Stop the World I want to get off..

Since the turn of the year, I cannot believe how busy I have been. January is usually a slowly paced month, planning for school meetings that normally become congested in March. But I had a rude awakening on 4th January, the first day of the spring term with a succession of phone calls and e-mails announcing the suspension of my friend Alan King as the headteacher of Furness Primary School.

This set off a flurry of activity for the Governing Body with three special meetings in quick succession and a protracted correspondence with Brent's Director of Education. Not only was the headteacher suspended (and at the time of writing still is), but the Director decided to apply to the Secretary of State to dismiss the Governing Body as well. I had already decided that if that happened, I would not offer myself to clerk the Interim Executive Board that would succeed the Governing Body, and so it is with some regret that I now believe I have ended my association with the school after being its clerk for 22 years.

It is a great pity. I do not believe the current investigation into the headteacher's management of the school will uncover anything of any great seriousness and I reckon the Governing Body's performance was no worse than many others in this area. Alan King always had a great line in conspiracy theories, which always appeared to become more outlandish as the rounds of drinks quickened at his local. And so after knowing him for over 20 years I usually took a lot of what he said with a pinch of salt. This time perhaps his theory was right all along.

Anyway that is what kept me busy in January, and the ever complex health agenda also provided a lot of extra work in the opening months of the year. I confess I also took my usual winter break in February to my favourite hotel in Lanzarote and managed to read five hefty novels of varying seriousness while I was there. But one downside this year was the impact of now owning an iPhone on which I can now screen my e-mails. A holiday is not quite the same when you are still in contact, on an hourly basis, with work and colleagues back home.

Since being back, I have returned to a frenzy of work with the more usual high number of governing body meetings taking place. The Council's budget-setting process created a flurry of activity within the Liberal Democrat Group, so much so that I was checking a suggested budget amendment at midnight while standing at baggage reclaim in Gatwick after returning home.

Is the world speeding up? It certainly feels like it. Many people tell me they think the years get faster as you approach retirement. But why do we have this frantic obsession with activity that keeps us moving like manic hampsters on spinning wheels?

Why indeed do I have massive feelings of guilt when I sit idly for 20 minutes? I have always juggled a number of plates in the air, keeping my schools business, Council work, and social life on track through careful diary planning, but what I have never done is build in "lazy time".

Should I now begin the slippery slope towards deliberate downsizing? Not in the sense of moving down the property ladder, because anything smaller than my flat would be a bedsit, but downsizing the number of things I intend to do and plan for in the diary? But could I ever get used to a diary page with blank spaces in it? And what exactly is being lazy? Is that the first step towards staring vacantly into space, and falling asleep in the afternoons? My grandparents used to do this, leading to low sniggering from the rest of the family, but now my parents do too.

How soon will it be my turn?