Dud-child, or Have You Ever Wanted to Know Everything About My Medical History? Good! Settle In!

The pictures of me, post-birth, are some of the most disturbing I have seen. Scrunched and writhing with my severely herniated belly-button, ten nail-less finger and toes, and tiny tube-bisected face I seem to be crying “For the love of God, why am I here? Put me back in! I’m not done yet!”

Three months short of done, or if you prefer 2/3rds finished, I was immediately whisked away to complete my development into something more closely resembling a human child in the glassy womb of an incubator. There I lay, happily focusing on developing working lungs, while the doctors wandered in and out to my mother and said such reassuring things as 

“There seems to be some considerable bleeding in the brain,”

and 

“We aren’t sure if her eyes will work yet.” 

I don’t know whether it dawned on my mother at this point that what she had bought into the world was a bone fide Dud Child or whether it took longer, but Dud Child I was at my first ausipicous coming and Dud Child I was to remain throughout my infancy.

Recently when I was searching through my “child file” (less sinister than it sounds) attempting to find my driving license, I rediscovered the many and myriad letters and certificates pertaining to my dudities and sat laughing at them for about an hour. Most of them are medical reports and some of them are almost fantastically vague. One, full of dense figures and unfathomable text, has written in pen at the bottom “If Anna is worried at all as she matures she can return for correction”

Concerned by the ominous sounding “correction” but incredibly excited that I may have found some sort of medical root for my chronic and generalised worrying, I presented the letter to my mother. She explained that she had been given it on my behalf when clumsyness on her part had resulted in some minor facial surgery on my part. The “worried” referred specifically to any insecurities I might grow to have about the resultant scarring.

This was disappointing. Unlike nuclear war, my encroaching death or the prospect of a loveless suburban life, my scar has never worried me. Feeling as if I’d had the prospect of a “corrected”, worry-free existence snatched away from me I returned to the “child file.”

Those papers that weren't misleadingly vague had written at the top a sort of topic sentence for what followed. They were all bundled together in a section of the file that my mother had titled “Medical” but that I would have titled “Will she lead a normal life? NO she’ll be a Dud-child!” Each topic sentence, hilariously and slightly unprofessionally, read like a verbatim recording of what my mother said to person behind the desk, upon checking in with me. They were, more or less, as follows...

“Anna can’t hear anything” 

“Anna can’t speak recognisable english”

“Anna can speak now but she makes up words and expects us to get it” 

- beside which someone of a more professional bent has written “neologisms”

“Anna is weezy and rattley.” 

“The ventalin you gave Anna to reduce her weezy rattlings gave her terrible hallucinatory visions.” - These “visions” are increasingly becoming my formal reason for not taking anything at university “Bah! Only just exploring the corners of your consciousness now? Think you’re Ken Kesey do you? Think you are Allen Ginsburg? Do you? Tit-master? I was expanding my mind aged five! Suck on that.” - I’m a dreadful arse at university, you can tell.

“Anna day dreams so much that I can give her a soft thwack to the ear and she doesn’t notice” 

“Anna has contracted the sort of antiquated diseases that you thought went out with opium”

“Anna is bafflingly clumsy,” - This irks me. For starters the whole concept of clumsiness under the age of five is redundant, show me a graceful toddler and I will show you a swan you have mistaken for a human infant. The idea that I could have been clumsier than your average child without being some sort of one-women-three-stooges-act is offensive. Secondly the hospital would have had, next to the notes on my clumsiness, the notes (however vague) from when my mother, during one of her abortive attempts at tackling the twin goliaths of “walking” and “carrying her child” tripped up her own familiar front steps and accidently broke my face, but at no point did anyone think to chalk my clumsiness up to overwhelming genetics.

and finally...

“Anna has a really big head, is there anything you can do about that?” - I wish this one was a joke but it’s genuine, in the summarial section below the nurse has written “we have measured Anna’s head and can report that she is in the top 90th percentile of head size” you can see her fighting the urge to jot “commiserations” at the end.

The brilliant thing about all of these forms is that at no point are any of the issues solved, there is never a perscription pad attached (apart from with my LSD laced ventalin) but there are always some kind words explaining to my mother “sorry, there is little we can do, you daughter is just a bit...faulty,”

My mother, I think, was consistantly worried that my clumsiness, lack of attention span, and difficulties with hearing, speaking...being, might lump together to form a genuine disorder or be the lasting and dehabilitating effects of that bleeding brain thing. Years of testing proved that this wasn’t the case at all. In a way it would have been nicer if they were. Instead I was just an deeply ineffective child.

To further compound this the “child file” also contains five developmental reports (the results of said testing), these are lengthy and while they have a few saving graces re. academic performance they can essentially be parred down to “Oh dear, Mrs S we are the professionals and...dud-child I’m afraid.”

The first four, at least, the last report in my considerable record is from Dr Prendergast.

Dr Prendergast’s name in and of itself endears me to him greatly.

My mother took me to him in one final brave rush at reclassifying my dudities into one big treatable block.  He took me for an interview and testing session aged 8 and half and his summary of the occasion constitutes a dramatic break from all that comes before it. Rather than being a catalgoue of my many and myriad failings it is basically an advert for me. I am “attentive” “intellegent” “bright eyed and cooperative” I “even show signs of humour” (I glowed when I first read that but I am now beginning to get sore about that “even.”) He concludes with the sentence “I can effectively describe her as a normal little girl.” 

