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kajcarter asked for 1997
Really when you're young you don't define years in terms of calender years, but of academic years. 1997 was when I moved up up into the senior school in September and started working towards my GSCEs. In our system, that's the biggest change in your school years, after changing schools at eleven. In junior school, we had all our classes with our form class (registration group). Mine was F, and although they were organised more-or-less alphabetically, it had the reputation of being the worst form class in the year. It was mostly the boys, although there was one girl who was a complete trouble-maker. Half the class would disappear during the week of Balmoral Show (the main agricultural show in Northern Ireland), which was winked at by the teachers in that rural area, but that group would come back with a haul of pencil cases, sweets and other portable items they'd stolen from the stalls. By this stage, it was also the cool thing to smoke. At that time in my life, I was more comfortable around boys than girls, but fortunately my boys were more geeky and less petty-criminal. Our status symbol was having made it through the unabridged
Lord of the Rings. I'd done it during second form, including the Appendices, while the boys were still stuck on the Council of Elrond.
In the spring we chose our GCSE subjects; I went with maths and sciences. I was very glad to get rid of art and home economics and music. I wasn't so pleased to get Mrs C., the maths teacher from hell, for 10 periods a week. Her temper was infamous. If anyone questioned her, it would be "
I'm the one with the maths degree.". Our Add. Maths class were the recipients of the occasion when she snapped, "I might as well talk to the wall," and proceeded to do so. "Brick wall, do you know the answer?" We got good marks (I got two A*s, for which she never congratulated me, even though I was at the school for two years after I had escaped her), because we were too scared not to. She wouldn't give me actual panic attacks until my fifth year, though.
Apart from that, life was pretty good. I loved Triple Award science, fifteen periods of it, when I would sit somewhere near the back (being relatively well-behaved) with L. and K. We had the most fun in biology, because Mr M. generally was too dopey to notice what was going on. We watched a lot of videos, but we did get to dissect a pig's heart and lungs. L. was going to be a doctor, so she was determinedly not disgusted. I was genuinely unfazed, and was pretty proud of it when the boys laughed at the girly shrieks. L. is one of the few schoolmates I'm still in touch with. She's an SHO or whatever they call it now. I see K. in the paper sometimes; she's working in PR for the Department (of Agriculture, which is always the default).
I had Mr C. for physics. He used to turn up ten minutes late to class, clutching his lunchtime coffee, and was reputed to be more interested in coaching hockey than in teaching physics, but we still managed to get through the syllabus somehow, and I did very well. He used to throw tennis balls above our heads to demonstrate Newton's Laws, and he said I was obviously a good physicist because I didn't flinch when the ball wasn't going to come anywhere near me.
I had the friendly, black-bearded Dr C. for chemistry (L. started the course by smashing two or three pieces of glassware; she did this most years), Mr S. of the ratty tweeds and the pink and yellow teeth for English and Eng. Lit. (Macbeth and Seamus Heaney, and F.M. who never brought in her coursework, gentle blonde Mrs A. for Spanish, and Mrs F. for geography, which was the most boring subject I did.
All that isn't what I think of first when someone mentions my school. What I think of is sitting on the grassy banks around the lower rugby pitches on a sunny day, eating milk lollies and watching the boys play football. And probably I have an new library book or an old favourite, because football isn't really that interesting.
This was the era of Professor L. He came between the rotating pulpit supplies and calling our own organising pastor in 2001. He was a retired minister and had been preaching for about 50 years by then. His sermons were like precision engineering. He could say as much in half as hour as most sermons would in three quarters, all bright and clear and sharp. I'm really thankful to have known him.
Comment if you want to be given a year to write about.
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