let's get lost

Dear Marianne,

The start of a new term has brought with it the traditional themes of children’s tears and tiredness, failed ironing of pleated school dresses, sunny days and cries of, “Has anyone seen Anna’s lunch box, Mike’s shoes, Becky’s keys, anything belonging to me!?” But this year it also signals the prospect of moving on, which makes me excited and scared and I need to do stuff or we won't be going anywhere; we may not be moving until December but I need to get my arse in gear.

Right now though, I'm doing nothing, I'm sitting on my own, staring out the bedroom window my face covered in the dust of a hundred old photos.

I am supposed to be clearing out the loft and under beds and in cupboards in anticipation of our relocation, part of my general scheme to avoid thinking about moving again. I shouldn’t really be worrying too much, we are not buying a house, so I don’t have to get panicky about the dates for Exchange or fret about Completion, or feel stressed about a communal right of way going through my kitchen or worry that the survey on the new house will reveal thirty years of rot in the basement. But I do have another worry list: I haven’t yet found a house for us to live in, or a nursery for Mike, an Infant school for Anna or Secondary school for Becky. Actually the secondary schools are not schools anymore, they are all colleges of one sort or another – for languages, for media, for arts or more worryingly for community. Don’t get me wrong I love community, some of my best friends are communities, but you put that word in front of the word college and it always ends in tears.

I rang two colleges recently and got a good reception from two fraught admissions staff, both women of course, the third place I contacted was a Catholic school - well I thought I’d have a go it’s in the family. I wanted to know if the School was required to have a quota of atheists in their intake (yes we are seriously lapsed). I received a call back from another admissions woman, who spoke at me in a telephone voice especially selected for parents whose children wouldn’t be coming to the school. She let me know that there are at least eight children on the waiting list for year nine, so I might want to look at other schools in the area; will Becky be attending a Catholic School in Brighton - is the Pope a Communist?

Of course, not to bang on about this again, but in my day we went to our local infant, junior and then secondary school and thank god there was no parents’ choice in the matter. I went to a comprehensive school in Crawley part of which was burned down by two boys in my class; it is now a community college. I have been reminded of the detail of my school days because I have been sorting through “My Personal Stuff” box. I get this out every few years, so that I can sort it out and chuck away irrelevant rubbish, instead of which I add more “personal stuff” and put it back under the bed. From my box of personal stuff I see that I received some “O” levels from the school, I also read that at the end of my Junior school I “had got in with a bad group of children” and that I talked too much in science and was actively disruptive in maths in year three of comprehensive school (I would just say in my defence MISS, that our superb maths teacher was off with cancer for over a year – and nobody bloody told us, we just had to guess, AND his replacement was an R.E. teacher with very little understanding of algebra or ven(?) diagrams). I also see that I received a Merit and a Pass Plus in the Russian Method of Ballet at ages seven and eight, I also have a letter from Mary Ninness, my first Junior school teacher who went off to teach servicemen’s children in Germany and wrote to me from there. There are pictures of old friends, pictures of my parents looking young, postcards circa 1976 (the year of the great drought) and a couple of teenage love letters.

I am sure there are books by psychiatrists about this sort of thing, hanging on to the past, unable to move on, vanity, perhaps it is historical separation anxiety? Mind you, just a word of caution to the “thrower outers”, my mate Dave is off to Kuala Lumpar with his family for three years, and since he has to get a work visa he has to produce evidence of education. Despite the fact that he is now an accountant for a big grown up firm he still has to produce his “O” level certificates for examination; he’s 46 he sat his “O” levels thirty years ago! He couldn’t find them in his loft of course, so he now has to wait for two months for the Scottish Education whatever it is, to find the certificates and send them. I offered to walk to Scotland and look through all the filing cabinets containing all the exams results of the last thirty years and then walk home again (because it would be quicker), but he couldn’t hear me over his sobbing.

This cautionary tale is irrelevant of course, because I keep more useless rubbish than “O” level certificates, and for whatever reason, I find myself unable to throw any of it away again; I will however be adding a clown painting by Anna, and a scribble by Mike. Tonight, I will put the box away under the bed until the next time when I have moved on but need to look back and lose myself in the past for a while.

Rx