Nostalgia
My parents visited before Easter, and achieved their long-threatened goal of bringing me a load of boxes of my stuff that had been hitherto cluttering up their loft. “You’ve got your own loft now, so it can clutter up yours.” Fair enough. It’s an assortment of random stuff that I didn’t really want to throw out, but didn’t have room for at the time, including a lot of exercise books from my middle and senior school years.
The school books are hilarious, particularly the ones from middle school. It’s funny how you remember doing some pieces of work quite well, and others are a complete mystery. In my middle school creative writing class, I wrote a totally insane, psychedelic story about turning on the taps to run a bath, and seeing a stream of tiny pink crocodiles coming out, which I then had to hide from my mother under my bed. Quite where that came from, I don’t know — perhaps there was a serious LSD habit I’ve forgotten about along with the experience of writing the tiny pink crocodiles story.
My favourite subjects at senior school were Biology (obviously) and Latin, and I was an unbearably swotty geek in both. I loved translating ‘The Aeneid’, and can just about still quote little chunks of it from memory. Exercise books from both subjects show that I lavished a lot more care on them than on some other subjects. I had also forgotten that I was a fairly decent illustrator back then. There are some quite good drawings and illustrative figures, including a frighteningly meticulous, pull-out, fully-labelled diagram of the male reproductive system. I’m sure my 15 year old self found that interesting for purely scientific reasons… Unfortunately, while my drawing was reasonably good for a teenager, it never progressed to being good for an adult, so I rarely draw now.
French was one of those subjects I didn’t enjoy much at the time, but wish I had paid more attention to now. In one of my French books, I found a folded, handwritten (and illustrated) worksheet. There was a little domestic scene depicted in that lovely, blurry purple Banda ink, and a series of questions about the picture. But wait — what is that sous la table? Could it possibly be un singe? It is! I’d somehow decided that the prominent featuring of monkeys in French lessons was all a product of Eddie Izzard’s comedy genius, but there was the documentary evidence in blurry purple and white. As we all know, the French prize above all else the ability to locate one’s primate accurately in their native tongue.
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As I get older, I find that nostalgia isn't what it used to be.........
by Jonathan Briggs @ 13/04/2007 8:15 pm • Permalink •
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Oh, to be able to recall what is nostalgia.
by Jerry @ 13/04/2007 9:11 pm • Permalink •
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Heh. I get the same thing every time I go home - the boxes of stuff that have to be brought back to my house. Except I live so far away that it's being transferred north at the rate of about one box per year.
And the Aeneid - I too loved translating that - such a buzz. And Ovid too... and reading Plautus! School latin did get interesting at about the third year, didn't it.
by Alan @ 13/04/2007 9:53 pm • Permalink •
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re: drawings. Ooo, do you have a scanner?
re: "unbearably swotty geek." I am fascinated by the word "swotty." Some British friends visited recently and I picked up some useful phrases like "faffing about" and learning about waistcoats vs. vests.
How would you define the word "swotty"?
by Inkygirl @ 14/04/2007 1:09 pm • Permalink •
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swot |swät| British., informal verb ( swotted , swotting ) [ intrans. ] study assiduously : kids swotting for exams. noun a person who studies hard, esp. one regarded as spending too much time studying.
PHRASAL VERBS swot up on study (a subject) intensively, esp. in preparation for something : teachers spend their evenings swotting up on jargon | ( swot something up) I've always been interested in old furniture and I've swotted it up a bit. DERIVATIVES swotty adjective ORIGIN mid 19th cent.: dialect variant of sweat .
So clearly Geeks tend towards swottiness, quite frequently wear glasses repaired with adhesive tape, have been known to bear skin with all the tonal quality of a wet book, are usually highly intelligent and make excellent writers of blogs - Phew, I think I got away with that one - unless over the next few days I find myself under attack by trained crows............
Myself, I was not in the slightest bit swotty, the playing fields of Woolverstone beckoned, so I was playing rugby, high jumping, sailing, playing cricket and driving the school cars. This all took place when I wasn't singing in the choir, or the chorus of the opera, doing the stage lighting for plays, model making or walking Erica across Berners Field: in fact I was so busy, I forgot what school was for!
Mind you, we had our share of "Bsags" who could do all these things and win scholarships to Cambridge and Oxford, damn them!
by Jonathan Briggs @ 14/04/2007 2:58 pm • Permalink •
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Jonathan Briggs, thank you so much! I am going to make a point of using "swotty" in casual conversation this week...
by Inkygirl @ 15/04/2007 4:45 pm • Permalink •
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p.s. Jonathan, what is "high jumping"?
by Inkygirl @ 15/04/2007 4:48 pm • Permalink •
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Alan: They've been itching to get rid of my boxes for ages, but I can't say I blame them. We didn't do Ovid, though our Latin teacher very courageously introduced some of Sappho's poems: in an all-girls' school, it only takes one mention of the island of Lesbos for unruly 13 year old girls (not me, of course
) to cause massive disruption.
Inkygirl: I do have a scanner, but that means I have to go up into the loft and get some of the books down again after laboriously storing them there
But I might do that at some point. I should reiterate that they were not bad for a teenager, but nowhere near the standard a competent adult, let alone of your lovely illustrations.
Jonathan Briggs: Yes, that's a pretty good discription of a swot. A further elaboration for Inkygirl: a swot is the one who when a question is asked to the class, flings their hand up in the air with every appearance of someone who might LITERALLY DIE if not allowed to answer the question. And they tend to underline headings in their exercise books neatly, with a ruler, and in a different colour ink. Needless to say, cool kids (athletic types like Jonathan or in my case, trendy girls) avoid swots like the plague, in case they catch learning off them.
I should say in my defence that my complexion was quite decent (fairly healthy and ruddy), and I didn't wear glasses until long after I finished school, and myopia finally caught up with me.
Inkygirl: High jumping is... jumping high
. You know that athletics discipline of running up to a horizontal bar placed some ridiculous distance off the ground, which you hurl yourself at and 'Fosbury flop' over, to land on a crash mat. I was rubbish at that, but then being such a Hobbit, I ws at a natural disadvantage (see also hurdling and almost every other sport, except swimming -- I'm a natural floater).
by bsag @ 15/04/2007 6:02 pm • Permalink •
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Bsag, can't post comments to the 1935 piece.
When I high jumped 45 years ago the Fosbury Flop was not allowed as the rules stated that your head could not be first over the bar - apart from that, jumping into a wet sandpit some 6" below the take off would have broken your neck first time; a landing area resempling a large stack of matresses was an effete invention of some Canadian school being overprotective, thus leading to a jumping style that finds landing on your head an acceptable practice.....
I was quite happy to amble round with swots, I didn't learn much from them, but they tended to be nice people.
by Jonathan Briggs @ 16/04/2007 11:52 am • Permalink •
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I still have some of my old school books and whenever I see them in my closet and pull them out a lot of great memories come back. http://randomstuffsite.com/
by Lonnie @ 12/02/2008 12:31 am • Permalink •
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I think im in nostalgia...nostagic?
by Pinoy Money Talk @ 21/02/2008 7:37 am • Permalink •
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