Sunday, March 25, 2007
Things I Knew At School...When one has spent time in the British public school system, there are a great many things that the mind consigns to the mystery heap just to protect the developing adolescent from future breakdowns. But there are many others that get swept aside with them, and unnecessarily so.
As an example, I'm frequently chastised by my wonderful wife for regaling our friends with tales of knee-rides (I had done well in an art project), nose-tweaks (I had done badly in an art project), gently slapped wrists with rulers (whispering to Alistair Clarke some translated verbal test instructions from French to English, so that he knew where to write his name), and the incident of the grabbing of Andrew Westcott's buttocks in a French lesson describing body parts. Those incidents were doubtless more sinister than I realised at the time (but see The History Boys for a largely capable if precariously imbalanced walk along the tightrope between adolescent curiosity and pederasty). As a naïve pre-pubescent, my school-sanctioned exposure to sex was primarily two sets of sides I was assigned by the generous and foppish prefects: "Young's Slits", and "Skin Friction". The former fomented my interest in physics, the latter destroyed my interest in the RAF. I believe I achieved short-lived and mild acclaim for being allocated those perennial subjects. Investigating "The elastic properties of a ping-pong ball" at the age of 12 merely taught me about the seedier side of cabaret entertainment in Paris and Bangkok (my research also informed me that it was similarly possible to smoke a cigarette without using one's hands, or mouth). It seems that I was a favoured scribe for many prefects although I never became one myself (I planned on working my way from the inside - it didn't work). My familiarity with the bricks at nose-level just to the right of the prefects' room doorway was second-to-none. As I was saying, as a public schoolboy you learn a great deal of useful information from your peers and your elders, much of which you deliberately or accidentally forget, and I find that I am frequently but haphazardly reminded of such things when I least expect it. Such remembrances typically combine the soothing calm of nostalgia with the excitement of elicit and furtive detective work in the school's library of French literature, 70s biology books and questionable etymological dictionaries. Today's entry in "Things I Knew At School": That "Berk" derives from the rhyming slang of "Berkshire Hunt" for "C*nt". (via OED - or read this detailed etymology [both links prob NSFW]) |