Ah, sweet Dr Prendergast, I wonder if he knew that he was formally elevating me from the dud child I was, stumbling around with my giant head balanced on my weak and ventalin-ravaged body, to the normal and even, possibly, even though she’s female, even, humour-based individual I now am.

The doctors records end there, not just the vauge behaviourial ones but also the proper illness based ones, I think I have been to the doctors twice in the last 13 years, which implies that Prendergasts judgements had a concrete effect upon my constitution or, much more likely, upon my mother. As far as she was concerned the final word had been said, I was normal. I had outgrown the Dud-child phase. She had a piece of paper to prove it. I like to think of her taking it out and looking at it during my intensely weird adolescence, and in fact, now, and thinking “No, I shouldn’t be worried, she is a perfectly normal little girl.”

I realise it would be more poetic if the completely farcical failure of my first few years on this earth had had some sort of lasting effect on me. If when I walked out of my ballsed-up Cambridge interview the walls had whispered “Duuuuuud chiiiiild.” If everytime I failed to impress my bright eyed and cooperative charms upon a pretty man he just lent over and said “I shalln’t be sleeping with you, you are a dud-child.” But it hasn’t. I didn’t even have call to think about it. Till I looked through the child-file to find my driving license, for my third driving test, which I failed, because I am clumsy and can’t focus on more than one thing at a time let alone everything that is going on, on a road, all the time, and because I’m basically deaf and I don’t know left from right, and every so often I get these dreadful ventalin flashbacks.

Seriously though I’m fine now.

“Because the cosmos instinctively vibrated at my feet in Kansas/on the A228 Tonbridge to Chatham.”

While this is ostensibly an anecdote about drugs and Bob Dylan that sort of hinges on a quote by Allen Ginsberg, I should tell you at this early stage that it really contains little of any of those people and/or substances. If you were hoping for something along the lines of “...and when I woke up I was down at The Wha jamming with Dylan, all the big names were there and it was only when Joplin upset her wine glass and I became entraced by its myriad colours that I realised someone must have snuck me some acid. “Oh Allen”, I cried! “You are a card!””...then you probably shouldn’t read on. Also, I think you have dissproportiantely high expectations of the blogosphere.

Just a warning.

 Also I'm writing this post-a hideous essay so it might read a bit stitltedly.

I’ve never been much of a one for substances. (Read that in Alan Bennet's voice, it works doesn't it?!) I think you can probably tell this by looking at me. It’s not that I object to them morally or out of a sense of social obligation, I’m all for them, in others, whatever makes you happy, it’s just that when everyone did it to look slick as a teenager I was too busy reading and staying inside the house to really commit myself full time to anything, and now everyone does it as an adult I’m just too much of a coward.

Also, do drugs at university in any real way and you have to rub shoulders with the sort of people who can only accurately be described as tit-masters, I would term them "creative drug takers" but to me that just sounds like they have found new and innovative ways to consume substances.
"He has started taking all his drugs anally via an ornate butt-pipe."
"Gosh! How creative!"
And anyway it doesn't correctly convay what complete tits they are...

I’m sceptical about the drug-inspiration relationship, I don’t think it’s causal and if it is causal I don’t think it’s simple, but there exists a breed of student who is convinced that, deviod of talent or creative zeal though he may be, the fact that he regularly puts cocaine up himself or a tab of acid under his tongue makes him a poet and a genius. These are people who have ignored Allen Ginsberg when he said “it’s not the experience - it’s how you apply that to reality, it’s what you do the next day.” People that have done the Beats a disservice, appropriating them and then systematically ignoring every aspect of them that involved hard work, humour, honesty or being alive to the subtlies of spoken language.

You know the kind of people I’m talking about. They have beards and an inflated sense of self-worth.

You know, tit-masters!

It would almost be more bareable to get your drugs from the trembling ranks of the horribly addicted than from the posturing ranks of English Literature students.

But my anger aside, here is your obligatory drug story.

The first time I went to see Bob Dylan in concert was two summers ago at a Kent based festival, it was fairly early in the year and it should not have been, but was, blisteringly hot. In the nature of festivals it was also distressingly crowded and generally awful, I have after many years of living with myself come to the conclusion that I have the stamina of an eighty something year old women, and I spent most of the time sitting on the ground in the centre of the crowd, worrying about my hydration and hoping that no sudden surge forward resulted in my horrible death. The music was good and helped to sustain me through the unpleasantness, I listened to Sea Sick Steve’s inditement of the American prison system from my two foot by two foot patch of field, reigned in on all side by the legs of thousands and thousands of strangers, with a new level of appreciation, but I would be lying if I said I wasn’t waiting for Bob, throughout. He was naturally the final act.

Ten, warm, dizzying hours later when he eventually slunk on stage like a ancient but surprisingly sexy cat, everyone bah myself, lit several celebratory spliffs. By the end of the first song you could see the haze of them hanging lazily over the crowd. When he played Rainy Day Women 12&35 the haze doubled and sunk thickly. I suppose when Bob gives you a direct order you don’t ignore him “Oh? I MUST you say? Well, ok Bob, your the boss, man.” The fog of it was unbelievable, it was like Victorian London - but with pot.

