Wednesday, 19th February 1975
‘After breakfast, I went outside to play with B’s Frisby, missing assembly. Came in at 9.00. Vicar late. Started our scripture exam. It seemed hard, and the very old vicar said some unmanageable things. Latin. Eurydice and Orpheus. Mr T goes over it with me. Break for an hour of frisbee—Maths III for me. Don’t finish. It can’t work out that an equilateral triangle 4cm base can have an area anywhere near 6.9cm, which it said it had.’
There were only two of us taking Common Entrance. It was an odd time of year to be leaving a prep: school to start public school as the natural break was at the end of the academic year in the summer. I’d made the case to leave sooner with my father. I ought to have left the previous summer. The problem with being a September baby was that I was old for my year group but young for the year before – I’d been with this older year group from my first weeks at Mowden. Academically this year I was treading water. All my Mowden friends had moved on, albeit of the likes of Eton, Harrow, Fettes and Gordonstoun. This delay was ensured by my breaking my leg so badly in March that I missed what would have been my first term at Sedbergh when I would have ‘caught up’ and stayed with those boys.
Breakfast might have been a bowl of cornflakes or rice crispies served from a huge catering bag of the cereal with full fat milk poured from a large plastic jug, followed by eggy bread, a fried egg (cooked on mass in a swill of fat in the oven so that the egg had a skin-like lid on it) and bacon (extracted from a sea of fat and salty water) with toast, omelette made from powdered egg made into a kind of cake (yuk) …, or marmite on toast, all served with a mug of tea brewed in a giant aluminium urn.
Missing Assembly seems odd. Had I been excused? I suppose so. As the head chorister, I would have led the choir, conducting them or keeping time. We may have been allocated a chorus or verse.
My choice of the word ‘unmanageable’ regarding something the vicar said is poor. Even now, I can revisit what I was feeling and thinking. By now, an atheist, a word and concept I didn’t know about, I thought that I understood enough about the world to know that god doesn’t exist.
Diane Morgan, playing Philomena Cunk in ‘Cunk on Life’, made the point brilliantly in 21st-century Britain when she asked a theologian to prove there was a god. He said he couldn’t. She asked, ‘What about God’s brother Simon?’ The Theologian tersely says he doesn’t exist. To which Cunk replies, ‘prove it’. My devotion to god and the church was a temporary form of mysticism born of frequent church attendance at school. Naively, I appreciate it. I went through a period of age 11 or 12 asking God to show himself to me by doing some magic trick while I was sitting there bored in church as the very old vicar said his sermons, such as moving a pot. It never happened. I wouldn’t have allowed anyone religious to argue the case with me as I would have deployed stronger arguments.
KAI provides the calculation and tells me, ‘The approximate area is 6.93 cm² (rounded to two decimal places).’
Another matter is how close or far I got to showing such calculations. In 1975, there were no calculators, only slide rules and log tables. Just saying the word conjures up their odd. I slid a slightly sweet plastic smell—Bakelite, I believe. We found all kinds of items to guillotine with a slide rule.
The background to Frisbee makes for fascinating reading. There’d been a Frisbie Pie Company in Bridgeport, Connecticut. The tins they came in became popular with students for their flying abilities and the fun that could be had. Alone, tossing a frisbee so that it would return to you like a boomerang was the thing, while in groups, you’d try to keep passing it accurately in a relay at increasingly great distances.
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