life, liberty and the pursuit of geekiness

bulky_monster asked for 1989.

I was in Mrs G.'s P2 class at the start of this year. I remember that the story corner had very scratchy carpet tiles in alternating orange and olive squares, and we each had a handful of plastic counters we used to do "sums", which we kept on the windowsill in little pots with our names on. Mrs G. had red curly hair; she was killed four years later in a collision on the A1, leaving a son the same age as me and a daughter a couple of years younger.

After the summer I moved up to Miss N.'s class. She was my favourite teacher in primary school. At the end of the year I cried when I was told that I was going to be moved up into Mrs M's P4/P5 class instead of staying in Miss N's P3/P4 class. The idiot headmaster read out the list in the middle of the class instead of just sending a letter home to the parents.

Miss N. used to write "Fried-egg day" on the blackboard instead of "Friday" and see who spotted it first. In science once, she was explaining about things soaking up liquids, and I piped up-not showing off, I was trying to be helpful-"Actually, it's called absorption." I imagine some teachers might have found me unbearably precocious, but not Miss N. One day in craft, when everyone else was trying to make clay giraffes and elephants, I made an abstract structure with loops and points, painted it in rainbow colours, and called it a "Nothing-in-Particular". Miss N., possibly tired of reconstructing more ambitious artworks, held it up as an excellent idea.

Unlike other teachers, she gave me enough work to prove I knew how to do it and not enough to make me bored. After you had finished your work, you were allowed to play quietly with construction toys (Meccano and Sticklebrix type things, I think) at the back, or go on the BBC computer which was the height of the school's technology. Tiny screen, immense keyboard. The floppy disks really were floppy and had a distressing tendency to wipe themselves if they were left too close to a magnetic source, like, oh, the monitor. If you wanted to print, it was a dot matrix which printed out on a strip of flimsy paper with holes punched down the side. Our favourite game was something like Space Invaders, where you had do give the correct answer to a simple sum before you got to shoot the descending aliens. Ah, education.

At Christmas the school put on a play: Heidi. Most of the rest of my class were sheep (costumes mostly composed of cotton-wool), but I and an obnoxious little boy called Richard were narrators. The parents were supposed to provide the costumes. My mother, who was about 7 months pregnant with my little brother, was despairing at the thought of having to sew a Swiss outfit. So she prayed, went to Marks and Spencers-and found that they were doing Swiss-themed clothes for little girls. I had a white blouse, and black velvet sleeveless bolero, and a red skirt with trimmed with black braid embroidered with flowers. I wore it to church for a year or two after the play.

This was also the first year that I paid any attention to anything going on in the news. I remember watching both the Exxon Valdez oil spill and-I think, live-the Berlin Wall going down. Also on television, although I can't say for certain that it was in 1989, I saw a programme about how space probes were launched, with the different fuel stages falling away, and for the first time I realised how huge and lonely space was.

Ok, I'll do the year thing. Give me a year, and I'll talk about it. Memory starts about 1986.

Yesterday a tour bus was vandalised in Belfast.

Personally I cringe every time I see a bus driving about with PADDYWAGON written on its side. Perhaps the vandals thought they were doing a public service?

I am opposed to human embryo experimentation anyway but this is just nasty.

Hmm. How far along would one of these be viable? Obviously the mitDNA would be bovine, but what would happen--actually, ick.

I know that ohnotheydidnt is the LJ equivalent of a tabloid, but if this Half Blood Prince film rumour tuns put to be true I shall be exceedingly irate. I thought we'd have trouble when I heard Kloves was coming back.

ETA: I'm referring to ( Read more... )

After the snow and the floods, yesterday we had gales. In the night, our trampoline took flight and blew over the hedge into the field, apparently without sustaining damage worth noting. It was sort of twisted around itself, and has now been dismantled and put in the garage, about 3 months late.

We've just had six inches of snow this afternoon. Not a flake in Belfast by the time I left. I said jokingly as I went out that I'd see everyone tomorrow 'unless I'm snowed in'.

Hah. It took me almost three hours to do a journey that normally takes 45 minutes. The bus got to within three miles of $LOCALTOWN with no problem, and then all the traffic on the dual carriageway lay down and died. I was about 10 minutes later than usual into $LOCALTOWN, and I was wondering if the snow was too heavy to drive to a friend's, who lives about five miles farther up the mountain (we're about three miles on the high side from $LOCALTOWN). Hah, again. The gritter had run out of grit about a third of the way along the main road that goes to our house, and it had lain down and died too. There were about seven cars stuck up the hill. My dad, who had come in to pick me up, did a heroic feat of driving. He got the car turned and back down the hill, and we went back through the town and out to the carriageway at the low end. We hit a kerb somewhere along there, and I was working out which house of people we knew was nearest so we could seek shelter if necessary.

The carriageway was good for 30 mph speeds, so we went to $LARGERTOWN where we had another hairy moment at the turnoff, lorry stuck on a hill again, and made our way along the main road from $LARGERTOWN to $VILLAGE, which had been gritted and was fine. Our main road meets it about a mile beyond our house, and the last bit was the worst. The snow had blown into little peaks like frozen waves, and there was a single set of tracks on the hill. If we'd stopped anywhere on the hill we'd never have got started again. My dad said, 'Pray that nothing comes down the other way', so I did, and we met one car, but it was on the bit in the middle where the hill levels off for a few yards. Our little side road was bad too, but at least there we could have perhaps trudged to one of the farms to borrow a tractor. Whenever we were turning in at our lane, we both started cheering.

The upstairs rooms are all filled with cold light. We went out to shake the snow off the baby pine trees so they don't break with the weight of it, and it was up tot he top of my wellingtons in places.

Another couple of Yuletide recs:

Lawrie's Wedding

Lawrie Marlow is getting married. Side-effects, much as one might imagine.

Not Quite A Happy Ending

Set after the end of Deep Secret. Life goes on, and Maree's started a new diary.

Happy Christmas!