Sunday, 28 June 2009

Cambridge (1)

  • allus wuk ard wen tha at school] said my father] enough times during my adolescence for me to be able to regulate the beating of my heart to the utterances of his syllables
  • all-us-wuk-ard-wen-tha-at-school[ thump thump[ breathe in[ breathe out[ all-us-wuk-ard
  • i could regulate my very life to his metronomic words but they never had any value as an imperative> being a teenager i exercised my right to ignore them
  • his advice swam weakly around my head when i shut the fucking geography teacher in the store cupboard and turned the lock] and when i put the drawing pin on the french teacher?s chair and when i went up to school on a saturday night to put dog shit through the head of year?s office letter box> how d?you like that] laughing until i was almost sick
  • i didn?t wuk ard> in fact i did next to nothing] scraping four gcses and more/or/less condemning myself to a lifetime of hand/to/mouth existence
  • my father was livid> thou art a bluddy disgrace> tha ant listened to owt a teld thi] his face ashen with disgust and rage
  • to me then> a working class lad frum tarn with modest/tending/towards/mediocre qualifications> cambridge was always a distant ambition> the shining castle on the hill> the fruited plain of the hymn
  • i woke up a bit when i was 16^but by then it was probably too late>i never got within a million miles>
  • so imagine how i felt when i visited cambridge for the first time in my life> blue fish and i both with the same awesome sense of failure chilling us> neither of us are fucking stupid love] this could?ve been us
  • i failed