Ok Folks, so here we are at the end of November.

Well I didn’t go very far this month apart from more gardening, which mostly consisted of picking up leaves and fence fixing.

Never one to look a gift horse in the mouth though, I have now completely updated my training material for PAT 5 (COPISITEE) and am completely ready to go with this. I have already published a brief summary of the changes on my Ted Barrett Services Facebook page.

I must say I was surprised how quickly the examining body updated their exams so I couldn’t afford to hang about anyway. The upshot of this of course means that if you train for COPISITEE with me, you will get the very latest training.

Talking of training, I remember reading somewhere that there is a basic human body type and appearance that falls within about 187 sub-sets. Now you might think that sounds a bit of a rash statement but after a lifetime of meeting people both professionally and socially I am beginning to warm to this idea.

If you are in the teaching/training profession this goes some way to explain why we often see the same bloke in classes across the country. Unless he’s the bleeding Count St Germain who never ages, he keeps popping up in my class.

One particular type I’m thinking of is the weasel-like bod with a scrawny moustache, lank hair and incessantly smokes roll-ups – Ah, I see you recognise him now.

Now then, this guy is usually one of life’s great tragedies. He is actually quite smart but (for various reasons) was never really able to apply himself to study and develop that brain to a higher level. Couple this with the fact that he married far too early to somebody who was just looking for a husband and turned him into factory fodder. His function in life is therefore simply to be a means of bringing money in to provide for a housewife and children.

There are of course, other characters that keep popping up, and I often find myself asking “weren’t you in Somerset last week?” On the other hand, perhaps it’s just me going loopy.

When I was doing my teacher training we studied quite a few aspects of how the brain functions such as cognitive development along with Freud and Jung etc which I found absolutely fascinating in as much as it explained many things that I had often wondered about.

Thank god that bloody election is over, one day the media will realise that the everyday people of one country are not really interested in the politics of another country. But there again, that would strip away another cheap TV trick wouldn’t it. The next one they’ll try is to tell us we are all fascinated by Baseball and try to get us hooked on the “World Series” (it’s a funny “World” though cos its only in the states!).

I belong to a club that meets at Woodstock and I am most upset that for the first time in what must be at least twenty-five years we will not be having a Christmas get-together. What a bloody swine that is. The heart-breaking part is that many members are of senior years and will not be able to have that last Christmas with friends. My old friend Harold Taylor was a member of this same club, Joanne and I miss him daily.

Even more heart-breaking is that we won’t be able to have a family Christmas dinner at our house as the numbers will probably be too great, so we need to break up the festivities between households over a couple of days instead. All things considered though, I’ll just be grateful if we are all still alive by then. To be quite honest, I’m grateful to be alive every day.

On a different note but still concerning Christmas, I love a good ghost story on Christmas Eve. I’m not really that keen on “Scrooge” but to my mind “The Dead Sexton” by J. Sheridan Le Fanu is the ultimate Christmas ghost story.

Talking about stories, they generally tend to follow previously defined plots, such as boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy meets girl again. The books my wife read all seem to start off with a divorcee or widow starting life again in a seaside town and often involves a cake shop.

However, lets consider Scrooge again. See if you can identify where this plot has been used so many times since. Lets kick off with “Back to the Future” (this remains one of my favourite films). So what’s happening? Well, George McFly cocked up his life because he didn’t like “confrontation” and ended up living on a trailer park. When Marty goes back to good old 1955 (what a great year) he has the chance to change George’s future, and does. So again, like Scrooge, it is a morality tale and shows we have different paths available to us if we so choose or push ourselves. Interestingly, in BtF II, we again see the results of disastrous life choices and a rare chance to change those events.

So, if we had the chance to change those events in life would we? (beginning to sound like Barbara Streisand now) I know some things I would certainly like to change in my history, but I can’t help but feel there was a reason for all the stupid as well as the occasional smart things I did. I also agree with my old mate and fellow college lecturer Gerry, (an Afrikaner who’s surname name I could never pronounce) Gerry believed that everything we do and everyone we meet is for a reason. I couldn’t agree more.

Now because I publish my blog at the end of each month, that means this will be the last you’ll hear from me until 2021. So I’m going to take this opportunity to wish all my readers (even the secret ones) a Merry Christmas and a very Cool Yule.

Ted voice 2 reckons he found the diary of a Spanish priest from 1536 in the Biblioteca Maria Zambrano in Madrid, which had a hidden message revealing the location of a lost Inca city of gold (yeah, right) so he’s currently hacking through the Amazon with an hyper excited gold gland. However, he has texted in to wish all our readers a “Fair dinkum Crimbo”. I wouldn’t quite put it like that, but he means well.