LESSONS LEARNED: OLD SCHOOL

Past, Present and Future walked into a bar. It was tense.

I am always learning, and this week I have learned so many lessons from what has happened when I revisited my old school for a reunion, many years on from the final end of term.

I have learned that you can go back in time and still survive the present.

I have learned that it’s especially surreal when you end up walking into the reunion with the person charged to look after you when you arrived as the ‘new girl’, years ago. And that it’s weird that she seems even more nervous than you are, though you wonder if she’s just pretending to make you feel better. Just for old time’s sake.

I have learned that the people to whom you used to feel inferior are maybe not the definition of how you’d like to be, even if you still feel a tiny bit intimidated when you see them after all the years.

I have learned that, even if having a busy career makes life routine and sometimes difficult, maybe it’s more worthwhile than just being rich and beautiful.

I have learned that, no matter what efforts I consider, I will never be either rich or beautiful. And, given that I might as well accept this now, it really is pretty much okay.

I have learned that dance has a vocabulary and artistic intent has an entitlement. And I never would have guessed.

I have learned that the person who blanked me for four years imagines that we were friends throughout. Spiffing, fabulous, and frightfully good show.

I have learned that I am mostly remembered for my long hair tied in plaits aged 11, my sharp tongue aged 18, and a musical prowess which is no longer mine.

I have learned that, when I am listening to conversation from which I feel detached, I start to laugh silently and irrepressibly until I start to shake.

I have learned that it can still be cold enough in May to make you shiver for an entire hour after you go back indoors.

I have learned that the cliques established by demographic and designer label at the age of 12, can reform in a heartbeat when time goes back to the future.

I have learned that people who stopped dead when they heard what primary school I went to, way back then, will blink like startled woodland creatures, all grown-up, when they ask me where I teach and I tell the whole truth, and nothing but.

I have learned that someone who seemed quite friendly at the time, will decline my Facebook friend request next day. On a Sunday too.

I have learned that too many people simply don’t get irony, or my jokes. And that tumbleweed is sometimes my best friend.

I have learned that school corridors can still smell just the same, a quarter of a century further on. And that there can still be that frisson of seeing old photos on a wall… as familiar as the icy breeze which makes a door slam in the distance.

I have learned that I am probably still the person who would wander off into the outer reaches of the grounds on a sunny, summer lunchtime. With a book, or a notebook, or my thoughts.

I have learned that I am still the person who sat on my own through almost two years of a subject, after the girl who’d sat beside me died. And that something that someone told me about that, years later, still lingers somewhere at the back of my mind.

I have learned that the mouse that ran across the fifth form English class is still scuttling invisibly across a hardened floor somewhere, its tiny claws scratching like shivers down my spine.

I have learned that the popular kids will still talk to me but not accept me. And that anyway, I wouldn’t want to join any club which would have me as a member.

I have learned that there were a hundred nights out, back then, which I didn’t even know about… let alone get invited to. Only now have I seen the photos.

I have learned that the so-called ‘bad boy’ never was an evil messiah. He just used to be a very naughty boy.

I have learned that sometimes when accountancy gets too exciting, you have to get a job with Inland Revenue.

I have learned that sometimes, you have to leave the money-making to your husband and just like, find what your thing is and just like – do that thing, and find your creative satisfaction. Cos that’s like, deeply satisfying and just like, so creatively enabling.

I have learned that sometimes you find a sense of who you used to be. And that it’s far more of whom you are today than you’d ever really consciously realized.

I have learned that neither the person who said that she would ‘break my f/ing’ legs’, or the person who told me she was my friend, really ever meant a word of it.

I have learned that sometimes you remember why you got on with someone and not with someone else, and that those things haven’t changed.

I have learned that I still worry about what people think of me, and that I probably always will. And that I’ll probably worry that anyone hearing about that will think I’m weird. And then I’ll lose the art of sleep. Again.

I have learned that you cannot repeat the past, but that the past is deeply rooted in the present. And in the future.

I have learned. I am learning. I still have so very much to learn.





12th May 2013