School Daze

…and calm.

I have decided to take a few minutes out and think about just about anything other than the feeble-minded, knuckle-headed dunderbrains that make up our elected representatives.

A couple of nights back, Furtle and I were talking about this and that and the subject wandered around to school days, particularly primary school.

Furtle tells of the time she was asked a question about sums by the teacher and couldn’t get it right, no matter how many times she tried, so she just copied it from someone else. The teacher asked her how she got it right and Furtle squirmed a bit before admitting that she had copied it, making the teacher laugh because she was clearly so exasperated. This made me think about my own terror one time when old Joe Lineton, our junior school headmaster wandered around the class pointing at people and asking questions from the multiplication tables. I reckon I was about 8 or 9 at the time.

“Bryan, what is seven times seven?”

“Er. Um. Er, ooh...”

“It’s forty-nine, as everybody knows”.

A few minutes later, having randomly wandered around the class:

“Bryan, what is seven times seven?”

“Forty-nine, Sir, as everybody knows.”

He had a good sense of humour, did old Joe Lineton, and my downright cheek got me out of more than one corner.

It never occurred to me that you could have a favourite multiplication, but it seems quite by chance that Furtle’s favourite is seven times seven. Spooky.

It turns out too, that despite the passage of years and being in different parts of the country, kids’ playground antics are often conducted in the most unsubtle of ways. In Furtle’s day, Star Wars was the preferred game in the playground and she got into trouble because she got fed up with always having to be Princess Leia when the boys could choose whatever they wanted to be. Preferring to be (in order of preference) either Chewy or Han, she settled the argument by decking one of the lads after a long argument.

In my day, the preferred game in the junior school playground was, for a long time, Thunderbirds (later supplanted by Captain Scarlet and then the Champions).

Everyone wanted to be Thunderbird One, meaning you could race around the school yard with your arms held back making satisfying zoom noises. It wasn’t unusual for the fat kid to be Thunderbird Two, but these were up for negotiation and most people got a turn at one or the other. Plus there were Thunderbirds Three and Four to play and the Mole or any of the various things that had to be rescued, like the Sidewinder and other such fun things.

Invariably, however, the smelly unpopular kid was always Thunderbird Five, the space station. We told him that he was really good at it and no-one else could play it like he did. He always stood on one leg at the corner of the playground and sometimes we waved at him as we zooooomed past.

School Daze

…and calm.

I have decided to take a few minutes out and think about just about anything other than the feeble-minded, knuckle-headed dunderbrains that make up our elected representatives.

A couple of nights back, Furtle and I were talking about this and that and the subject wandered around to school days, particularly primary school.

Furtle tells of the time she was asked a question about sums by the teacher and couldn’t get it right, no matter how many times she tried, so she just copied it from someone else. The teacher asked her how she got it right and Furtle squirmed a bit before admitting that she had copied it, making the teacher laugh because she was clearly so exasperated. This made me think about my own terror one time when old Joe Lineton, our junior school headmaster wandered around the class pointing at people and asking questions from the multiplication tables. I reckon I was about 8 or 9 at the time.

“Bryan, what is seven times seven?”

“Er. Um. Er, ooh...”

“It’s forty-nine, as everybody knows”.

A few minutes later, having randomly wandered around the class:

“Bryan, what is seven times seven?”

“Forty-nine, Sir, as everybody knows.”

He had a good sense of humour, did old Joe Lineton, and my downright cheek got me out of more than one corner.

It never occurred to me that you could have a favourite multiplication, but it seems quite by chance that Furtle’s favourite is seven times seven. Spooky.

It turns out too, that despite the passage of years and being in different parts of the country, kids’ playground antics are often conducted in the most unsubtle of ways. In Furtle’s day, Star Wars was the preferred game in the playground and she got into trouble because she got fed up with always having to be Princess Leia when the boys could choose whatever they wanted to be. Preferring to be (in order of preference) either Chewy or Han, she settled the argument by decking one of the lads after a long argument.

In my day, the preferred game in the junior school playground was, for a long time, Thunderbirds (later supplanted by Captain Scarlet and then the Champions).

Everyone wanted to be Thunderbird One, meaning you could race around the school yard with your arms held back making satisfying zoom noises. It wasn’t unusual for the fat kid to be Thunderbird Two, but these were up for negotiation and most people got a turn at one or the other. Plus there were Thunderbirds Three and Four to play and the Mole or any of the various things that had to be rescued, like the Sidewinder and other such fun things.

Invariably, however, the smelly unpopular kid was always Thunderbird Five, the space station. We told him that he was really good at it and no-one else could play it like he did. He always stood on one leg at the corner of the playground and sometimes we waved at him as we zooooomed past.