Midway through Blind Willie McTell I could make out just make out through the fog, the couple in front of me. The boy was taking something powdered out of his coat pocket and proceeding to gallantly to proffer it to his girlfriend from the back of his credit card, (this seemed wrong on so many levels, it was like they had got the requisit equipment for taking cocaine but finding that they lacked a mirror had decided not to line it up with the card but rather to just heap it on the back and snort it from there. I’m not even sure it was cocaine, it looked yellow.) The first time they did this they were relitively successful, in that most of went up her nose, the five subsequent times she tried it the wind caught or her boyfriend’s hand jolted and a good 50% of it hit me in the face. I think they gave up when they realised I was taking more of it than they were. I should be greatful that they didn’t ask me for any money really.

An hour in sunstruck and disproportionately blissed out on Bob, it became increasingly hard to differentiate between what was my heat-beaten, weary, Bob-addled mind, what was the considerable amount of second-hand marajuna I was consuming and what were the after effects of the mystery substance that now grittily adhered to my face. Trying not to think about it, I gently parted the pilable doped-up crowd, moved closer to Bob and devoted what remained of my non-clouded mind to looking at him.

Afterwards as my mother drove me home, I vaguely tried to determine the extent of my contact high, yeah, I was very relaxed and content, but then that was because I was finally having a sit down after 10 hours on my feet, I was very euphoric but then I’d just seen the face of Bob, in person, who wouldn’t be euphoric? (Nobody, that’s who!)

I gazed lazily out the window and tried to weigh up the situation. Probably not high, I thought, no, no, in fact definitely not, I knew how it felt, I would know now. And beside there wouldn’t have been anywhere near enough of it on the air, or flying backwards into my face. I was being ridiculous.

And thats when I saw them, drifting behind the rooftops. 

All the stars. 

And they weren’t far away and silver any more either they were huge and gold and close. Strange, fiery, beautiful. They had all changed their starry arrangements and I could see them slowly drifting into new and increasingly elaborate constellations.

My god, I thought, I’m completely gone.

Whatever it was that blew back into my face has taken me aboard it’s magic swirling ship!

“Oh!...Oh! Oh! Look at them! The stars! My god! Mum! Are they the stars?” 

They were so exceedingly beautiful I thought I was going to weep.

My mother gave a perfunctory glance over her right shoulder towards the bright sparkling starry dynamo with it’s mystically-shifting constellations.  She didn’t seem as taken with them as I was but obviously she wasn’t chemically enhanced like me, she wouldn’t be alive to their beauty in the same way I was.

I think she waited a respectable time before disabusing me. I was allowed a good ten seconds of thinking I was a poet and a prophet before she said kindly...

“Anna, those aren’t the stars. What you’re looking at is about 60 flying paper lanterns.”

“Oh.”

“They were letting them off at the end of the concert, I’m surprised you didn’t see them then.”

Clearly I had been focusing on Bob.

When I looked again it was obvious. Dissapointing. I wasn’t at all stoned either, I realised, just tired and stupid.

The weird things was that for that split second in which I thought things had all got a bit hallucinagenic, I understood the appeal. I had thought to myself “Well, look at that! Stunning! I really must do this again. Not a substance person my arse! I can't believe I have wasted so much time not doing this! I'll google that powdered yellow gunk when I get home and buy me in some of that baby!” I had been fully convinced of the drug-inspiration relationship, (obviously I'm not now, if anything my non-drug induced "hallucination" has compounded my belief that inspiration is a matter purely of chance and usually of misunderstanding,) and ultimately, why spend all that money and risk such cerebral damage when you can achieve similar effects by depriving yourself of water, looking at someone you fancy till your oestrogen levels make you light-headed and then idiotically mistaking things for other things.

I stand by Ginsberg though either way, the experience itself doesn’t make you creative, you have to something with it. Perhaps if I had genuinely had been high, and genuinely had seen each star in it’s golden Blake-esque glory then I would have turned that experience into some sort of trancendently beautiful modernist beat poem, grown a beard, upped my sense of self-worth to ridiculous levels and mingled with my fellow English students, a bona fide convert to the tit-master way of life, but who needs drugs? As it is, I've turned my non-drugged, flying lantern based anti-experience into a mediocre, slightly disjointed post-essay, blog ramble.

Which I feel is similarly valid, artistically.

The Power of Film or How My Five Year Imaginary Relationship was Sullied and my Brain Melted.

When I tell people that I fancied my English teacher, which, on the whole, I often do, I’m always concerned that what they are picturing is something horribly saccarine and cliched, that they are, in effect, imagining my life as some sort of black and white 40s film entitled “Growing Pains” in which I am played by Shirley Temple and he is played by Jimmy Stewart. Shirley thinks she is attracted to Jimmy because she isn’t really an adult yet and is mistaking her love of English and her respect for Jimmy’s position of authority for an emotion, fortunately Jimmy is kind and understanding and guides Shirley through this period of her life without once giving her a quick feel until, a few months down the line, she meets a nice non-threatening boy of her own age and all the issues are resolved and everyone feels developed (even though their characters are deeply underdeveloped).

