Cul de Sac by Richard Thompson for September 12, 2024

Ooooh! I’m sensing the Saga of the First Day of School!

Looks like my junior high.

Looks like a stalag.

First panel – I love how well RT portrays their different emotions. Alice is sooo pumped!

Back in the 70’s I had some suburban friends whose school had about 30 portable classrooms. They were in the process of building a new school a few miles away.

I spent a couple of days there going to classes with friends. I told Admin that, as a city kid from a Catholic school, I wanted to do a paper comparing the two. (Pure bs. I was cutting school. It probably helped that I showed up in dress clothes, shoes and a tie)

I think back on it on occasion and think that there’s no way in heII that you would get away with that today just on your word.

I’ve just started rereading “Neverwhere” by Neil Gaiman. Petey needs to be careful – doors, entrances, gates, can lead to very strange places.

Petey in The Labyrinth! Perhaps Ernesto will appear to guide him through. Or he could send out other Peteys to search, while he waits and chews his arm off…

When our kids were in elementary (about twenty years ago) their school had three or four portable classrooms for a couple of years, while the new wing was being constructed. The downside was that they had to take out the outdoor basketball court, which was where we’d set off our fireworks every July 4th. (The city allowed the purchase and setting-off of fireworks inside city limits. They also had drive-through daquiri stands. Always felt that was a recipe for disaster.)

My mother was a teacher for over 40 years and I’d occasionally visit her or pick her up from school. In her entire career spent in one school, which included being deputy-head for a couple of years, she only ever taught in one steel framed “temporary” classroom propped up on breeze blocks in the field at the back of the school. It kind of recalled the phrase that ‘some people spend their entire lives in places they didn’t even think they’d spend the weekend’.

I remember those . . .:)

Alas, Petey had neither a ball of thread to mark his path, nor a sword with which to fight the Minotaur… and he was never seen again.

But we AREN’T overpopulated!

I wonder if Petey takes any comfort in the fact that the buildings are a non threatening beige. A picky eater Saltine Beige.

For a moment it looked like an old war fort.

Looks like the beginning of an epic tale!

And I love it when Alice levitates!

I remember the teachers really liked to be assigned to a portable. It was their space and gave them some freedom to run things their way.