Well! If TES isn't returning the Community forums under the same or very similar conditions to how they were, I'm not bothering to pursue it any further.
It's quite strange getting used to not checking in on the site after thirteen years of daily visits and countless hours of discussion and postings.
I keep finding new videos on YouTube of brilliant musicians and have to remind myself there's no more copy and paste to 'More Music' a thread I started a good few years ago. It must be about six years that thread was going.
Friends come and friends go but, seldom is a whole community closed down in one stroke with no notice.
Even so, I've always maintained that TES Personal and TES Opinion aren't owned by me and it's perfectly correct that the owners do as they wish.
On to other things now. One thing the closing down of TES Community has done is make me recognise yet again how I got here: living in this house, doing the work I'm doing etc.
When I first qualified, I travelled hundreds of miles to live in a ancient and unheated mobile home in order to secure six hours a week teaching in community education unaware I had to generate my own students. It came to nothing and set me on a course that leaves me back labouring and basically skint.
I can think of no other work in my life that has so impoverished me than teaching.
Twenty-five years ago, seeing the ad in the TES, I arrived out in the Fens with £7.00 in my pocket and a grotty mobile home on a traveller site to live in.
I think through all my struggles in education I have still retained that illusion that teaching is a good and honourable job.
I know it isn't and the whole set-up is as rotten as those racist violent factories and building sites I used to work on.
It's taught me a much deeper hatred of the middle classes. Their thin veneer isn't evident until you're in their midst. Education is rotten to the core. It's a great con and their insurance is to tell you it's better than not being educated. I totally disagree. I can think of few things worse in this life than becoming a teacher.
I was a fatal mistake I made and one I bailed out of after seven years. Once I stopped I also stopped drinking. If I'd have carried on teaching I would have drunk myself to death.
I believe I was a good teacher but, I met so many cowards and bullies in teaching I'll never regret leaving it. It's an horrendous environment: basically inhumane and damaging.
There's more honour in factories and building sites.
The enlightened who have got out and the retired are back being academics while those still practicing need to be avoided at all cost.
I find most teachers toxic.