If people are imagining this I can’t say I blame them, it’s the sort of thing that the words “I fancied my English teacher” naturally conjure up, but it wasn’t like that at all.

If there were to be a film of it I would probably be played by an unknown Lithuanian prostitute turned actress and he would be played by Owen Wilson in prosthetics. It would just be that kind of film. “Die Schmerz de Wachstums” would be painfully long at a full 3 hours and almost nothing would happen for the first two. Rather than being full of mutual respect and Shirley Temple songs it would instead be full of a lot of unresolved mutual sexuality. David Lynch would direct the last five minutes of it which would be entirely comprised of horrible flashing images set to the music of Wagner. It would end abruptly.

Incase no one ever makes it though, and we all pray they don’t, I’ll give you a quick relatively unemotional run-down here.

When I had first met him, aged 13, there had probably been something very innocent and pure about the whole business. All at once I had looked across a crowded room/assembly hall, etc. It had never been what my mother termed "respect and admiration" (this was her cover-all for any emotion experienced by people under 30,) but was from the start, on my side, a fully committed adult relationship, I really put myself into it. 

For the first few years I figured that when he came to his senses and reciprocated we would probably have to move to a moor, away from the society that would judge us so, and closer to rivers and streams and other things that were pure, like our love.

For the few years after that (or if you prefer, the second hour of the film) I figured that moving was not strictly necessary and that we could probably get by with just fooling about in a low key way between lessons and after school at his flat. There didn't have to be anything particularly star-crossed about our relationship, just a faint mutual affection and a great deal of soaring well-orchestrated sex. We both liked Blackadder and The Clash which was enough to see us home in terms of common ground. I wasn't a stunner but I didn't still look like a child and I wasn't actively hideous. We were well suited enough for a brief affair. Surely?

By the time I reached sixth form, having given of myself in our imaginary relationship for five years, I had effectively run out of patience and wanted him to just give me a hard screw so we could all move on with our lives. I mean really! How long did I have to wait? I was actually in his class now which I had never been before, the oppertunities were plentiful and he had clocked up five years of sex debt. It didn’t even have to be good, it would probably be quite angry sex, but just something to speedily lay to rest the now time honoured link between him and romance. Every so often I would still think of him in his moor-bound capacity, or of us wandering back to his flat, but mostly I was impatient and unreasonably convinced of my own entitlement to him, rather than lovelorn.

Towards the end of the first year in sixth form, for no reason, he showed us a film about nuclear war. Ah, Mr Lynch, how good of you to step in. He took real glee in how distressing it was and it was distressing, the certificate was only a 15 but I really don't trust anyone, 15 or otherwise, that could weather that film, uneffected by it. It had been banned, and while I'm not pro-censorship it deserved to be and the British Film Board aught to have burned all copies of it while they were at it. The subject wasn’t something I had ever really thought about before. I realise looking back that this was because my brain was storing up a lifetimes worth of occasionally thinking about nuclear war in order to compress it into a period of about six months during which time I would be lucky if an hour went by without me graphically and horrifically envisaging it. It made my brain melt.

I wont bore you with the details of the months directly following my viewing of the film during which time my melted brain settled in a trembling pool at the bottom of my skull, completely incapacitating me. Someone told me about a month ago that when I say “melting brain” what I actually mean is “adjustment disorder” Aside from the fact that this sounds like something that people who have had their gender realligned go through a month into the change, I felt that it might be a bit hasty as a diagnosis. I am fairly convinced that that type of thing usually comes on after divorce or redundancy or trauma, and I think that “after watching a nasty film” would probably be conspicuously absent from a list of precipitating factors. But whether pathological or otherwise my point is that the long term effects of my Melting Disorder were that teacher and Film sort of became inextricably bound up in my jellied mind.

This did mean that the link between him and romance was laid to rest, though in a much less sexy and much more vomity way than I would have liked. I didn’t not fancy him but I now couldn’t even imagine him but he was surronded by firey death and laughing gleefully at it, the moor on which our mansion of gothic romance had stood was now an irradiated tundra and whenever we went to walk close by the rivers or streams I found that there were dead radiation burnt children floating in them. If we walked back to his flat after school the people of Rochester highstreet were invariably vomiting up their stomach linings, crawling, weeping, eating their own afterbirths and reaching out quivering hands to us for help. It’s hard to stay aroused when that kind of thing is going on.

He left the school shortly afterwards in a blaze of radiation poisoning and horror. I wasn’t glad to see the back of him because he still owed me some sex but on the other hand it would be nice not to have a daily reminder of the fact that humanity would soon end in a poisonous-fireball of it’s own creation. I think his last words to us as a class were “now I have become death, the destroyer of worlds,” either that or “Fuck The Leather-Clad Head!”.

I forget.

But anyway that is “Die Schmerz de Wachstum” from it’s innocent beginning, through the 2 hours/five years that doesn’t have a plot, to the traumatically Lynchian ending. I basically enjoyed the ride apart from that last bit, and besides my brain has re-solidified now and I only occasionally almost vomit in fear when I mistake fire alarms for the five minute warning. I’d be happy if I saw him again to either write off or receive that sex debt he so clearly owes me. His choice.

