March was pretty mad, and so was I. Mostly it was a month of relentlessly stupid bureaucracy, relentlessly stupid people, relentlessly stupid, well, pretty much everything really. Leavened by a couple of outings and my nearest and dearest.

British bureaucrats at the Passport Office are trying hard to out-stupid their confrères in France by demanding stupid bits of paper. Stupid bits of paper, of course, which have to be downloaded and printed in France so they can be posted – POSTED – to England where they will be scanned into their computer system. Oh no of course you can’t email those same documents. There lies the way to fraud! No really, that’s what they told me. So Roxanne’s passport application process is now well into its third month.

The school that never gives up is still insisting that I send them a document proving that I’ve paid all my cotisations, my social security contributions for the year. Not for 2025, oh no, that would be much too normal. No, they want a certificate proving that I’ve paid all my contributions for 2026. My special pleading that no such document exists because I don’t have a Time Machine fall on deaf ears with the riposte that I am the only teacher in the entire school who has not provided this certificate. This is either a lie or proof that time travel does, in fact, exist and is so commonplace in Nimes that bored teachers are using it to collect future government certificates. All this for a school where I have had 1 (one) class of 3 (three) hours this year. I have spent longer arguing about paperwork than actually teaching there. I will not be teaching there next year.

Unless, of course, I have to. The higher education situation in France has taken a dramatic turn for the worse with a government crackdown on private schools. Which is a good thing in some ways – I’ve given up teaching in more than one where standards were appallingly low. Including one where I taught 10 computing Masters students in a literal broom cupboard with one electrical socket between us. And no projector, whiteboard, blackboard or, well, anything. This same school is now up for sale and currently has no actual premises at all, not even a broom cupboard, and has taken to holding classes in hotel rooms and the Halle Tropisme which I last visited for a giant sale of household plants being held there. It’s also well known for its all-night long techno concerts and is singularly lacking in what I’ve come to thing of as the essentials for any sort of classroom activity – chairs, tables, that sort of thing.

So yes, close down the crappy schools by all means. But this and other changes mean that there are more teachers chasing less jobs. I know of one teacher who is now working as an Uber driver, delivering food to hungry students who are better of than he is. It does not augur well for next year for me. We’ll see.

I have managed to inspire another school to step up its TOEIC exam program and become an actual exam centre, and there should be more work there, but again they have an administration happy to make appointments with me which they then miss by going home early. Sigh.

And I have finished, finally, a first draft of my next novel. Into the editing process now.