Fledging The Nest

We all know it has to happen sooner or later.

They grow up. They leave. They want to head off into the big wide world and leave behind the familiar safe comforts of home. The nest is suddenly too small to house their enthusiastic ambition. They say their goodbyes and head off into the brave new world.

I have been like a father to my student neighbours this year.

I have watched over them, my head shaking, as they have dumped enough beer cans and bottles on their front lawn to fill a landfill site the size of Wales.

I have laughed scornfully at their appalling dress sense, their idiotic facial hair furniture (ignoring my own) and the bizarre sound-bite posters they put on show in their bedroom windows.

I have gnashed my teeth and seethed through sleepless nights when the vibrations and noise from their industrial strength subwoofer has threatened to frack my entire street into Roman mosaic sized rubble. I have not understood their music. I have bewailed the tunelessness of it, the lyric ridiculousness; I have compared the endless beat and twisted synth moans to the meaningless noise emitted by a hippopotamus farting into a vuvuzela. It’s not proper music. Not like the music I used to listen to when I was their age; music that had a proper melody and lyrics that meant something that my dad nevertheless dismissed as meaningless noise.

I have shuddered every time they have slammed the front door, stomped up and down the stairs at all hours of the night and conducted loud and ebullient conversations about “how much beer, yeah, they can drink, yeah, in one sesh at the pub and still have room for a kebab, yeah, you get me?” at 4 effing a.m. in the morning.

Lord knows I’ve loved them. Lord knows I want the best for them given the amount of time, money and effort I have invested into their upbringing and education. But now that they are going, God forgive me, I can’t help but think “thank Christ, thank God it’s over”.

I wish them well. Of course I do. I wish them every success in whatever hare-brained pursuit they decide to follow.

But I consider my job to be done. I’m cutting the apron strings. I don’t want to see them back. Not ever. I’ll change the locks if I have to.

Go forth. Be men, my sons.

Go get some student kids of your own.

And then suffer as I have suffered, you little shits.

God bless.

Buzz

Lord knows I have racked my brain for her name but it is long gone. Which is a damned shame because, of all my secondary school teachers, hers is the name I’d most like to recall.

She taught Chemistry and, most importantly of all for us burgeoningly pubescent boys, she taught the girls netball.

She was young. She was fit. She was pretty.

And in the words of The Streets, my God didn’t she know it.

Most of my teachers at secondary school had had all of their emotion and sensitivity long scoured out of them by year upon year of having to teach the magic of knowledge to a zoo full of barbaric ingrates who were driven purely by the dictates of their hormones and the desire to be first in the lunch queue for chips. They looked upon us young scholars as mere animals, subhuman at best, with little chance of redemption by the examination board. We were Neanderthals in school ties.

Miss Chemistry (as I shall call her) was different.

She gave us boys knowing looks. Secret smirks. The raised eyebrow that suggested she knew exactly what we were thinking most of the time (every 8 seconds apparently) and felt a little frisson because of it. She was playing with fire to be sure. Possibly though I am reading far too much into it. Possibly I am merely tapping into the murky adolescent communal fantasy that flourished during her employ at Manor Hall Secondary School.

Whatever, she was different. She was human. And she seemed to look upon us as human or variants thereof too.

There was Chemistry indeed.

One of my most enduring memories of her is watching her referee a netball match between the 5th form girls one Wednesday lunch time. The match was held in the “tennis courts” – little more than a concrete yard fenced round with that weird plasti-coated green wire fencing. Word got around fast and within minutes the perimeter of the fence was populated by a hundred, silently slathering boys who gripped tightly onto the fence with their fingers and drank in every bounce, jump and wobble. It was like being at a dog pound – only with the desperate pups being on the outside looking in.

She played up to us for a good 20 minutes before the comments got a little too bawdy and she blew her whistle – ah those lips! – and moved us all on. I remember her looking highly amused as Mr Evans the “gardening” teacher shooed us all away before lingering himself. Just to make sure we didn’t return, I’m sure.

The story that went round the school just before she left for pastures new was that during one Chemistry lesson she’d been fishing round in her handbag for a tissue when something long, smooth and intimately cylindrical rolled out onto the laboratory desk.

It wasn’t a Bunsen burner I can tell you. It had a compartment for batteries.

By the end of the day she’d earned the nickname “Buzz”.

By the end of the week the 5th form boys were shouting “buzzzzzz!” at her every time she walked by them in the corridor.

Her position had become untenable.

She was gallingly replaced by a weird moustachioed guy in a tweed jacket who looked like Michael Fish. He thought himself a right comedian but jokes – even good ones – could never replace what we’d lost.

I often think of Miss Chemistry now and wonder where she is. What she’s doing. What happened was a tragedy. But the tragedy was on us boys.

We just were not man enough.

That’s what all those knowing looks and smirks were about. She wasn’t laughing with us.

We just weren’t man enough...

