I'm thinking about heading South this Sunday, to tackle my first Munro. The one I have in mind is Schiehallion, a little bit West of Pitlochry. There are plenty Munro's much closer to home, but the ones further North are all snow-covered right now, and that's not really suitable for beginners. There is also the problem of my lingering knee pain, first it was the left knee, now it's the right. Unfortunately, I have had problems with the right knee in the past, so I'm kind of hoping I haven't awoken a sleeping lion there. Watched "The Real Indiana Jones" on Channel 5 the other night, quite interesting. It seems to be that Indiana Jones is based on real-life adventurers, although not directly as you might have expected. Instead, it seems that Lucas and Spielberg based the character on their recollections of "Matinees" that they both watched as children. These shows featured all action heroes and clear distinctions between the good guys and the bad guys. The shows were of course based on real characters, not that Spielberg or Lucas might have known that. They simply had a T.V. diet on which they thrived. So Indie is a third-hand version of a hotch-potch of early 20th Century adventurers and explorers.
I've another week or so before I'm back in school for a five week run, at the end of which that will be me, virtually a teacher, although only provisionally for the first year, but at least I'll start getting paid. This course has been a hard slog. You can tell from the drop-out rate, and even amongst those that will finish, I have heard many of them saying that they don't plan to take up teaching places after the Summer, on all sorts of pretexts. The most likely route for many will be to simply finish the course, and never teach at all, because they don't want to quit so close to the finish, but they've already decided that teaching's not for them!
