When you are working in an environment where people are becoming increasingly concerned about their jobs, where directors find they have been judged as no longer fit to be directors through some unknown, and apparently dodgy process then things are not necessarily going to be as they should be. When also, you have reached the second week in September and your main provider of money for education (Dept of Health) have not come up with any kind of budget for you to spend, you begin to wonder what you are actually doing there. Having said that, the office is not a completely depressing morose place, the opposite really, as there is a slight sense of mania. A sense of a time before things change and not entirely for the good. For all the acting out that took place when people perceived change was going to happen, they are acting pretty well now that it is.

I met with my counterpart in the North of the county this week to look at what kind of service might be needed given that we are likely to have to merge departments, or at the very least become closely linked. Once we began to concentrate on the needs of the new PCTs and not on the needs of the existing staff we began to produce some really good ideas, and by the end had more than enough work for the existing teams to do, and probably more. What we don’t yet know is who will be the director in charge of the function, and what the structure beneath that will be. But by the time we do know we will be prepared with information about what might be needed. We will also have plenty of material to put into the application forms and CVs we will need when we all have to reapply for our jobs and in our particular cases more than likely for the same job.

At home, I am having to cope with the realisation that I cannot keep my teenage son locked indoors at night, especially at the weekend. Last night he and his friends went off to meet up with other friends in a village about a mile away to ‘hang out’. Apparently there was football in the local park then the rest of the time in one of their houses. I know he is nearly 16 but I am struggling with not knowing where he is and what he is doing at all times. Still I managed well I think and luckily he turned up before I had to go out looking for him and before it was too far past my own bed time.

The other main event this week has of course been the blog move. Things are getting easier over here at wordplay’s, as I begin to become familiar with how it works. I am in the process of categorising all my previous posts and iin the process re reading some of them. Even I am impressed by some of them! Looks like the move has regenerated my enthusiasm for blogging which was waning slightly, and long might that continue.