If some poor filmicly progressive soul does make “Die Schmerz de Wachstum” I hope they do a good amount of audience testing to ensure that it won't melt anyones brain and that if the BBC shows it once and bans it that the people in charge of the DVD realise give it a higher certificate than 15. They can stick this post on the DVD extras, too. Just a thought.

Sticks and Seduction (Nailing the pretentious title!)

A meeting was called by the Women in Charge mid-way through my first year in sixth form. It was the kind of large important meeting that we were all told about a week in advance and that meant that we all, the entire lower sixth, had to gather in our library-adjacent common room to be addressed as a collective.

The contents then, logically, concerned us all.

The Women in Charge had called in back-up for the occasion and sat against the wall along with her were Mrs Grey (The Gray-ster) and Miss Kermit (Kermy!) Kind and witty, respectively, and not above idle gossip, collectively, The Grey-ster and Kermy were lower-sixth favourites. They had a difficult line to walk however between their natural goodness and the terrible demands of duty. They were for the most part good to us though, like friendly prison guards who gave you extra cigarettes when the warden wasn't looking, or rather like friendly prison guards who let you come in and weep all over their office and abuse the warden terribly, when the warden wasn't looking.

Now the warden was looking they sat ashen faced and uncomfortable, staring at their shoes.

Once we were all settled the Women in Charge waddled her way up to what she must have imagined was her soap-box and tilting forward on the balls of her small feet, trilled at us "Laddddiiies."

"Sorry to keep you after school (general inward grumbling) but there are two things that have come to my attention and that really need to be dealt with straight away. The first is that someone has bought a stick in to the common room, (the eyes of about 10 good friends shifted towards me, and mine shifted towards Sticky, my proposed sixth form mascot who rested forlornly in a corner.) It needs to be removed immediately. The second is that there is still some very inappropriate dressing going on. We have been over this before ladies, sixth formers need to look respectable! I don't want to see any more clevage (eyes probably shifted in various directions here,) any more corsetry (100 pairs of eyes, back to me) or any more, any more...abundancies of lace, (ah, that was everyone, everyone's eyes, even The Grey-ster and Kermy had allowed themselves a quick glance up from their shoes towards my corseted-in-tits-out-lace-swaddled self.) Correct it ladies! ("lady" chimed in everyone mentally "correct it, lady.")" The Women in Charge stepped heavily down from her imaginary soap-box and exited with as much gravitas as she could command.

It would have been annoying if it wasn't so hilarious, The Women in Charge could have just sidled up to me as I walked to a class and said "Anna, stick - out! Stop dressing like a Victorian whore! Comprende?" but a meeting for the entire year? With extra staff members present to really hammer it home? I resolved to purposefully drag my feet on both issues until they could learn to be less childish about the whole thing.

I wasn't given much oppertunity to drag though. When I came in the next day I found that Sticky was not resting in his usual corner.

Sticky. The God of our legend.

Having decided that sixth form was really grim and dreadful, that we had prefered GCSEs, and that all changes being made managerially and acedemically were for the worst, some friends and I had decided to buoy up spirits by appionting a stick we had found in the grounds as Sixth-form mascot. We felt it correctly reflected our disillusionment with the current state of affairs...

"Who is your mascot? Is it a horse like on the school badge?"

"God no, it's that old stick, over there."

The brilliant thing was that, in spite of his unassuming appearance, Sticky was working, a girl with access to the art block supplies had offered to paint him pink and blue and varnish him. We were going to carry him to important events, hold him aloft like a beacon of excellence as the head girls were announced, dress him up appropriately for Christmas. He had brought us all closer and, frankly, rekindled our collective hopes and dreams.

And now he was gone. His favourite corner, empty.

I burst in to The Grey-ster and Kermy's office.

"What have you done, you monsters! Where is Sticky?"

"What? Who?"

"Sticky - The Sixth Form Stick! Don't act like you don't know, we had a bloody meeting about him yesterday!"

"The old stick in the corner of the common room? The Women in Charge made us throw it out back outside where it belonged."

"He! He - and he belonged in our hearts!" - I would have said but didn't.

I turned and exited disappointed with both of them.

When an extensive search of the area below the windows of the common room and a more general sweep of the grounds yielded no Sticky, it became apparent that their "outside where he belongs" business was a crock. It was like telling a child that their cat had gone to live on a farm.

For a long time I expected The Women in Charge to send me woodchippings through the post. Bargaining with me until I was dressed appropriately and Sticky was returned to his rightful place, though maimed and a shadow of his former self.

It never happened. Much more sinisterly he was just quietly and mysteriously disposed of. A-level history had taught us that you don't ask questions when this sort of thing happens, so we didn't ask them then. We made our peace with never seeing him again and our collective heightened spirits disappeared along with him. 

A few months latter having, presumably, matured slightly, The Woman in Charge tried a different tack in regard to my dress-sense. Appearing at my side one lunch time as I sat innocuously reading Pope in the library.

"Ah Anna."

I put Pope down.

"Now let me just say at the outset, I do...like what you are wearing."

"We both know you don't" I should have said but didn't.

What I was and wasn't wearing

"but I mean really, Anna, come on!...it's just too avant garde. It's not necessary! No dresses from now on, stick to jumpers and t-shirts. Please! There will be complaints! I can't have things like dress offending anyone."