The Year Of The Bully

My oldest boy starts secondary school in September.

He seems well reconciled to it, helped by the fact he has been allocated a place at the school they he himself favoured above all others.

Weirdly, the school is built on the site of my old secondary school which was demolished and then redeveloped around 10 years ago, so when we attended the open evening at the end of last year it presented a strange kind of memory shock. I found myself looking out of the windows of classrooms that did not exist when I was last on this site to take in views that haven’t changed since I was a teenager.

That, coupled with apprehension for how my boy will cope with his first year at secondary school brought a lot of things back to me. Most of them not pleasant.

Because the first year at secondary school is always the worst.

It’s a big emotional peer-group jump from junior school to secondary school.

I know I struggled for the entire duration. I was emotionally immature and it took me until I was 17 to get to the same emotional and hormonal level as others who reached the same point by the time they were 13 or 14. It meant I was considered one of the weaker boys. I could never join the cool groups as we literally did not speak the same language or dream of the same things. While others were getting into The Smiths or whatever indie group was popular at the time I was unaware of the existence of anything outside of the BBC charts. While other boys talked lasciviously of what you were meant to do to make a girl come I was still too painfully shy to even say hello to a girl let alone ask one out on a date. While others talked of the kind of car they’d buy once they were old enough to drive I was still poring over the latest Lego catalogue to choose the set I wanted for Christmas.

Some might say nothing has changed.

I was never really what I would call “full on” bullied.

I was never done over for my lunch money. Never had my head flushed down the toilet or de-bagged in front of my classmates.

But I was very aware of the pecking order and how near to the bottom of it I was.

I got shoved. I got pushed. I got made fun of. I got talked over. Ignored. Laughed at. Sneered at.

A common misconception was that I came from a rich family.

I didn’t. We were totally working class. The reason my books and clothes were in such pristine condition was because I’d been brought up to look after things.

Because there was no replacing them if they got damaged.

We just didn’t have the money.

By the end of my time at secondary school I had made my peace with my enforced low social standing. It even gave me some bravado. I could talk back to the bullies without fear of being hurt because, as I pointed out, how would they look cool beating me up? They’d laugh and agree.

Respect of a kind.

I survived.

But you know what? Survival isn’t enough.

It took me years to get out of that “weaker than everybody else, bottom of the pile” mindset.

Even now, I have to shake it off on occasion when it sneaks up on me and attempts to take me over again.

I regret not standing up for myself more. I regret taking it on the chin and then offering my cheek too. I regret accepting without question the place my peers had consigned me to.

There are times now when I still get angry about it.

Our school days are with us for a very long time.

And now my boy is going to a school where reports of bullying have already caused concern. It is a harsher world now in some respects compared to when I was a boy. Violence these days seems to have more scope, seems to be more subsumed in how we operate as a society; in how we entertain ourselves.

I wonder how he will cope. How Karen and I as parents will help him through.

I wonder which side of the peer divide he will be allowed to sit upon.

Because sometimes that is the only difference between the bullies and the bullied.

Gob

Eavesdropping is necessarily a snide pastime.

I don’t think I’ve ever eavesdropped on a single conversation and come away thinking, “Ooh, they’re lovely people – I wish they were in my friend’s network so I could get to know them better”.

Generally I come away shaking my head, sneering, laughing and quite often disgusted at the small minded, bigoted, malapropism-rich outpourings of my fellow man.

Of course, I’m quite willing to accept that maybe I am just a big snob per se and congenitally live in contempt of my fellow humans.

But that in no way invalidates my claim that eavesdropping inevitably positions those being eavesdropped upon well beneath the moral hobnailed boots of those doing the eavesdropping. It’s just human nature.

This being the case, I was walking quite innocently back to work after my lunchbreak yesterday afternoon when I stopped at a pedestrian crossing. While I waited for the lights to change in my favour two other pedestrians approached the lights behind me and waited at my back. Two young teenage girls, the ubiquitous mobile phone held out in their hands like a Ghostbuster PKE metre and their overly glossed lips pulled into pouts big enough to form the south facing wall of a bouncy castle.

“Fockin’ gaffa tape. Fockin’ gaffa tape. Bastard. I mean, look, that’s what he wants me to get. Fockin’ gaffa tape. Can you believe it? Bastard. Fockin’ gaffa tape.”

And on and on and on. Those same few phrases repeated over and over while the orator’s companion laughed like a drain and no doubt was as familiar with the gutter as one.

I actually began counting how many times this delightful young lady swore. I got to 15 before the green man finally appeared and rescued me.

As I sped away I could still hear, “Fockin’ gaffa tape, fockin’ gaffa tape, bastard” singeing the air like hastily deposited nuclear waste and I found myself wondering whether anyone on this planet can ever find such constant expletive incontinence attractive. Or even think it adult or mature?

