A mate said to me recently that all I ever do on the blog is moan about my time at school. They said "Did you actually enjoy any of it?". There were a few moments I recall. Here they are
1. Making a cotton reel crocodile in the 'baby class'. When I was at St Vincents, reception was called the baby class. The teacher was Sister Rosalie, who everyone thought was the 'nice nun'. She was always nice, never clobbered us and organised fun activities. The best one was making a cotton reel crocodile.
2. Catching Tadpoles at Darlands Lake. In Junior 2, we had Miss MacDonald. She was very pretty and very nice. I liked her. I can remember one spring, she took us down to the nearby Darlands Lake. At the time there was a boating lodge there. We caught Tadpoles and did a nature survey. I have loved the place ever since.
3. Arctic Roll. I used to quite like most of the dinners and puddings. My favourite, and I think this was a pretty universal choice amongst our school mates was the Arctic Roll. Whenever this was the pudding, we all felt like we'd won the lottery.
4. Football practice on a Sunday Afternoon at St Vincents. This was organised by Brother Jerry from St Josephs college. Dad would drive me up in his car, then we'd go for ice creams at Tonibell afterwards. Sadly, I was rubbish at football, but that never deterred me! As I was born in August, I was the smallest, weakest boy in the year. By the time I was 15, I became a big lump and a half decent defender. I think being small made me a bit fierce and this was well suited to industrial defending. I used to love that.
5. Scratching my name into the bricks at St Vincents on the last day at the school. It was a work of art, I think it's still there, even theough the school is now houses,
6. Margate. I don't have too many great memories of FCHS, which I joined in 1973. There were a couple of great moments. One was our trip to Margate. We absolutely ran riot, but it was an amazing day and going to Dreamland was fun. Our class was banned from any such trips again. But it was brilliant
7. Pine cones. Another great moment was when our class, form 4B stormed class 4H and pelted them with pine cones we'd collected during dinner break. There was bad feeling between our two classes. They were tougher, we were cleverer and we had a far higher number of troublemakers. It was a glorious feeling. We timed it so that their form teacher would arrive to take the dinner register as we left, meaning they couldn't follow us out. I suffered for it later when ambushed, but it was worth it.
8. In 1978, I joined Orange Hill Senior High School. I had a lot of fun there. I can well remember the first lesson I attended, a biology O Level class. I'd been at a boys school for five years and all of a sudden I was surrounded by pretty girls. It was wonderful. I felt like I'd been in prison and I'd just been let out.
9. Millport. We had a week long biology field trip to Millport, an island near Glasgow. It was amazing. We had to do a project, I chose to do one to see whether baby eels were attracted to fresh water. It involved a set up with a large section of gurrering in the science lab. Millport was owned by Westfield College and had well equipped facilities. I got a C+ for it. About three years later, my biology teacher saw me and apologised. He'd read an article in a science mag and some professor had won an award for a similar experiment. He said I should've got an A +. He said he hadn't taken me seriously, because I was a bit of a joker. He was a great bloke and gave me a brilliant job reference though.
10. From Jazz to Punk. Mr White, the deputy headmaster, asked me to do a presentation on how Jazz influenced Punk, as part of the celebrations for his retirement. He was a Jazz nut. It was the moment I realised that I had won the respect of my teachers at Orange Hill. I was quite shocked. It went really well.
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