She nodded smartly and bustled away.

I nodded back and picked up Pope again. This was ridiculous. Avant garde? As in ahead of it's time? Challenging? I could understand the application of the term if I had come in skin-tight disco-ball lycra. I could understand if I had come wearing a burka that completely obscured my face but that had a panel cut out of it that meant that it also entirely exposed my bare breasts, that she could reasonably worry that my manner of dress might offend.

But I was wearing an empire-line cream dress, and a tailored black jacket. I'd even gradually eased the corsets out of my clothing cycle. Nothing was out, nothing was pinched in, nothing was overtly offensive. I was sat reading Pope in an empty library. I wasn't avante garde. If anything I was extremely retro.

And besides even if I had been a little daring in my sartorial choices it wasn't like everyone wasn't fully aware of why. Unlike the numerous other people in the year who were lounging around with skirts cut up to here and tops cut down to there for no good reason, I was trying to quickly and effectively seduce my english teacher. Everyone knew it. It had become part of the hive mind of Fort Pitt. All members of staff knew it. The years sevens in my form knew it before they had met him or me, as if it was a piece of information passed to them in their introductory assemblies

"Here at Fort Pitt we try to uphold excellence at all times. You will eventually grow used to our mixture of dictatorialism and incompetence. You can eat lunch in your form rooms if your form tutor allows you. There is an avante garde looking girl in sixth form trying to bed a member of staff." and so on.

The refusal of the Women in Charge to publicly recognise my well know agenda as well as the terrible fate of Sticky as ordained by her, meant that I churlishly retained my mode of dress until the day I left, as much for the sake of defiance as for seduction. My spirit outlasted hers. After nine more months of corsetry, ruffles and cream lace she stopped mentioning it, stopped contriving horrible little tete-a-tetes in libraries, stopped calling meetings to address it in front of the student body. 

The last time she ever mentioned it was about a year later when she called me into her office to brief me for my Cambridge interview, just a subtle little dig to let me know that she hadn't laid the issue to rest yet...

"And for goodness sake Anna, if you want to be taken seriously, just watch what you wear."

"...What the fuck have you done with my stick?"

I should have said but didn't.

Languages or Things I'm Really Bad At Part 1.

Five years ago, when I was in my final year of GCSEs, my French teacher dedicated one of her lunchtimes to a half an hour phone conversation with my mother. I don't know if she made some small talk or whether she just dove straight in there, but the purpose of the call was to establish why I was so bad at french. Take a while to consider that. She phoned home to ask why, it couldn't just be that I was bad, I was so bad that there had to be a deeper explanation!

"Anna is perfectly capable in other areas and I was just wondering if there was anything going on at home that might be affecting her ability in French."

"Anything going on at home?"

What my mother should have said, tearfully, was "At home? At..? Oh god I was afraid of this. You see I've recently taken a French lover. It's tearing the family apart but I just can't leave him. Anna's french was perfect before Pierre came into our lives but now she can't bare to use the language that she hears us speak when we make love."

What she actually said was

"What? No. I can't explain it, sorry, she's not good at French. There it is. Bye Mrs C-"

This annoyed my teacher who I think had genuinely expected a reason, maybe not Pierre, but something to explain my complete inability to pronounce "soeur" ("sir" it transpires, not "sewer" or "sue-eeeur-r-r-" In my defense look at those vowels! Freakish.)

There were in fact a few reasons; the one that stands out for me is that my french teacher was one of the most singularly terrifying and intimidating people I have ever met. There was nothing necessarily formidable about her physically (she wasn't some sort of broad-shouldered, leather-clad, Ratched-figure like The Head,) but she was tall and severe and just generally gave the impression of being wound up tighter than a clockspring. Unspeakably intense, she would, before an oral, adopt what I can only assume was her "interested listening position" it involved grasping her jaw-line tightly with one hand, bending her trunk forward so her face ended up about 30 cm from your own, and glaring.

Some people were fine with this but no matter how many times I saw her adopt it I never started an oral without thinking "Ho-lee-Christ, woman!"


Another and perhaps more genuine reason was the one flagged up by my mother; I have no natural skill with French just as I have no natural skill with any language. As far as I'm concerned it was only sheer bloody-mindedness on the part of my parents that meant that I managed recognisable English. I learnt to speak pretty fast, considering my deafness (I was a complete dud of a child,) but in my haste I failed to appreciate the finer points of phonetics. After four years of being "Anna Thavory" a women came once a week to bridge the terrible gap between my loose bundle of speech impediments and actual spoken language, teaching me, with the aid of balloons, how to pronounce Hs, Vs, Ss, Ths, and Bs. A lot of the process involved holding my head against the balloons, talking into them, and feeling the syllables sort of knock playfully against my five year old face. This was fun but looking back I'm really not sure it was an approved technique.
It worked though and "I'm not an animal I'm a fu-thum-fuman b-being." became "I'm not an animal I'm a human being." Obviously that was just a sentence for the sake of comic example. I wasn't given that to say, as few speech therapists like to draw vocal comparisions between their pupils and the Elephant Man
(how ever apt they may be.) It's just not good practice.


