I found my daily diary from when I was 15.
The word “rage” was very popular with me that year. But I wasn’t angry in a Rage Against the Machine kind of rage. No. This kind of rage was more of a mucking about, messing around. Examples?
“Went into town with (friends) on Friday night and had a rage.”
“Had a sleep over at (friend’s) house and stayed up late raging.”
“(Maths teacher) didn’t show up for Maths class so we had a rage.”
I remember reading this last bit out to my sister and she said I should’ve been raging about the fact that parents were paying fees for the school where there was a repeated absence of teachers. (The absence of the Maths teacher was one of several such incidents recorded in my diary throughout that year.)
I can’t see that we students would rage about the absence of a teacher, although the casualness with which the class was left unsupervised was surprising. Where were these teachers? Did they forget they had a class? Were they off sick and there was no cover?
I wasn’t a kid who liked sport very much. Anything I could do it to avoid sport was fine by me so when I discovered if you had “forgotten” your sports uniform on sports day you just had to do 100 lines of write out (“I must not forget my sports uniform” or some such text) that was just fine with me. I was happy to sit beside the sports field with anyone who was sick or had a legitimate note for why they couldn’t do sport and do my write out, but I think teachers caught onto that very quickly, and very quickly it became some kind of demerit or reportable offence to forget your sports uniform. But for a few weeks I was able to get out of doing sport and for me that was a win.
When I was at high school the city council introduced a service that connected up all the out of town shopping malls, and other out of town points of significance into some kind of giant bus loop.
I’m a fan of public transport, always have been, so the initiation of this bus route set me up with a plan for the school holidays which I roped my good friend into.
We got the bus at the local shopping centre early one morning. We bought an all-day ticket and rode the bus over the tall bridge across the river to the other side, to a shopping centre, we never usually visited because it was so far away. The riding of the buses went on and on and on for hours from there. We would stop somewhere, buy one thing, have something to eat, then catch the bus on to the next place. We crossed the river again in the afternoon, after gathering bus trundled up the hills in the west of the city, past a girls’ school which perched like a Victorian vulture, staring down at the city.
I can’t pretend that all those shopping centres had wildly different stores. They didn’t. But they were different enough, and we were far enough away from home to feel like we were on an adventure.
It’s insane what passed for entertainment in my world as a teenager.
The uncomplicated summer school holidays. I think my mother hoped I would be doing something productive with those 6 to 8 weeks off school. Instead, on most days, I would just sit by the stereo and I would play one record after the other. And as we’re talking vinyl here, I need a fairly good level of engagement because every 20 minutes or so I need to get up and flip the record over to play side two. Listening to vinyl isn’t really commensurate with reading because you had to interrupt yourself too often, but it did work with games of solitaire (with actual playing cards). I could pass a whole happy day with my vinyl. My mother must have been going mad.
Tales from Tobhamhor 