My dusty past

03:16:2005
Forgive me for not writing anything for the last two months but I've been delving into my past.

In the form of boxes and boxes of stuff which have been gathering dust in the corner of my attic since 1998. Most of them had come from my last place (1994-98) where they used to live on the top shelf of a cupboard. Before that, they lived in my parents' cellar, (1990-1994) and before that they were stuffed into various corners of my bedroom (1971-1990). There's stuff there going back 23 years. It's all jumbled up so I might open a box to find a diary I wrote while on holiday in the USA in 1990 next to a photo of ----i cutting my hair in 1996, sitting on top of a latin exercise book from 1983. Physical mementos of the last 23 years of my life are being presented to me in random order.

Which is just as well. If I had packed these boxes more dilligently in the past, with a real dash of anal retention, I would now be going through these items in precise chronological order. This might have offered too clear an insight into my 'life story curve' for want of a better phrase. Such an insight, if clear enough, might provide too clear a picture of where my life is going, and if reaching 34 has taught me anything, it's that predicting one's future based on observations of one's past is a cunt's game.

Anyway, I came upon this latin exercise book from 1983 and flicking through it I was shocked at:
a) The sheer waste of hard mental work and hours of childhood that went into it.
b) My Latin teacher's incredible passion for this timewasting shit, as demonstrated by his aggressive hectoring of my mistakes, which were many, and my marks, which were pretty bad.

Some work he hadn't even marked with numeric scores or grades, just the whole page crossed out in its entirety, with something like 'Don't ever present me with rubbish like this again' scrawled underneath in red biro.

Now I don't want to get into the whole 'Should Latin be taught in schools?' argument. The answer is, of course, "No, you fuck." Some people really enjoy stuff like Latin, with its mean spirited way of insisting something like "I had been going to approach" be expressed in a single word. Some people don't enjoy it, but are able to get their heads down and just do the work regardless because this is a private school and their parents are paying for this and you have to do it because it's part of the workload. Some people like it and really want to do it well but are sadly unable. Then there are those who see the whole venture as so pointless they are unable to muster up the enthusiasm or the ability and become their Latin teacher's favourite Whipping Boy. Guess which category I fell into.

Not a literal Whipping Boy. Not in 1983 thank fuck. But I could sense the sadistic bastard would have been only too happy to smack us about had it been still allowed. Instead he had to rely on verbal and written abuse and mental cruelty in every possible incarnation. Anyway. I've half a mind to send him the old exercise book with a note politely explaining that I'm sure he would find more use for it than I, as I need the attic space for the storage of pornography. Then less politely explaining that if he has spent the last 23 years bullying children into absorbing 99.9% useless information when they could have been learning something more useful like Cantonese, then he has esentially been holding back the development of society and can be safely said to have wasted his life. Then I would challenge him to put me in detention now I'm 34 and send my kids to a state school where they will be educated properly. Finally I would call him a cunt.

Right now I'm too busy unpacking and repacking boxes. deciding what stuff to keep and what stuff to chuck. A prosthetic nose I wore when I played 'Bardolph' in 'Henry 4th part 1' in 1989- chucked. A pair of scratched foldaway 'Aviator' style sunglasses which must have been the height of cool in 1987- kept. Two A4 colour photos of George Harrison and Ringo Starr- kept. A mostly fucked up battery charger -chucked. A list of films recommended me by a student at NYU who I met in 1993, along with her address -chucked.

Tired. going to bed. More boxes to sort tomorrow.

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