I want to say that perhaps if Mrs C- had been aware of my lack of talent for accurate sound making she would have accepted it as the reason she was seeking. It explains "sewer" at least. But it wasn't just pronunciation with French, it was everything. Sense, word order, number of words required for a sentence, the whole haphazard and contrary business of gendering things (vagina is masculine. Why?) Words on their own were fine, I couldn't say them but I liked them, pamplemoose for example, what's not to love about that! Ecchymose, hilarious! But no matter how much I like the constituent parts of the sentence it would be beyond me to say "my grapefruit is bruised." I don't know what sex grapefruit is for a start, and for all I know fruit bruising has a different term. I just can't do it. There is no explanation.


About once every two years I'll forget all this and make tentative steps towards learning a new language before remembering about a month in when things get beyond words and phrases and into construction "Oh right. I'm really bad at this. It's all coming back to me now."
This summer I tried Hebrew and Arabic, I liked the latter because "My name is Anna" translates as "Ana ismee Anna." as in "Anna! It's me! Anna!" and I liked the former because to my mind it is what Bob Dylan would speak to me in the passionate throws of our love making ("Ken! Erev! Ken! Oh, Yekiri, ken,... ahuv sheli." and so on.) Both of them feel more natural in the mouth than French ever did, both make use of the sort of guttural chokes and lispings that I was obviously trying to go with when I first learnt English. I want to say I'll be good at them but deep down I know I won't. There is simply no future for me in Gaza Strip diplomacy.
I know it. Mrs C-, if she's out there, glaring intensely at the screen, she knows it, although neither of us are able to work out the reason for it.


That's all.


Leila Tov and Jayyid Sa'adat.

Why I Don't Contribute Anything to The Community Anymore.

Four years ago, when I was in lower sixth, the women in charge of us waddled in and announced to our assembled ranks that from that point onwards the last two periods of every Wednesday would be spent in what she termed "community service." You will notice that this post started with the words "when I was in lower sixth" and not with "when I was in Wormwood Scrubs" but this didn't seem to deter her. Community service we were told, with jowl-wobbling emphasis, was important to our development as socially responsible young women. To this day I am convinced that the school must have been getting something out of it. Terms like "personal development" "social responsibility" and even "young women" were all just things you said. They were very well in assemblies and the beige tundra that was PSHE, but they were airy and vague and you weren't meant to really assign concrete meaning to any of them. You definitely weren't meant to spend half a Wednesday cultivating them. And yet that's what they had decided to make us do. It's possible that there was money involved.

Naturally we spent a few days collectively laughing at the fact that the school was forcing us to become better people in a manner usually reserved for felons and when it became obvious that we had seen a double meaning in the phrase that she'd missed The Women in Charge subtly changed the term to "compulsory voluntary service."

If anything this was much funnier.

"Just off to do my compulsory voluntary service. No, there's no choice. No, well, I suppose I am technically volunteering myself, just under duress. Yeah I can check out any time I want but I can never leave."

A list of placements went up in the adjacent hall and there was a rush to secure something unobjectionable or, better yet, a sinecure; something that would involve almost no work. Generally people plumped for their old schools on the grounds of familiarity; and veterinary clinics were viciously fought over as they meant you got to spend your Wednesday hugging fuffy things that were too weak to protest.

I remember actually being pleased that I had got a place with a local voluntary organisation who I shall here call the UVS. The plan was I would go to them on Wednesday and from there they would drive me to a school for autistic children with whom we would paint pictures and cook. My mother often implied that I was autistic and I had recently seen Rain Man so I was convinced that I would enjoy the experience, or at least make a quick casino buck off of one of the children.

Two other girls were to join me, Kelly Poirot and Alicia Swellings (obviously those aren't their real names, or anybodies real names, but I'm told it's de rigour to allot fake names on the blogosphere.) Though you wouldn't guess it from the pseudonym I've alloted her, I liked Swellings a lot. I didn't know Poirot but it didn't matter because she was only there for about two weeks before she, in her great wisdom, fled. In her place was substituted Emma Wingham.

Emma had started her compulsory voluntary service at a vets, having braved the first wave at the signup sheet to get it. She turned up once. Rather than letting her hug things and tend to the wounded and easily healable the vet made her hold the leg of a rabbit while it was euthanised. It had twitched horribly under her hand. I remember thinking at the time "What? Why?" Not why had it twitched, but why hold it? What was the point? I had thought perhaps it had been a comfort thing, some loving contact for the rabbit as it shuffled off, but have since learnt that when you put an animal down it's knocked out almost immediatly, so that wouldn't make any sense. The only real explanation is that the vet was deeply bitter and wanted to make the new girl get to grips with the horrible realities of his job. Or possibly that the legs of euthanised rabbits sometimes come completely free from their morings unless held in place, flying off, and gruesomely hitting nurses in the face and knocking over scales and thermometers. "It's just one of those unseen chemical things. There's no stopping it. First it twitches then the muscles go taught, spasm, break, and under the pressure the whole leg just flies off...get the compulsory voluntary service girl in and make her hold it in place, would you?"

Either way Emma seemed glad to be joining us.

