(no subject)

I feel that I should record the fact that Sainsbury's in Victoria gave me a fiver today, because neither they nor I were sure that they hadn't accidentally done me out of that amount in my change last week.

It's not that often that I feel well particularly well disposed towards a corporate entity, so it's unusual enough to warrant a note, even if it's only in a blog read by a limited number of (admittedly discerning) people.

Beyond that, I don't really feel like writing tonight.

So I won't.

(no subject)

I feel that I should record the fact that Sainsbury's in Victoria gave me a fiver today, because neither they nor I were sure that they hadn't accidentally done me out of that amount in my change last week.

It's not that often that I feel well particularly well disposed towards a corporate entity, so it's unusual enough to warrant a note, even if it's only in a blog read by a limited number of (admittedly discerning) people.

Beyond that, I don't really feel like writing tonight.

So I won't.

(no subject)

Over on his LJ, my old friend telemeister and I have been reminiscing about school days at Adams’ Grammar School in Newport, Shropshire back in the 70s. The days when the world was garish, the music glittery, shoes platformed and clothes flared.

The mullet was the hair style of choice for many a spotty oik, and those of us who didn’t have one generally had long hair with centre partings. I recall that we were not allowed to grow a beard at school (one or two of us thought we could, but they were distinctly nu-metal Belgian beards, and hideous). I myself, in one of those rebellious streaks that you spend the rest of your life regretting¹, had sideburns that stopped exactly one razor’s width apart. You couldn’t call them mutton-chop sideburns unless you were taking your sheep from Belsen, but they would have been had my face follicles been more accommodating between the ages of 16 and 20.

My mother told me that I looked like an idiot, and Dad (unwittingly quoting Rod Stewart) said we looked ridiculous.

You have to remember that I was only half the man then that I am now, almost literally. (I believe the weight gain over the past 25 years puts me officially one steak dinner away from being two people – neither of them anorexic).

This has sent me into something of a reverie, as I am choosing to remember the bits I liked, or rather of which I have fond memories. My good friend telemeister has rather darker memories of being bullied on occasion, but advancing senility has largely edited that sort of unpleasantness from my bonce. Thus it is that I can recall standing in the sun on the lawn behind Beaumaris House in the late summer of 1973 with a bunch of friends listening to Suzi Quatro singing Can the Can on the tranny,².

The masters (for they were masters: no mere teachers for the likes of us) were an odd and unlikely bunch. Most of them (but not quite all) now retired, and many sadly deceased.

There was old Motty Mottershaw, the senior historian: a man with breath that could drop an elephant at twenty paces. His successor in waiting, one Rodney Rodders Jones, the cheery young history master who liked to pretend he was one of the chaps. A man who looked rather aghast when a friend of ours, John Cotterill (who later joined the army and who I believe is currently a major serving in Basra), hauled him over the coals in class for disparaging the achievements of the army in the First World War³.

And what of old Bernie Deakin, the world-weary giant of a chemistry teacher who would look balefully at miscreants and announce that he would “come down on them like a sack of bricks from a very, very great height” if they didn’t mend their ways?
There was, for a while, Tony Cave, the English Master who was also an Old Boy. This gave him an unfair advantage, because he always knew exactly where people went to skive off, carve their names in the masonry, or just have a smoke. He’s done it all himself ten years earlier. He like modern jazz, and drove around town in a half-timbered estate car with a double-bass sticking out of the back.

I think he may have been a Time Lord.

My favourite teacher was the eminently laidback Jerry Chambers, denizen of the art room and Beatle fan. He was permanently sad that the school no longer had a skiffle band, and bemoaned in a gentle way the fact that it (skiffle) had died out after a brief flowering, some 15 years earlier.

It transpired that my cousin was going out with, or was at least a friend of my old geography teacher, Tom “Master” Bate. In those days he was fresh from teacher training college and a dead shot at ten paces with a wooden board cleaner or piece of chalk. Of course, I had a certain licence in his class on account of my cousin. This was rather wasted by the fact that I quite liked geography, so paid attention instead of up.

Lastly, the man who closed the world of mathematics to me forever, with his cheerily boring lessons: Mr Edgoose, or Spock as he was known. He meant well, and wasn’t a particularly nasty man or anything like that. But Lord, could he bore for England. I do recall, though, his exasperated catch-phrase, “Watch the board while I go through it again.”

There were many, many more notably Flash Newton, the communist biology teacher who had the good grace not to mention to anyone outside the staff room that in one of my essays on bird reproduction, I had consistently used the word ‘clitoris’ instead of ‘cloacae’ much to my later mortification and his amusement. These are the incidents that scar us, and the fact that he didn’t take the piss out of me in front of my class mates gives me just about the only fond memory I have of that man.

