nunoncastors

It’s like Brideshead, but more secular.

A few days ago I wrote a post entitled School, and into this post I poured a certain amount of hate and a soupçon of morose rubbish. It’s very much what I do. Now, as a rule I don’t tend to reread my entries here, they’re intended to be ‘of the moment’ rather than considered discourse. However, I’ve cheered up in the intervening time and feel that there were some glaring omissions.

For example, context is always important; it’s one thing to say that I loathed school and another to elaborate on why. My time at school, I imagine, was no worse than anyone else’s, full of travails and nonsense certainly, but arguably no worse. The fault, I suspect, lies with me.

In as much as my original post was born of grumpiness and doubtless a subconscious desire to paint events a rosier hue by a) partially justifying them and b) trying to present myself as being aloof and detached, this is an attempt to explain rather than point fingers.*

I realise that my view of the world is perennially dim, ever has it been so, but why do I recall school as being uniformly horrible? Well, I think if we take my suicide attempt at the age of eighteen and work backwards, we’ll probably get a pretty good idea.

It’s very easy to say that I was ‘unhappy’, almost a cop-out, but realistically this was the case. My parents divorced when I was ten and, while things are fine between them now, at the time I was treated to a certain amount of… shit. I suppose you could call it that. Again, hindsight undoubtedly blurs recollection, but when you’re ten divorces aren’t the easiest things to get your head around and, as much as I’d like to think I knew what was going on, I don’t think I really did. I certainly wasn’t equipped to deal with it.

The upshot this divorce was that I ended up living with my mother, visiting my father once a week and coping with the joys of my grandparents moving in to share the house. This, as you can imagine, made for a strange dynamic, one not necessarily conducive to a normal upbringing. Not that there was anything particularly abnormal about it, I certainly didn’t want for love and affection, it simply created tensions that again, you’re not really equipped to deal with as a child.

Which sounds like more excuses, doesn’t it? Perhaps they are. It remains though, that we are the sum total of all our experiences and, while some people cope and flourish, I evidently didn’t. My dark rumblings on school should therefore be taken with a pinch of salt the size of a small van if they are to be considered accurate; the same goes for this missive.

Navel gazing and reminiscing really doesn’t serve any purpose does it? Time to move on.

* Seriously though, there were some people who were wankers at school and, having met them since, still are. Though I sometimes wonder if I’m one of them.