I only once played hookey from school: my boyfriend got hold of a spare dentist’s appointment card and made me a fake appointment so that I got the morning off. I’d like to say I had a great time but actually I was terrified of being found out as it would have been such a Huge Deal: I’d probably have been grounded for a decade and had all my pocket money stopped in perpetuity. Everything was Terribly Serious in those days.
One of the reasons I was so keen to skip school was hockey. I loathed hockey; I couldn’t see the point of it at all (and still can’t) and I was terrible at it. I’ve never been good at anything which involves physical confrontation, and being bruised and battered by lumps of wood and shouted at for an hour at a time, was not my idea of fun. In fact I’m not good at games where people shout a lot; partly because I don’t like shouting but mainly because I can’t work out what the hell they’re saying. They look at me from fifty yards away and yell: ‘Whadayamesaside! Go!’ and I just want to go up to them and say, ‘Sorry – what was that again? I didn’t quite catch it.’ But by the time I’ve done that, the scrum (or whatever) has come along and trampled me underfoot. As a result I was never picked for any team and spent hockey games shivering and dribbling up and down the side with a couple of other rejects: whenever the teacher wasn’t looking we would stop and crack jokes.
I’m a little tired this morning because Zadie Smith kept me awake. I’ve not read her before and initially I didn’t like ‘N-W’, the book of hers about North-West London which I got from the library. But it’s hooked me in now – and it reminded me so forcibly of living in London and what that was like and how vehemently I hated it, that I couldn’t put the thing down.
http://www.avclub.com/articles/zadie-smith-nw,84991/
Seriously, you couldn’t possibly pay me enough to go and live in London now. I lived in the same house for more than ten years, and when I went down the road the only people who spoke to me were parishioners who would usually find something to reprimand (church was very formal in those days). I knew the people in the shops, but they never spoke; nor did anyone ever chat at a bus stop unless they wanted to be taken for a loony. Here, when I go down the road I am likely to see neighbours who will say hello even if I don’t know them very well; people from church who will stop for a chat; staff in shops and in the library – and everyone will talk to you at the bus stop. It just makes life so much easier – and more pleasant. Things work so much better – you can exchange information, help each other out, lessen feelings of loneliness and isolation… Seriously, I can’t bear London.
OK that’s enough of a rant. Speaking of rants, I have a nearly-finished poem called ‘For Your Good’ which is about the too-frequent use of the expression ‘my bad’. Which I also loathe.
Kirk out