It's been a thousand years...

... since I last blogged properly, and even though I think about it often, I don't really have the urge to write. Until tonight. Today I found out, quite by accident, that my high school Italian teacher died in December last year. Signora Carter was a wonderful teacher, enthusiastic, helpful, funny... she even visited me in hospital when I spent my 16th birthday suffering from Glandular Fever. Even though I haven't seen her since I graduate A LONG TIME AGO, I've thought about her often over the years... I imagined running into her one day when I was home for Christmas. I would have loved to have sat down with a coffee and told her about my life now. Told her how much her teaching meant to me. Today I feel a bit shaken up about it, she was too young, she had daughters who would be teenagers now... I never got a chance to tell her how much I appreciated her work. How I still love and speak Italian to this day, mostly because of her passion. I'm feeling sad and nostalgic for everything from home- I'm in touch with a handful of school friends, I left my hometown 15 years ago, I've never been back to my school. I feel very, very far away right now. Maybe it is also because everything is so unsettled here at the moment- we are on the brink of SOMETHING but nobody is sure what it is. I keep waiting for it to happen, but everything is carrying on as normal. There are papers to grade, student's to counsel, exams to write. I feel tense AND sad tonight.