8336/21255
It was literally yesterday that I drove my daughter to her first day at Reception at school and yet somehow today we went with her to look round a potential secondary school for the next academic year. Why does God insist on having my life on fast forward like this? It must be dull for Them to have to see people basically living the same life, making the same mistakes and doing the same grotty things over and over again, but They are meant to love everyone in Their creation and I'd very much like Them to pay full attention. If not, when I die, I will make Them read this whole blog from start to finish and no one deserves that. Even if they created a flawed and terrible Universe like this one and then instituted a ridiculous reward/punishment system based on who can correctly guess the correct deity.
It's a damning indictment of Their failure that today, on the day of the Rapture, nobody was deemed worthy to be sucked off into Heaven, leaving their clothes in a little pile. All those people trying to be good and none of them good enough. I am glad I never tried. Being sucked off by God is the last thing I would want. I have stuff still to do.
The school we saw was very impressive indeed, with incredible facilities including a dance studio and a fitness room. I know state education is very much a complete lottery and that not everywhere gets a school like this, but by the end of the tour I pretty much wanted to enrol myself. Not to knock the Kings of Wessex of the 1980s or the headmaster, whoever that was, but this place made my school look like a fucking shithole. Imagine what I'd have written if I was going to knock it.
This school had an impressive space for drama and offers GCSE
and A Level in that subject. A career in performance felt like an impossible dream to the teenage me. I very much wanted it, but my careers advisor told me it wasn't on the form and that his very early computer thought I should work in a bank. There was a drama teacher and we put on a few plays and musicals. The drama teacher also briefly set up some lunchtime lessons for me and Hannah Griffiths and we did some scenes from Macbeth (luckily my 15-year-old interpretation of "Is this a dagger I see before me" was never committed to tape and the lessons quickly fizzled out).
The Hitchin school even does classics and you can do Latin A Level, which I also wish I'd done. It was offered at the KOW and the lesson was taken by my favourite ever teacher, Mr Moore. Even then the idea of teaching Latin in a regular school seemed a bit archaic, but I took the subject for a year, did the Cambridge course about Caecillius in Pompeii. As the obsessive swat that I was, I took it upon myself to complete each book as quickly as possible and am pretty sure in the year before O levels, I was studying A level level Latin. I got 99% on my end of year exam (losing 1% for my one mistake of spelling "there" as "their" in a translation). I loved the subject, I loved the teacher and the books started my love affair with Pompeii, but when it came to making choices for O level subjects I was unable to make Latin work for me and had to drop it.
At the time I thought I'd be studying maths at University, only shifting to the idea of doing History when I was one term into the sixth form. Obviously doing Latin would have been a big help for my future studies (if I'd ever done any at University), so in hindsight it was a double disaster. I started the sixth form doing Double Maths, Physics and History, before suddenly having the revelation that I didn't want to do Maths at all (I was the best at it in the school and it's what my dad did, but it didn't bring me much joy and I didn't fully understand it all). I dropped Physics and did English - an incredibly bold move which required catching up on a lot of missed work - but really I should have been doing Latin with Mr Moore as a couple of my friends were. Imagine all the conversations I could be having with Romans now, if I had.
Anyway if your main regret in life is that you didn't do Latin at A level, then you've had a pretty good life, and I was delighted that Phoebe should get all these amazing opportunities. A lot of emotions were being stirred up by the past, the present and the future. The kids in the first year still looked like children and the kids in the sixth form looked pretty much like adults. If the journey from Reception to Year 6 has been quick, how soon will my little daughter be going to the coffee shop that they have IN THE FUCKING SCHOOL!?
Would it be weird if a 59 year old man tried to enrol in the next school intake? Would Phoebe find it embarrassing if I was in her classes? Why can't we go back in time and rectify the mistakes and see where that would lead us? Going back to do Latin A level in 1985 would certainly change my life to the extent that my kids would not exist in this new timeline. Which would be sad. But some other unborn kids might be given a go. And I'd find out what happened to Caecillius. I hope he's OK. Everything was going great in Pompeii when I last saw him.
Maybe I should just be glad that my kids will get opportunities that I didn't. Also my school did amazing things for me. They got me into an amazing University, at a time when that seemed very unlikely for someone like me and (in spite of the careers advisor's best efforts) did enough to foster my interest in comedy and writing and performing for me to give it a go.
But I am not glad. I am furiously angry and jealous. The only consolation is that my generation's selfishness has made the world unviable for the future happiness of my kids. It's not much of a consolation though. I could have had a drama O level.
