Friday, Second lesson, R.E.

The bell went for second lesson, but before I went, I had to get my RE book out of my locker.  I opened the door to find that the mushroom stroganoff I’d made in cookery last week had reacted with this week’s Watery-liquid juice puree and cultured a new species of fungus.  

Fun Gus

The WWF[1] and National Parks council have declared my locker a site of special scientific interest and ramblers from different countries are currently making their way to St Evander’s as I write[5].  My RE book was under a small mammal I have been allowed to call a ‘Bankank’[2] by the international new species naming committee. 

Davina, the Bankank

I trotted off to RE in the English block. We learn all about Hindus and Buddists.  Mr Toe, the RE teacher makes us sit in ones, in rows and columns with a desk each – except Steve, who doesn’t get a desk after he scratched slogans into it with his teeth at the start of term.  There are loads of bibles on the shelves and in one of them it has ‘Turn to page 33’ on the front cover, on page 33 it says ‘Turn to page 88’ and so on, until you’ve visited 72 different pages and the last message reads ‘now get on with your work you lazy twit’.  No one has used the word ‘twit’ out loud since 1981 – anyone who does, gets pointed at and poked in the elbow with an S Club 7 ruler (or its equivalent depending on what year it is[3]). 

The now infamous question on the RE exam paper last year was ‘Who was Amos?’  Everyone put the same answer except me, I put ‘My best friends dad’.  Actually, my best friend put ‘My dad’ which technically is the same answer if you follow?  Actually in the Hebrew bible, Amos was called from his rural home to remind the rich and powerful of God's requirement for justice. He claimed that religion that is not accompanied by right action is anathema to God, and prophesied that the kingdom of Israel would be destroyed.  Which is what I’ve been trying to tell the people in smokers corner all these years!! 

Amos in the 90s

The bell went to signal morning break.  Me and Wazzy were bored so we tried to traverse the side of the physics classroom like Olympic athletes but Wazzy got hit in the face by a stray football which knocked him off and broke his prefect badge.  He needed a sit down after that so we went to the prefect room in Edam House where he is a prefect.  

They can't even spel

The prefect room is a small room set aside in which prefects can relax during breaks – it’s one of the perks.  The other is that you get to shout obscenities at first years and call it a ‘deterrent’.  The room itself has comfy chairs from the 70’s[4] and a “hi-fi” on which only the radio works and the tape player if you jam a small plastic dinosaur in the side to keep the tape in.  I set Wazzy down on one of the Chaise-longues and set off for tuck-shop.  There was a big queue out the door of Edam house as there was only one prefect serving and he’s got no depth of perception due to his eye pad[6].  The bell went before I got served so I just ran in, knocked everything off the table in protest and ran away to the Drama room where 3^rd lesson was about to begin.

---

[1] The World Wrestling Federation.

[2] Sadly now extinct c.2002.

[3] In 2012 it would be a Dizzy Rascal  ruler.

[4] 1870’s.

[5] Still are

[6] A pad on his left eye, not a computer tablet

Friday, First Lesson, Economics

Friday 17^th September

           

I got to school early today and sat on the wall outside the main entrance.  I watched the teachers go in and tramp up the stairs to the staff room where they no doubt down cups of awful coffee and read the Guardian.  The Guardian is called Steve and he always wears slogan T-Shirts.

Some teachers look world weary while others positively skip into the building – they’re normally the ones who teach A-level, the ones in the depths of despair teach the classes that contain pupils who would rather throw and shout than learn.  Prazzy, who is in one of these classes set fire to his left sock in Mr B’pants lesson. He also turned a stapler into an aircraft, glued two first year’s faces together and worst of all, didn’t hand his maths homework in on time.  He got expelled and suspended for that, and came back the week after and put in class 4A.  I’m in 2.  

A typical lesson with Mr. B'pants

Tazzy has started a craze of wearing cardigans instead of blazers, which all the people who want to be cool[1] have copied.  The people who want to be warm have also copied this. The real cool people do generally what they want and don’t follow fashion.  Take Yazzy for example, he wears flares, has really bushy hair with things living in it and never brushes his teeth.  The cool thing is no one has followed his chosen style – now that’s cool!  

