Fifty years on: Thursday, 6th May 1976
(Sedbergh School, Age 14)
Five-Year Diary: I’m up early to revise German. I type it out, thinking that might help in some way. I may not be learning much German, but I’m learning to touch type!
Music lesson: I play the flute – with less enthusiasm these days than I used to. I’m OK on scales, but bad on two octaves. We do minors and find a good Beethoven duet. An orthodontic brace on my teeth rubs against my gums when I play.
French: We’re on the last chapter of Petit Nicolas. I pay attention rather than just looking at the cartoons. It’s about running away after he spilt a bottle of ink on the carpet and his Mum shouted at him. It
Maths: questions on averages—mean, mode, median. I got it! (and it’s a lesson that stuck for life).
Geography: I did badly on a test. We had to hand them in. Something I didn’t read, rather than something I hadn’t understood.
Latin: I scratch at the desk. The desk is a hundred-year-old oak, full of the names and initials of boys who, like me, have sat in front of this exact same teacher. I did the paragraph all wrong. Latin for me is either improvisation or invention; the first is an attempt at translation, things like ‘oderint’ translated as ‘they smelt’; the second, I write down whatever comes into my head.
Lunch, not on B sets. (Reading this 50 years later, I have no idea what this means.
Swimming: Arduous
A day to forget, but I write it up in my Collins Five-Year Diary regardless.
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