenty-four, I was forty-eight.  The utter joy.  If only moments of such sublime flirtation could be implanted in my little brain and replayed on the hour every hour for all my days – a benign fix that would make each o’clock an eternal summer.

            “Let’s see how things are in March,” I replied coyly and incompetently.  What the fuck was I getting at? What had my mouth verbalised before my brain engaged? Might we be married? Might Putin decree that this MUST BE SO? Might the wind chill factor necessitate snuggling? 

            “What do you mean?’ he asked. 

            “A double.” And then we snogged and ended up climbing over a barrier and creeping under a hoarding featuring Gary Lineker promoting Walkers Crisps and their ‘Do Us A Flavour’ campaign.  There’s probably a record of this on CCTV somewhere.  We were there for about half an hour and it was actually quite sweet and innocent; the most salacious it got was his hands up my dress and on my inner thighs. This was when I told him I wasn’t wearing any knickers which seemed to surprise him.  My freedom wasn’t for porno reasons, it was just because my dress was a size ten and slightly clingy so looked better with no VPL.  And then I honestly said “I don’t want to kiss you, I want to talk to you.” But talking to him wasn’t right, I just wanted to listen to him being funny and clever and charming with little me, his only audience, twice his age, with a few fake gold tattoos and a few real age spots and a few real thread veins.  I was magnetised.  For fucks sake he was twenty-four and a little bit fabulous.  Lovely would be a poor adjective for this atheist son of God.  And it didn’t end there.

            Luke and I were back at school for two more weeks until he and his ghost would disappear forever into his post Teach First, me-free life.  There was some minor flirtation in the canteen and some major flirtation when the photocopier jammed in reprographics but then, in the middle weekend, he met a normal person, a woman his own age.  She was Irish, lovely, pretty, clever, probably did endless charity work and, above all, she knew the same lyrics as him when I didn’t even know the bands.  But before he found Little Miss Ireland’s Blarney Spot and they strolled off into a sunset together in Dingle or Killarney we had one more moment. 

            Luke and the other three Teach First teachers at our deeply, deeply special measures school were having a leaving do at their house.  They really had been brilliant, so much so that I’d even painted TEACH in gold glitter on my left forearm and FIRST in gold glitter on my right forearm. (Photo). This wasn’t the mark of a middle-age crush, just a wee bit of self-graffitied respect for four teachers who had made a real difference in a school that needed it.  After three or four hours of afternoon games, chat and drinking there were about twenty minutes of intense flirting between Luke and I.  And a drunk law student – talk about ‘Whack-a-Mole’.  Our flirting jumped from play to smiling pause over the head of the bloody talkative would-be QC who wanted to enthuse us with her wit, as we craved fast forward or a hammer, but finally there was a chance.  The student adjourned to heave and we could finally discuss bedroom furniture. “We could pretend you were interested in buying my chest of drawers,” Luke whispered, leaning forward endearingly.  The sale was because he was moving away to London, Dublin or bloody Tipperary and was selling his furniture. “If I go to my room now, you could join me in five minutes.”

            “But if it was genuine,” I pointed out with Newcastle University logic, “if I was really interested in your chest of drawers there would be no issue with us going straight to your room.”  Usain Bolt couldn’t have got there quicker. He flicked the main light off, flicked the side light on, we snogged and then fell to his bed.  “We’re not having sex,” I said, and we didn’t, but he did rip my Elle McPherson thong off which I’d had the foresight to wear rather than my usual reinforced concrete grey granny pants, and he did try to take his skinny jeans off before his shiny Doc Martens, momentarily delaying proceedings with a minute of sit-com farce.  “I’m smiling like a big smiley thing,” I said, laughing and, er, smiling.

“Great simile, Gen,” said the oh-so-love-struck Luke.  Note to self - good at similes as well as blow jobs – must add to CV.  She gave a blow-job like a new Dyson.

           

            We didn’t have sex as described on page one of the manual but we were very frantic.  There were frantic hands, fingers, lips and tongues in a sweaty tangle of a pleasure fest; giving and taking, groaning and gasping, it was all exceedingly good.  And fun too.  Why had sex been less fun with men in their forties and fifties? Mortgages, children, ex-wives, the pressure to swap one’s energy provider and the ballistic missiles in North Korea clearly reduce the humour of sex. One of my middle-aged professors had serious issues with moles – both the lawn and the dermatological variety so no wonder erections were troublesome, never mind the pressure to hit my joke quotient. 

            But back to Luke’s bed of intergenerational sweat, harmony and the grasping, gasping and groaning.  I recall making rather a lot of the latter and him clamping his hand over my mouth, (oh, the pleasure and pressure of those long, literary fingers) and me going down on him, a lot, and him going down on me, a lot.  “I’m about to come. Where shall I come?”  This was clearly not a FAQ in Luke’s Teach First handbook and was probably not a question in his Cambridge University finals. I didn’t need to answer verbally.  My mouth would not be an externalising organ but an internalising one.  I swallowed.  I’d not swallowed for twenty-five years.   This was biblical, astronomical, had Nostradamus foretold it? 

            Five minutes later I had my thong back on and his slim twenty-four-year-old arse was disappearing into the bathroom-en-suite with perhaps a sprinkle of my glitter on his balls.  It was time for me to leave.  The bedroom door opened out into the lounge. What if fifty teachers, the school’s accounts department and Ed Balls (no glitter) were outside the door with a hot-off-the-press transcript and a written warning?  Or would this be an 'Exit Through Gift Shop' moment, the sort you get after a theme park ride of your life where you’re offered, for just twenty-five quid, a glossy and mounted full-action photo?  But thankfully there was no audience and I was soon leaving the party with a few patient colleagues.  My only worry was that there might have been some neon green souvenirs remaining: ten lovely people had kissed me goodbye and as I sat on the late bus, winding its way through the streets of Leicester, all I could think of was microscopic tags of Luke’s fresh cum sprinkled across ten innocent lips.  I hoped to Christ there weren’t any UV party-lights strung across the garden.

  

            So now, back in the wholesome reality of my sensible fifties, it’s time for a quick sesh with Mr Rabbit, a pot of Earl Grey and another hour of house clearance.  Eat your heart out Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.