Still, that’s all for another day.

¹Largely because you are never entirely sure that you have destroyed all the photographs

²I have covered this ground in previous entries: in the far more naïve 1970s a tranny was a radio, not a bloke in a dress saving up for the operation.

³I believe Johnny came very close to accusing him of treason and calling him out.

(no subject)

Over on his LJ, my old friend telemeister and I have been reminiscing about school days at Adams’ Grammar School in Newport, Shropshire back in the 70s. The days when the world was garish, the music glittery, shoes platformed and clothes flared.

The mullet was the hair style of choice for many a spotty oik, and those of us who didn’t have one generally had long hair with centre partings. I recall that we were not allowed to grow a beard at school (one or two of us thought we could, but they were distinctly nu-metal Belgian beards, and hideous). I myself, in one of those rebellious streaks that you spend the rest of your life regretting¹, had sideburns that stopped exactly one razor’s width apart. You couldn’t call them mutton-chop sideburns unless you were taking your sheep from Belsen, but they would have been had my face follicles been more accommodating between the ages of 16 and 20.

My mother told me that I looked like an idiot, and Dad (unwittingly quoting Rod Stewart) said we looked ridiculous.

You have to remember that I was only half the man then that I am now, almost literally. (I believe the weight gain over the past 25 years puts me officially one steak dinner away from being two people – neither of them anorexic).

This has sent me into something of a reverie, as I am choosing to remember the bits I liked, or rather of which I have fond memories. My good friend telemeister has rather darker memories of being bullied on occasion, but advancing senility has largely edited that sort of unpleasantness from my bonce. Thus it is that I can recall standing in the sun on the lawn behind Beaumaris House in the late summer of 1973 with a bunch of friends listening to Suzi Quatro singing Can the Can on the tranny,².

The masters (for they were masters: no mere teachers for the likes of us) were an odd and unlikely bunch. Most of them (but not quite all) now retired, and many sadly deceased.

There was old Motty Mottershaw, the senior historian: a man with breath that could drop an elephant at twenty paces. His successor in waiting, one Rodney Rodders Jones, the cheery young history master who liked to pretend he was one of the chaps. A man who looked rather aghast when a friend of ours, John Cotterill (who later joined the army and who I believe is currently a major serving in Basra), hauled him over the coals in class for disparaging the achievements of the army in the First World War³.

And what of old Bernie Deakin, the world-weary giant of a chemistry teacher who would look balefully at miscreants and announce that he would “come down on them like a sack of bricks from a very, very great height” if they didn’t mend their ways?
There was, for a while, Tony Cave, the English Master who was also an Old Boy. This gave him an unfair advantage, because he always knew exactly where people went to skive off, carve their names in the masonry, or just have a smoke. He’s done it all himself ten years earlier. He like modern jazz, and drove around town in a half-timbered estate car with a double-bass sticking out of the back.

I think he may have been a Time Lord.

My favourite teacher was the eminently laidback Jerry Chambers, denizen of the art room and Beatle fan. He was permanently sad that the school no longer had a skiffle band, and bemoaned in a gentle way the fact that it (skiffle) had died out after a brief flowering, some 15 years earlier.

It transpired that my cousin was going out with, or was at least a friend of my old geography teacher, Tom “Master” Bate. In those days he was fresh from teacher training college and a dead shot at ten paces with a wooden board cleaner or piece of chalk. Of course, I had a certain licence in his class on account of my cousin. This was rather wasted by the fact that I quite liked geography, so paid attention instead of up.

Lastly, the man who closed the world of mathematics to me forever, with his cheerily boring lessons: Mr Edgoose, or Spock as he was known. He meant well, and wasn’t a particularly nasty man or anything like that. But Lord, could he bore for England. I do recall, though, his exasperated catch-phrase, “Watch the board while I go through it again.”

There were many, many more notably Flash Newton, the communist biology teacher who had the good grace not to mention to anyone outside the staff room that in one of my essays on bird reproduction, I had consistently used the word ‘clitoris’ instead of ‘cloacae’ much to my later mortification and his amusement. These are the incidents that scar us, and the fact that he didn’t take the piss out of me in front of my class mates gives me just about the only fond memory I have of that man.

Still, that’s all for another day.

¹Largely because you are never entirely sure that you have destroyed all the photographs

²I have covered this ground in previous entries: in the far more naïve 1970s a tranny was a radio, not a bloke in a dress saving up for the operation.

³I believe Johnny came very close to accusing him of treason and calling him out.