The first week we turned up at the UVS Poirot, Swellings and I had shopped for art and cooking supplies (I had picked up a pack of cards to begin training my miniature Raymond Babbit's with) and the second week we had sat in the UVS's office and eaten biscuits which was brilliant. Poirot at this point, with what we thought had been impatience but with what proved to be crystal-clear foresight had left. The third week we sat in the office and ate biscuits and Emma arrived and told us the rabbit thing and it was brilliant. The fourth week we sat in the office and flipped through catalogues and ate biscuits and talked about our plans for after uni and it was brilliant. By the fifth week we tentatively questioned the lack of children and art in our lives and they told us that there was probably never going to be any of either and that the whole thing had fallen through. They were searching for something for us to do but in the mean time we could just sit there and eat biscuits. The sixth week we sat and ate our biscuits with the cold and terrible knowledge that this was All There Was stretching out in front of us, hideously. We had secured a sinecure, almost no work at all, and rather than being wonderful and relaxing it was dreadfully, dreadfully boring and completely Kafka-esque. We would have left, and could have left if only it had been regular voluntary service, but of course it wasn't. Our community service had been revoked and we had instead been sentenced to A Stretch. By week 7 I started to be surprised that our weekly biscuit ration wasn't pushed through a hatch in the door.

It's shocks me that I only had to spend two hours sitting in my UVS cell a week because it feels as if whole portions of my life drained slowly from me in that room. I was genuinely fond of Swellings and Wingham, they were, and are, both funny and interesting, full of stories and post-sixth form plans, but some how we managed to get all of that out the way in the first few weeks and were just left knowing everything about each other and trapped in a room.

For a while we tried to buoy our spirits up in the manner of all POWs, trapped mountaineers and caged animals, by setting ourselves simple tasks. We found an empty biscuit tin full of stuffing and scrap material in a corner and from it we fashioned Cecil, a snail/bear creature made of purple silk and stuffed with felt. We sat him in a plant pot on the desk and he stared at us pityingly with his drawing pin eyes. The next week we made him a tag that read "Hello my name is Cecil. I am 8. Please love me." and I toyed with the idea of creating one for myself which would read "Hello my name is Anna. I am 18. Please kill me." Then, at least, at the end each interminable stretch, when I staggered out into the real world with my now cold dead eyes and completely useless boredom-wracked brain, kindly passers-by would know what to do.

In many ways the time there was not wasted as I now have a detailed gauge of how much boredom I can withstand, and the ways in which I withstand it. Some days I would really go to town on the biscuits, or play an internet game called Dino Run for hours on end. Some days I would just lie back on my swivelly chair and groan for minutes at a time. I think Emma joined me in this. Swellings was probably the best at bearing up, I only remember her joining the groan chorus once or twice, when it's despairing force became too irresistible. We youtubed "ghost videos" regularly, and for a while we had a good thing going where we would walk the short distance to the kitchen and prepare squash and tea for ourselves, though this had to end when someone casually mentioned that there was legionnaires disease in the pipes. The up-side to this was that the remainder of that particular stretch positively flew by as I dwelt upon my imminent death.

There was another thing that provided occasional relief, though it was basically relief traded for concern, and that was Phil. Hamster-like and jovial, it should be stated early on that Phil was very nice, but like all overbearingly nice people you had to wonder whether he was fully developed in mind. He was perfectly able to function but just child-like and odd. He was also the person who was supposed to be organising an alternative placement for us, and had so far failed to do so. He would float in and out of the office when our groaning got too loud. Almost everything Phil said was amusing in some way, and the degree to which he was open about his life with us was both wonderful and terrifying. He showed us a love letter and poems he had penned, I say penned, typed, and while it feels wrong to divulge any real details as to their disturbingly candid contents, I will say that the font he had gone with throughout was Comic Sans. I'm not prissy about fonts but the fact that a love letter had been typed? And like that? It's just plain wrong on so many levels, and in an odd way tells you all you need to know about him.

Clearly the week that we read the letter and poems wasn't boring, but it was both horribly voyeuristic and distressing to all sensibilities. Somehow this wasn't an improvement.

Eventually, three weeks before the year ended Phil found us a placement at a local junior school, and for those three weeks we ran an art club. This was, some one remembered, what we should have been doing from the start. These children, though, were the slow and shy ones and there was no way I was going to be able to teach any of them to count cards. It was all I could do to teach them to fashion glove puppets from old socks. While the art club had nothing on the hours spent at the UVS in terms of private grimness it did present it's own uniquely depressing moments; the fact that one child, when Swellings asked what he had got for Christmas, said that he and his mother hadn't had Christmas, only birthdays that year because money was low, and the fact that all the children's glove puppets were dreadful, are just two examples of such.

We left after our three weeks because Compulsory Voluntary Service ended with the run up to exams. We probably could have kept on there but, as that would have counted as genuine volunteering, none of us went for it.

So there it is. The lengthy wordiness above being the explanation of the short title above that. I don't contribute anything to my community anymore because sitting in a office cum cell with two friends and one lovelorn mentalist, with nothing to do, nearly destroyed my brain as well as nearly giving me Legionnaires; because one sock-puppet does not a Christmas make; and because while community service does mean that you may get to hug a fluffy thing that is too weak to protest, when you pan out you invariably find that the fluffy thing is the leg of a dying rabbit and you are only hugging it to stop it flying off and wrecking terrible veterinary havoc.