Everyone looks good in a cardy, even people you need to spy on with binoculars

At about 8:15, Nizzy walked by on her way to Brie house. She smiled at me when she walked past.  I asked her out once and she screamed in my face and then had an attack of hysteria and ran off.  I went to see her later and asked, “Was that a yes or a no?”.  She head-butted me in the face.  I still don’t know what her answer was.  If she fancies me why doesn’t she just say?  I guess that smile she flashed me as she walked past was merely for the memory of me lying on the ground trying to keep my nose attached to my face.  A little harsh I thought, but it hasn’t put me off asking her out again.  As a contingency, I asked Wendy out last week, the one that’s got one cheek bigger than the other; she whacked me in the shins with her badminton racket and ran into the girls’ toilets crying.  Plenty more fish in the sea although it seems that girls look at me as the effluent that decreased the biodiversity index in the river of love. 

Barry's love life

8:30am and the swots start to turn up, getting out of their parents Audis and Bentleys.  Dazzy was early, getting out of his Dad’s Lada with a ski mask on so no one would recognise him.  Would have worked if he hadn’t worn the one his Gran knitted for him last Christmas[2].

You deserve to wear a ski mask if you get in one of these

Quarter to nine and lots of people are milling about now, drinking pop and hitting each other with their school bags.  There’s a fashion right now where people zip the small triangular bag off the end of their sports bag and carry that around with them.  It’s a good deterrent to bullying when you put a chambers dictionary in it I suppose.  Big Jock McPugilist has invented a new version of tag where he chases people and when he catches them, he punches them really hard in the mouth.  Ozzy likes it, it gets him out of French Oral.

My advice? Don't type 'French Oral' into Google Image search

On the way to my tutor room I passed smokers corner.  The people who hang out here like to look hard[3] and make believe they’re in control of the entire school.  Fact is, they’re not in control of anything being as they are, slaves to tobacco.  They spend most of their time up the ‘top shop’ hanging around buying singles[4] and taking money off first years to fuel their habit. Some are so addicted, if they can’t afford tabs, they set fire to an item of clothing and breathe that in. On one occasion, Cizzy set fire to Nizzy and tried to smoke him.  When they get caught, which they do with startling regularity, being as how smoker’s corner has come to the attention of every teacher in the school, they get their tabs confiscated.  Mr Gout has never had to buy tabs for 15 years.  Turns out the smokers have disproved Darwin’s theory of conditioned instinct and natural selection. If it were true, they’d move on to another favourable habitat in which they could exist and not have their tabs taken off them every day at 8:55 by the same teacher.  Or at least they would have evolved a method of smoking the tabs without being seen.

Only really cool, hard and clever kids will know what this is

Registration was strange this morning. No one spoke at all. Everyone just sat looking shiftily at each other.  Because no one was talking, no one wanted to speak first because the whole room would hear what they said and no one was confident that the thing they wanted to say was interesting enough for everyone else not to think they were (a) boring (b) a socialist or (c) a spanner.  We sat in silence through the whole of registration, only the sound of Mr Chipolata's pen scratching on the register cutting through the eerie silence.  Razzy farted which broke the peace 0.1 second before the bell went for first lesson. 

First lesson today was Economics.  I love this subject because it makes you feel all grown up, learning about the stock exchange and finance and why orange juice is 87p at Tesco and 3p at Netto – that sort of thing.  Mrs Highair takes this subject as well as Business Studies. I guess they’re intrinsically linked or whatever.  She did a few of those transparent plastic paper things on the overhead projector about fecundity.  Uzzy laughed everytime she said the word fecundity because he’s immature and thought it sounded a bit rude.  I didn’t think it sounded rude, I thought it sounded like ******. I didn’t laugh though, it’s immature. 

Fecundity/play time

The teacher thinks I’m a really hard worker. I’m not, I sit next to Tizzy who is dead clever and I copy off him.  Once, I copied off him so literally, I put his name at the top of my test paper.  This other time though, I copied his work word for word and I got 98% and he got 97%.  Unable to hold my curiosity, I asked the teacher how that could be and she stripped me of all my marks for that term for cheating – I still didn’t find out why I got 1% more than him too – double whammy!!  Mmmm… that reminds me, I really fancied a Wham bar – tuck shop is on a Friday in Edam house. 

---

[1] Cool people used to say ‘beast’ or ‘mint’.  Which I think is kinda cool.

[2] I remember that ski-mask.  It had ‘Darren Gold’ embroidered on the forehead in white wool.

[3] Physically or mentally tough.

[4] One cigarette is called a single although the top shop did sell Adam Ant’s new single in 1982.