Not A Sound On The Pavement

A friend from school, Iceni, has been transcribing his journals from the time and is kindly sharing them with me. Here are some accounts of things I said. Behold the wisdom and serenity of my life in 1998, from his perspective.

Everything to look for in a man
"I started going out with him because I was really impressed with how brainy he was. Perhaps that’s a funny thing to be impressed by, but that’s just me.”

Honesty isn't always the best policy
In English this morning Dr. Banks allotted us a fresh set of chapters from ‘A Passage to India’, which we spent (or pretended to spend) the lesson preparing. Towards the end he had a sudden thought and asked,

“What do you read?” to the class in general. Silence, naturally. He narrowed the question and addressed it to one individual.

“SF, how long does it take you to read a book?”

“A day.”

“A day?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What, an average book of three hundred pages?”

“I read very fast, sir.”

“What have you read in the last week then?”

She rattled off a list; I hadn’t heard of any of them, by the way.

“Well,” said Dr. Banks, “that puts to shame anyone who says they haven’t got enough time to do some reading.”

"I did have to push some of my work out of the way in order to do it.” She added.

Hypocrisy
SF did not seem inclined to any serious topic of conversation. She spotted a German out of the window. “Do you know how much he smokes? Germans smoke like chimneys. It’s such a disgusting habit. I might do it, but I still think it’s a disgusting habit. His lungs must look like a road before the gravel’s laid down."

Foresight
After history this morning I had met SF on the stairs. “I’m going to be ill, very ill this afternoon so I won’t be at your dad’s lesson. See you tomorrow!”

Depth
(Iceni's father, one of my former teachers) gave us half of the lesson, the latter half, to work on any other work we might have. I produced my imitation of Ted Hughes and made a few corrections.

“Can I have a look at that?”

“Certainly.”

She read it. “That’s really good; mine’s about a vindictive bunny rabbit.”

“Yes. It’s rather difficult, since we’re not given the choice of whether we happen to agree with Ted Hughes’ view of nature.”