staying back in your memory

[freckles_and_doubt]

Weird experience at the open day on Saturday: after the second, or possibly third, talk I gave (see exhaustion, previous post), one of the parents in the audience came up to me and wanted to know if I had indeed spent my early junior school days in a one-horse town in Zimbabwe. Upon my assent she revealed herself as my Standard Two teacher, Miss Grey. I remember her as being slightly terrifying, with long brown hair and a tendency to be merciless with idiocy, but principally because she used to read us extracts from Erik von Daniken, of whose mad aliens-created-human-civilisation works she was apparently enamoured.

I didn't ask what she remembered me for. Probably for being a girly swot. Or possibly for following the excellent advice of my papa and hacking Roeline Buitendag across the knees with my suitcase while standing in line for class, since the little bitch had been heading an eight-year-old goon squad dedicated to stealing my lunch. (As an exercise to the reader, please imagine me aged eight. I was incredibly shy, skinny and knobbly-kneed, had pigtails, and only didn't wear glasses because I discovered that I needed them only towards the end of that year, when the entire school had mandatory eye tests. Fortunately I was a girly swot and had apparently got by quite well without being able to read the blackboard).

As if the sudden resurgence of teachers wasn't enough, my Standard Five class, from a little government school in an approximately half-horse Zimbabwean town (I went to three different junior schools in different towns), is popping up all over a Facebook community for the school concerned. They're trying to put names to a class photo. This is productive of weird surges of memory. That was the lad with a beautiful boy soprano and a completely weird and inexplicable crush on me (I spurned him utterly, owing to not having the faintest idea what he was on about), who used to come and sing "Greensleeves" loudly in my ear during singing, to the general hilarity of the class. Bastards. Also, why is that girl missing who was in the boarding hostel with me the following year? she used to have fainting fits. Since she was quite hefty and I was, as aforementioned, skinny and feeble, I used to regularly have to be extracted from beneath her recumbent form, having more or less involuntarily broken her fall. She owes me big, in retrospect.

I loved Iron Man. Shall burble about it tomorrow, I think, when I have some distance and can minimalise the quotient of fangirly "squee". Now I have to put all my "new" HTML skills into use on the faculty website.

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[(Anonymous)]

I was also amazed at how I had been managing when I first got glasses and could see the board clearly.

Favourite IronMan quote:
Jim Rhodes: Hey Tony.
Tony Stark: I'm sorry. This is the fun-vee. The hum-drum-vee is back there.

pK.

Re: Facebook

[veratiny.livejournal.com]

My mum laughed at me after I got glasses and exclaimed: "I can see the leaves on the trees!".

Then she felt bad about all the times that she had told me off for drawing trees that looked like lollipops (that was her pet hate).

Your friends

[schedule5.livejournal.com]

Your friends page just had me guffawing out loud in the office. Have you read Mistful's latest post. Man, that's good!
( http://mistful.livejournal.com/112591.html )

Re: Your friends

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

Mistful is an eternal delight, and today's "school butter" story was particularly vintage. She is the mistress of the brief excerpt of dialogue. She does incredibly good Harry Potter parodies, too.

[strawberryfrog.livejournal.com]

I liked Iron Man, the armoured heart metaphor was perhaps a bit laboured, but otherwise it had a deft touch, and Robert Downey Jr was an inspired casting. Others were less impressed with it.