Where: A residential school for young people with severe challenging behavior.
13:30pm: It's the school's Christmas party and I have volunteered to be Santa. Everyone has just finished eating and are playing musical chairs. By 'playing' i mean the staff are trying their best to stop the kids from kicking the crap out of each other as they fight over the chairs. Why they are fighting is any ones guess because someone has forgotten that their needs to be one less chair so there is a seat for everyone.
14:00pm: I am in a back room donning my red suit and beard. I begin to wonder why i am doing this. The kids don't give a shit about Santa, they just want presents and a chance to slap each other.
14:20pm: Santa enters to a crowd of happy faces. Well to a crowd of faces anyway. Some of the young people are more interested in trying to eat their own shoelaces or jiggling about. Some of them seem genuinely excited. I begin to 'work the room', waving and shaking hands.
14:25pm: I start handing out presents. Many of the kids are more interested in the paper.
14:30pm: I reach Safi, a young Asian boy who is very much the incarnation of a caveman. He communicates through 'ugs' and hitting people on the head to get his own way. I hand him a present.. he starts to open it.
14:31pm: Santa Claus is running around the room with a 17 year old caveman attached to his jolly red shoulder by his teeth. He clearly got upset that the colouring book he was given wasn't a bike. Other staff members are attempting to pull him off.
14:32pm: Other staff members have stopped trying to pull the boy off and are instead attempting to remove him from my shoulder.
14:33pm: I am laid face down on the floor with a 17 year old caveman being forcibly removed from my back. The other young people are going wild. One boy attempts to kill Safi by stabbing him with a Crayola Pencil for attempting to murder Father Christmas.
15:00pm: I am sat in a backroom. Someone has just finished dressing my shoulder wound. I have no idea why I am still wearing the beard though.
