I used to think it would get worse as I aged – with each passing academic year I got older and my classes stayed the same age, after all – but the girls were gentler with the older teachers, particularly the ones nearing retirement. Women of that age were like their nans, a kind of human being so far ahead in the distance they could never imagine becoming like them. They were much more judgemental about the twenty- or thirty-something teachers – we were too close in the future for their comfort. We were walking premonitions, what they would become.

And so, each morning, there was this sense: that I was getting ready to be found ridiculous. Not just my clothes or hair or jewellery but the way I talked, my gait – any physical tics or habits. No teacher is ever confident in themselves because they spend six hours every day being stared at by the toughest judges on the planet. And however much you love your job, as you dress each morning, walk to work, approach the school gates, there is always a sense of clenching, of readying yourself for combat.

And so, half term – no early alarm, a morning in pyjamas – however much marking or paperwork there is to do, a whole week of being unobserved. It’s bliss.

*

Like most teachers, I also had to use half term to do all the things that other people get to do during working hours – visits to the dentist, mornings off to shop midweek when the shops are not too busy. And this half term, I had my annual check-up with my neurologist.

‘Appointment with Dr Barnard,’ I said to Matty. ‘I meant to say, I thought we could have lunch but then I thought you probably won’t have time.’

I liked Dr Barnard very much, a thin, professorish type who took me seriously even though I only saw her once a year since I’d stopped taking the sodium valproate. I’d been medication-free for nearly a decade but as I was ‘of childbearing age’ – a term they had been using since I was fifteen – I still had check-ups. She never made me feel that because I had grown out of epilepsy I should have also grown out of my anxiety about it. I’d never had a seizure at work and although my colleagues were aware I had a medical history, I didn’t need any special allowances. I’d never had to use the red card system they have for some teachers – but Dr Barnard understood it was a possibility that I felt required vigilance.