Posted by mr lata on June 08, 2010 at 12:54:01:
within months of my coming to the school, my Head of Department, ray Halls aka 'slimy rat, disappeared never to return. This was parr for the course at the time.. any time a member of staff had a couple of days off, it was touch and go as to whether they ever returned. I do remember that somebody (as they ran in parallel) had the bright idea of me teaching his exam classes at the same time as mine!! Ther cannot be that many teachers who had classes of 40 plus in their first year.
anyway to the story... As the Biology lab was now 'mine' i decided to have a clear out. Among other of the dubious biological specimens inherited from slimy, was a large freezer stuffed full of...?? anyway two very nice boys (I think one was Clark lawlor) came in one saturday to help me empty it. Various predictable horrors emerged.. dissected rats and frogs, dogfish, possibly rabbits, all (luckily frozen) with trailing lengths of intestine. semi dissected hearts, eyeballs.. you get the picture. Then somewhere in the middle, a huge skull with flesh and eyes intact, but no skin.. A number of hypotheses.. a cow?.. a horse?.. but somehow we decided that it had to be a CAMEL.. Do not ask me how a flayed camel's head came to be in Ray Halls's freezer, it just was. We continued to pull out the gruesome contents.. more rats and hearts, a set of lungs with trachea etc.
Right at the very bottom under everything else was a GINGER PUSSY CAT complete with collar and bell.I have taught biology for 30 years now, but I do not recall pet cats ever figuring on the syllabus ( except perhars in genetic crosses)
however I was looking through 'stripes' yesterday, and what should I see but that a certain Paddy Bennett brought a dead cat into his lessons.. mystery solved.