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Working as a teacher convinced me that I enjoy working with people, both when it is a pleasure and when it is a challenge, as inevitably it occasionally proves to be. It also reaffirmed that I could not work in a typical office environment, and, given the financial limitations of such work, that I am not motivated by financial reward alone. I consider that working as a teacher involves many of the character traits that are also demanded while working with children with behavioural problems, that is, patience, an ability to listen, and perhaps above all, a sense of humour which can be expressed at the most unexpected and stressful occasions, and which may transform them.

One of the places in Prague to which I kept on returning was a café in a park within walking distance of a number of the flats I lived in. Named the Half Way café, it was operated by a non-profit organisation and staffed by young men and women recovering from schizophrenia. It would be tempting to overstate the degree to which the café was inspirational for me-it did also happen to have good, cheap beer-but it is true that the exhibits of paintings of patients from the famous mental hospital which adorned the walls, the chilled, rather than sedated, character of these men and women behind the bar with self-applied tattoos and home-made dreads, and the atmosphere of acceptance led me to reflect on what I could do when I returned to face my student debts. Indeed, the longer I was there, the more the place grew on me. It came to seem more significant following my visit to a festival within the mental hospital grounds in which stalls were laid out and theatre performances acted out by the patients themselves. I came to notice that nestled among the anatomically-oriented biro suggestions for George W Bush on the Gents’ walls were optimistic poems about life, hope and opportunity.

I dropped in at _______ college for an hour or so with James and, though I didn’t visit the Gents, I had a strong feeling not that this was the same atmosphere as at the Half Way Café but that it was the valuable groundwork of a stage or two behind it.

My brother once related to me the curious feeling of pride of coming from ________. This was on meeting a local in Mexico: on describing where he came from with habitual deprecation, she replied that she had been here to learn glass blowing. I had grown up with the inevitability of European-funded statues to ________’s heroic past vandalised but realised that this tradition of skilled work can be inspirational for kids who are conscious of little more than the dole and Mcjobs. Though most of the students are not from ________, I am convinced that it must be a wholly positive experience for them to be involved in something which has such roots. This hands-on approach to learning, and to teaching is, I believe, good for every student, and is exactly what I envied on walking past the Rudolf Steiner school, Elmfield, to my primary school; it is especially good for those students most failed by conventional ‘bog standard’ education. I would appreciate the chance to be a part of it.

I am always conscious when compiling my education and employment history that it was not always inevitable that I would get to university. I was a good, but inconsistent student who, I was often told, failed to live up to my potential. I followed an abortive attempt at A-Levels in the sciences by a curtailed stint studying sound engineering at Sandwell before finally finding success in my A-levels at Kidderminster.

It was on doing a touch of moonlighting, researching nutrition and disorders of concentration at the medical library at university that I realised I may be a borderline case of someone who was sensitive to the high content of simple carbohydrates in modern foods. I had not previously been a Damien so much as a slightly restless and moderately clueless introverted extrovert with an exaggerated empathy for the antics of Holden Caulfield in Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye but in excluding these foods and taking a couple of choice supplements I nonetheless discovered I had been cruising on a duff clutch. Such experiences, though in my case far from extreme, could be put down to the last x-factor I consider to be necessary for work in this field: life experience, and the resultant knowledge that children who have been rejected and excluded by the conventional education system have every chance, and every right, of sorting themselves out with a little help, and of settling into an ordinary life.

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