Friday 8 April 2011

If you can't do the time, don't do the crime

This one caught my eye earlier in the week. Leaving aside the implications of the "crackdown" element, the list of transgressions - complete with sock inspections - is very similar to the school rules which prevailed when I was a schoolboy - with the exception of mobile phones, which hadn't of course been invented then. Depending on the circumstances, some of the infringements might've been punished by lines (or 'pages' as we had them) rather than a detention - but at the other end of the scale, rudeness towards the staff was likely to have earned you a caning.

It's not entirely clear whether the school *oops, sorry, "community college"* didn't previously have the rules or just wasn't enforcing them. But it's hard to actually find fault with a clear basic framework of what is regarded as acceptable standards of behaviour, and my mother certainly never showed any sympathy if I was punished for doing something I knew I'd been told not to.

Wednesday 6 April 2011

Here's lookin' at you, kid!

I was browsing through some updates on Flickr yesterday, when I noticed some new scans of the 1962 panoramic school photo... and there I am! Forty-nine years ago in April 1962, I was a 13-year old third-former - looking shy, timid and a perhaps little apprehensive. I wonder what I was thinking? Certainly not that one day I'd be sitting here remembering back almost five decades to my schooldays. I was never given to introspection, nor particularly to casting my mind forward to what the future might hold. I was always a "let's get through today" sort of pupil, young for my age and anxious to keep out of trouble.

It's odd in a way that I now think back so nostalgically as I'm certain I didn't feel like that at the time. I just wanted to get through school and get out of there,which is probably why I never really gave it so much as a backward glance: I don't think there ever have been any "reunions" as such anyway, and I didn't keep in touch with anyone much after I'd left. Whatever the line of reasoning, I do now enjoy looking back with some affection: my education had more of a lasting effect on me that I ever gave it credit for and it's certainly nice to swap reminiscences with other ex-pupils albeit coloured with the benefit of hindsight.