Ten Things

Ten Things

What do I want to tell the world, and why? Do you really care that I chose camembert and now wish I'd had brie? Do I really want you to know it?

I wish I'd understood more during my school days. Either understood or simply memorised whatever I was told and thought no more about it. Oh, to be fick.

Why, for instance, did we learn in chemistry that everything was made of atoms and in biology that living things were made of cells? Did what you were made of depend which class you were in at the time? Were there chemistry facts that were entirely different from biology facts? Were any of them really true?

Why didn't I believe in Romans? I'd realised in my primary school days that people made stuff up and then pretended to believe it. The Romans sounded to me like another dose of Jesus. It wouldn't be long before they were telling us to love our centurion and not to covet our neighbour's onager.

As for geography, everywhere I'd been looked pretty much like where I lived. Why did countries have principal exports? What did it mean? I didn't know anybody with principal exports, unless they were keeping it to themselves. How could countries do it on their own? They were made of rocks and mud.

I was okay with maths because it was pretty well self-contained. It didn't involve believing whoppers about the world around you. I was lucky. I could so easily have started wondering why you had to borrow one, or invert and multiply, or why there were long divisions and short ones. I wasn't fucked up in maths until I started reading about the foundations of maths in my mid to late teens, but that's another story.

I had no idea what I was at school for, other than that's what you had to do. I went there to do subjects and, as far as I knew, the purpose of doing subjects was to get exams. What you did with your exams when you'd got them I had no idea. I expected there'd be somebody around to tell me what came next.

When we moved to Weston Super Mare shortly after my O-levels, I refused to go back to school. I eventually consented to go to the local technical college to take my A-levels, and that was probably my academic salvation. In a school environment I'd have crashed and burned but at tech college I discovered freedom! I grew my hair. I made friends with Hassan Arafeh and discovered that there really were foreign countries and people who came from them. Nobody at my old school in Salisbury came from anywhere but Salisbury. The most exotic thing we had was a boy with no legs.

Now, with an adult perspective, I wonder what I could have achieved if I'd known more when I was young. These days I know the difference between history, the collection of folk tales, and History, the academic discipline. These days I can write, and have something to write about. I have been to abroad and walked on it.

Is it all too late? It's certainly too late to persuade a nice man to give me a nice job, I no longer want one. Didn't ever want one before if the truth be told. But I write, and every viewpoint and piece of information can inform your writing.

Now all I have to do is find something useful to do with my writing.