I went to first school in a small village and in the time I was there the number of pupils was never more than 60. If it snowed or a family moved away or went on holiday, the numbers could plummet to below 10. I mention these numbers because there were never less than 4 teachers which meant a very good teacher/pupil ratio. You would think this would allow the teachers to go into more detail on subjects and generally teach us more but in reality it just meant there was more time to fill and it turned out they often filled the extra time by just making stuff up. For example;
On his first day of middle school a friend of mine was in a Science class when the teacher asked someone to explain colour. My friend excitedly raised his hand and started making uhhh, uhhhhh noises, straining to raise his hand higher than anyone else, the way you did in school when you knew the answer. The teacher nodded at him and he proudly began to explain colour to the rest of the class, as it had been explained to him in first school. He confidently stated that the sky is filled with invisible buckets full of different coloured paint and as the earth spins round and round, the paint buckets tip over and all the paint mixes together to make colours which then land on everything in the world and that is what colour is.
The teacher gawped at him like he was a retarded mule, half the class laughed uncontrollably whilst the rest just looked on disdainfully, their tiny little faces filled to the brim with pity. From that point on he thought twice about answering questions in class, worried to explain that lemonade came from bee tears just in case it was just something Mrs. Green had made up to fill time.
N.B. My time at first school was utterly amazing and despite being presented with the odd bullshit I loved it more than anything.
How was this not horrifying to me as a child. Watching it now makes me want to give up everything and shiver myself to sleep in a shop doorway with only a blanket of paranoia to keep me warm.
Perhaps my only hope is to marvel at this amazing list of the shows guest appearances. Garry Glitter, George Best, Geoff Capes, Eric Bristow, Bernard Cribbins, Willie Thorne and Barbara Windsor. Splendid.
I was just thinking the other day what story I would have to make up if I ever fed my dog mushrooms and killed it and I didn’t want people to know. Apparently this is it.
Just watched Star Wars again and couldn’t help digging out this old yet still amazing retelling of the story by someone that’s never seen it. I love the confusion about Han Solo and whether he is perhaps a German called Hans Solo. Beautiful.
This recording of the dispersion of sound waves through ice is wonderful. For New Year 2009 I stayed with friends in a cottage in Finsthwaite near a frozen lake. As we walked up to the lake we heard the same sound echoing around the valley. When we finally made it we found a little boy smacking the ice with a stick producing this huge Star Wars like sound. We then proceeded to spend far too much time doing it ourselves.
I love this music video and was wondering how they’d managed to make it look and feel so authentic. It turns out the footage is taken from a 1977 public information film for British Transport called The Finishing Line. You can watch the actual film here (part 1, part 2). It was deemed so controversial at the time that it was replaced by the slightly less brutal but still harrowing Robbie, which is the one we all got shown at school. You can watch Robbie here (part 1, part 2). I remember sitting in assembly at middle school watching Robbie and all the other utterly terrifying films they showed us, convinced that I would meet a similar horrific fate at some point in my childhood (in my mind I was going to die being electrocuted whilst retrieving an Aerobie from an electricity substation).
This brought to mind the Friday Film Specials, and some of the scarier Children’s Film Foundation productions, the sole purpose of which seemed to be to scare the living shit out of children thus making them utterly scared of adults, the outdoors, modern technology and life in general. I particularly remember One Hour To Zero about a boy who runs away from home. Upon his return he finds his village deserted and is unaware that the village has been evacuated due to danger of explosion at a nearby Nuclear Research Station. The message is clear; even if you’re being beaten to within an inch of your life, starved or abused at home you better not run away or else a nuclear holocaust will get you and everyone else in the world.
I still have a corner of my mind filled with disconnected scenes from these films just waiting to haunt my dreams. A young Dexter Fletcher breaking into old ladies houses while bunking off school only to be caught by the police and sent to prison for ever and ever and ever. That shit scary guy from Lovejoy who played the googly eyed Tinker chasing children round deserted woods and taking them to an island where nobody would ever find them. A kid who was posessed by a pair of red trousers that made him steal things and break into his school only to be caught by the caretaker who was probably played by the previously mentioned googly eyed Tinker. There was also apocalyptic films like Threads, the 1984 television docudrama depicting the effects of a nuclear war on the United Kingdom with the bomb landing in Sheffield (clip, full film). I watched it recently and it’s really ace and really harsh.
When I was 6 or 7 I went shopping with my Mum and suddenly became paralysed in my right leg. For the rest of the day I walked round with one normal leg and one floppy, woefully inadequate leg. 24 years later I am trying to remember if I made it up in a vain attempt to to get my Mum to buy me something or whether it was genuine.
Favorite Youtube comment: LLS… Thi shit has me cackling like shit! DAMN… That shot fucked her all up.
