Parading around on a Sunday Morning

My goodness, it has been another few months since I wrote my last post. Silly how when I first started off I updated every other week, but now I can barely write a post a month. I am sorry readers. Exams are looming, and now I am on study leave I have more time to write an update, as well never having another school lesson again, which is in itself a bizarre thought. Overall I have really enjoyed my lessons at school, and do have a deep respect, fondness and appreciation for a few of my teachers, which I will probably maintain for the rest of my life. However, if there is one thing which has characterised me as anything but a good, frugal student, it has to be the way any punishments I receive seem to follow each other in a sort of Butterfly effect.

We have pretty bizarre Draconian punishments at my school; among which is what is affectionately known as a 'pink card'... which is funnily enough a piece of pink card (I now have a serious aversion to pink these days), and 'Sunday Morning Parade'. This is when the 'powers that be' or in reality a biscuit-munching teacher who serves the purpose of being in charge of all punishments (you know, one of those people who spend their entire lives gazing at subfuscous flasks full of chemicals and have the periodic table printed on their pyjamas), requires you to march around the town at an obscene hour on a Sunday morning picking up... litter. Lovely. So come Sunday, when there isn't even any litter left around, we busy ourselves trekking around the campus with essentially nothing to do. It just so happened that one week of an extraordinarily bad run in with three 'pink cards' which had already resulted in one 'Sunday Morning Charade', the library, in some paroxysm of schadenfreude, decided they were going to give me another one for not 'returning my books'. As if anyone even takes books out of libraries anymore, and when someone does, they have to ruin their weekend lie-in. The next time I saw the librarian I was tempted to drop an Oxford English Dictionary on her head.

On another matter, I haven't had a good old rant for sometime, so I think its time for me to re-ignite my complaining voice about one topic which has annoyed me at school: handshakes. Why is it that nowadays people cannot give a normal handshake? Although we could go on forever trying define what we mean by normal, in this case I take it to mean the good solid, firm handshake with a gentle swinging movement which has charactererised our noble, stuffy English culture, but it seems that my generation is incapable of doing a normal handshake. Have you ever just met someone, and they try to pull some palm-slapping switchy, twitchy, friggity hand-jive, which most people would need a special class to train for? And I don't really buy into this whole fist-knocking thing either. I've seen monkeys do this on a nature programme, and not only are we stuck in some anachronism in which we have failed to evolve out of this primitive behavior, we also seem to now have some co-ordination disfunctionality which renders us incapable of just holding someone's hand without finding the need to do some spastic finger snap. At the same time, for those of you who do take part in the humble handshake, if you are going to do it, please don't do limp handshakes as though you've just been treated with flunitrazepam. I suppose the reason I'm going on about all this is because I once did a tour for a prospective student and his mother, who gave me a handshake which was so pathetic it made her hand feel like a piece of dead lettuce.

I also had to explain to her the whole principle of what is called CCF at our school, something which is essentially when the students get the chance to play soldiers with guns, with the excuse of trying to ossify themselves for their later lives. However, some of the boys get a bit too attached to their army kit, going so far as to wear camouflage style trousers and tops in their spare time, with the excuse of that dumb urban-pseudo philosophy:

"Well, I, I wear 'em, cos on the streets, I'mma soldier yo!"

And what you do see them wearing is some acrimonious, bizarre 'designer' camo-trousers sporting the colours yellow and black. What the hell are you trying to blend into? A bee hive?! The worst is white and black... I call this, cow-mouflage.

Speaking of cows, I have had a few unfortunate run-ins with the local fauna at my school. Doing rowing as a sport I have to run down to the boat-house which is happily surrounded by fields of cows. However these silly animals seem to have taken a certain interest in me more than anyone, and I have found myself on numerous occasions running like a maniac away from a pile of inquisitive, charging, 2000 pound lumps of mooing cellulite. We also have a resident dog in my boarding house which, unlike the cows, has a definite hatred of me, and will try to subdue me by any means possible; including pinning me to the ground and barking directly into my face like a manic wolf on LSD.

Still despite all this I will always hold my teachers and merry school days in very high esteem. Who knows. Maybe when I'm a millionaire I'll donate money to the school to hire some bin men.

Listen to the album 'A Thousand Suns' by Linkin Park, as well as 'Fortunate Son' by Creedence Clearwater Revival.