I mean I am right in thinking that someone who effs and blinds every second word is chromosome deficient, aren’t I? Their emotional / intellectual development has somehow stalled at the ‘bike shed badinage’ stage and they’re forever stuck with the mentality of a 15 year old where they think that heavy use of the eff word automatically bestows upon them the heady mantle of ‘Adult’.

I instantly found myself dismissing this pair as a couple of foul-mouthed, uncouth, thick as shit, nob chompers who will end up working in McDonalds and exorcising their dissatisfaction with life by wiping malicious bogeys onto the underside of all the bread buns.

Which isn’t fair. They might actually make it to Burger King.

Joking.

They might actually be intelligent. They might even be nice girls. From good homes. With a staunch moral view of the world and an acceptance letter from Oxford.

But I don’t think so.

We are how we talk. Our voice and choice of words express our personalities and our aspirations. I’m not talking about accents here. I’m talking about what we say rather than how we say it. To choose to swear so prolifically and so (deliberately) loudly speaks volumes about a mindset that has not only normalised aggressive displays of behaviour but has also promoted them as being the most efficient way to navigate modern society.

And that is deeply, deeply saddening and possibly speaks volumes about the rest of us.

Possibly.

Or it could just be that a potty mouth is a habit that people fall into when young and like all nasty habits needs a jolly good kick to get it broken.

Believe you me, I was tempted.

Fuckwits

The anti spending cuts march in London on Saturday has left me feeling rather ambivalent though, I admit, I am leaning more towards the sour.

My own Union was well represented although I myself did not attend the march due to personal reasons. Ironically I joked to a colleague last week that I wasn’t going as, if I wanted to have my ribs smashed by a policeman’s truncheon, I could easily do that in my own hometown on a Saturday night merely by pissing on the windscreen of the police surveillance van (though the chances are they wouldn’t see me).

The legitimate portion of the march – the largest portion – was, I think, a success. A success in that it was well organized, peaceful and had something (if news reports can be believed) of a “carnival atmosphere”. (What? Bearded ladies? Fire eating dwarves?)

Not a success in what it achieved though. Some Government mouthpiece has dismissed the march and has said that no government would change its policies on the strength of a protest march – even one that keenly displays the vastness of public dissent. Really? This from the same Government that crowed with delight when Mubarak stepped down as Egyptian president due to public demand and who have gone to war (let’s call a spade a spade) in Libya to “defend the lives” of those protesting against their current government. Seems, we, the UK people, do not have the same rights or regard in the eyes of our own UK politicians. Our voices in the UK do not count.

Sadly, the side of the story that has claimed the most column inches is the disproportionately small element among the protestors who broke away from the main march to initiate their own agenda on the streets of London. Namely attacking buildings, smashing shop windows, letting loose industrial sized fireworks in crowds containing small children and grinding their stupid little crotches above the porticoes of high profile edifices when they knew the news teams were filming.

Twats. The lot of them.

One overriding image I have in my mind is watching some beleaguered news reporter trying to deliver his piece to camera while some cock in a hoodie danced in the background and waved his V’s in the air whilst shouting some guff about “revolution”.

Oh please. Not that old lame warhorse? I’m all for ideals and the hopeful aspirations of the young but really? Class war? Anarchy? Smash the system? Have people really not moved on from the 80’s, the 70’s, the 60’s ad infinitum? Plainly not. Because yet again here are the same half baked ideas being spouted and held up as justification for a good ruck with the coppers by the same dirty looking dickheads that have plagued every generation since the invention of the dick. The same flimsy political understanding being used as motivation to go on the rampage like giant 2 year olds and smash up some windows and lob a few bricks. British Bulldog anyone?

My first thought wasn’t, ooh that guy is protesting for my rights; he’s standing up for my freedoms. It was: great, there’s a stupid looking cock on my TV, wasting my license money, spouting the same hackneyed political garbage that used to infect the common room at my 6th form and only inspired the crusty looking dope-head in the corner who had joined the Socialist Worker party the year before and thought he was destined to be the next Karl Marx.

Twat. Twat. Twat.

These idiots have merely overturned all the good the legitimate march might have achieved. They’ve undercut the whole thing. Carnival atmosphere? A public grotesquery more like. A bestiary.

What also annoys me most is how blind these fools were in their targets. Some of the banking corporations they hit did not deserve the slander of these oafs. Some of them had actually been prudent and honourable throughout the current economic crisis and looked after their customer’s money. But no. These dunderheads were so high on the sound of their own primitivistic protest they didn’t care. They just wanted to smash and kick and destroy. And oh yes let’s lob a few humungous fireworks at the shoppers passing by and see if we can blind some of the children. Look, Mr Cameron! Look what you have made us do! Hulk smash!

You know what? I grew out of “anarchy” and “class war” about 3 hours after I first heard about it. I may not have been the brightest of teenagers but I could still tell a big steaming pile of shit by its smell.

And I can still tell a fuckwit by the faces he pulls in front of a BBC news camera crew.

And that includes you as well, Cameron.