It’s my birthday

 It’s my birthday and so I’m going to treat myself by writing a blog about innuendo.

I love to laugh. The quirky, the misheard and the misunderstood are my favourite things. Although we have been married a long time, the Long Suffering Husband can still buy the best birthday card. 

The great thing about enjoying smuttiness is that because my Friday afternoons are spent working with year 6 children my week nearly always ends with an ‘only here’ moment.

There are a small group of boys who are obsessed with sausages. They work ‘sausage’ into almost every answer they give me. It started with the register. I asked them to answer with their favourite food and for some reason all the year 6 boys enjoy a sausage. I didn’t laugh but the corners of my eyes might have twitched.

The week after I asked them to answer with their favourite fruit. This prompted a bittersweet memory of my dad. One of his many (unexplainable) catchphrases was, “Sausages are my favourite fruit.” When he said it, though, it was never followed by sniggering and side-eye checking for approval from the other boys in the room. 

The week after, they were bolder and asked if the question could be “What’s your favourite sausage?” I suppose I should have shut it down there but I wanted to see. I knew that none of them would be brave enough to name their own sausage.

“My favourite sausage is the one I keep in my trousers, Miss.”

It is what they are doing though. Extra long, big, fat and  juicy are frequently mentioned. 

This week I decided that the ring leader could choose and ask the question. It can be interesting for them to see how it feels. I was wondering if he would try to take a serious register but he went for chaos.

“Do you like sausages?” he asked.

Most of the girls picked up the cue and quietly  answered “No”. The boys revelled in their answer, “Why wouldn’t I? What’s not to like about a sausage?”

One girl though, loudly and proudly, made me want to laugh.

“I only like German sausages!” she announced.

I vowed to shut down the sausage talk because it’s embarrassing the girls and the boys don’t really realise what they are saying.

For the rest of the music lesson we were using straws to act as double reeds to make a pavane with a recorder tune over the top. It was complicated composing that required an understanding of rhythm notation, pulse, pitch and texture. It also took the technical skill of being able to play the recorder and get a sound from the double reed straw. 

Double reed straws cause a lot of excitement. Two classes had tried them the week before (the classes who hadn’t wasted a lot of time on sausages). One boy had got it really quickly and asked to go to the toilet. 

“But Miss, he’s already been to the toilet,” the other’s complained when I said he could go.

I thought but luckily didn’t say, “I know but he wants to go and blow his thing in private.” He did but not how I made it sound in my head. So I just shrugged.

“He probably needs a poo,” they told me.

Too much information.

This week when I gave out the straws one of the sausage boys said, “Oh good, we get the blow jobs this week.”

If it hadn’t been a sausage boy I would have assumed it was a slip of the tongue (so to speak) but he was obviously asked to leave the room until I had finished the input.

When I went to speak to him he was shamefaced. 

“Just. Not. Appropriate.” I said.

“I don’t know what it means,” he said.

“Whether that’s true or not, you can come back in but don’t say it again.”

He didn’t take the opportunity to draw a line under it. 

“People in the playground last week said that they were called a blow job.”

“Well, they’re not,” I said, thinking, “Oh great! What did children tell their parents I’d given out last week?”