SCHOOL

I hated school, and I still do. From the first minute to the last I could not stand school and I loathed everything to do with it.

I was the kind of child who found that school got in the way of learning. When I was away from school I learned far more than I did when I was there, it wasn’t hard to do because when I was at school I was so consumed by the desire not to be there that I didn’t learn anything at all.

My memories of school are mostly sensory; I can remember the smells, the colours and the textures of primary school. I can recall vivid memories of brightly coloured counting blocks, different colours for different lengths. They were used to introduce the concept of numbers. I can still feel the dampness that never seemed to leave school clothes and I can still taste the air that was thick with the fumes from the wet coke that smouldered away in the central heating boiler.

The worst thing about primary school was the floor polish, I could not abide the smell of school floor polish, it adorned all the wooden floors in the place and it had a smell that would make a cat tray smell sweet.

The only worse smell that I ever discovered in a school was the first time I went into the changing rooms next to the gymnasium when I went to secondary school. There is nothing like the smell of school changing rooms; an aerosol of deodorant the size of a petrol tanker couldn’t shift it.

Even the smell of the school dinners was bad. I stayed for it a few times but I didn’t like it, the smell might have been bad but the taste was worse. How it could be possible I will never know, but I wouldn’t have fed it to a dog, and of course I said so. The school meals were served up in one of the classrooms and, of course, it had a freshly polished floor to add to the ambience.

In those days teachers used to wander around the classroom smoking cigarettes, one teacher used to smoke a pipe. It was a wonderful example to us all and to be honest the smell of tobacco was preferable to the rancid dinners and the disgusting floor polish, and most of us were smoking before we got to secondary school.

The things that they taught at school were rubbish and from the first day none of the teachers could answer the questions that I wanted answering. I was five years old and I was pondering the impossible notion of infinity, I couldn’t work out how the universe could go on forever without stopping, I would lay awake at night trying to understand the concept of space going on forever and never coming to a place where there was not space. It still gives me the same feeling now and nobody can tell me what would be there when the universe runs out of space. You can’t have nothingness, even empty space is something.

I wanted to know things, I wanted to understand the nature of existence, I’d think about the reality of the world, the world around me and the world within me. I was very aware that the two things were not the same, I wondered if I was real or just part of someone else’s dream, I thought about the possibility that they would wake up and forget the dream and I would cease to be.

At five years old I was questioning the nature of existence, I was grappling with philosophy and existentialism at an age when I should have been making mud pies in the garden.

I wondered if the stars in the sky had planets spinning round them, I would sneak out through a window in the early hours of the morning and go into the fields to look up at the sky wondering if there was another boy on another planet looking out into the night sky at our sun and wondering if it had a planet in its orbit with a boy looking back at him who was wondering if there was someone looking at his sun…

Nobody had any answers for me, it took half a lifetime for me to understand that it wasn’t the answers that were the problem, it was the questions that were the problem, that and the simple truth that nobody could understand the questions.

Dad always said that I never stopped asking questions and it was true, but he didn’t have the answers and school wasn’t the place to get the questions that I wanted answering.

Then I got glasses and I could read again. I read everything, I read dad’s newspapers, I sat in my bedroom and systematically read twelve volume Waverley’s Encyclopaedia.

The worst thing is that I’m still here and I still have all those questions and they remain unanswered.

Its also the best thing as well because every time you get the answer to something it usually opens up the way to a lot more questions.