A constant disappointment

On the face of it my childhood history teacher Miss Close was totally unremarkable, but that didn’t stop her dispensing one of the most valuable and formative lessons I ever learned in my life. Although I should add that it wasn’t directly to me and I don’t think it was quite the lesson she had intended. Anyway, a chance remark at a house party this weekend brought it all flooding uncomfortably back.

Like everybody my year is punctuated by events, and the most significant ones always seem to take place at my friends Glenn and Lucy’s house, a Victorian terrace off the Oxford Road. Not mumbo-jumbo like Easter and Christmas, nothing like that. We have different ceremonies and faiths. In May, we congregate there to worship at the shrine of Eurovision (an event I’ve already described here). It, along with the beer festival at the start of May, denotes that summer is on its way to Reading. Soon there will be tables and chairs outside Picnic. There will be long sunny days and drinks after work in the beer garden at the Allied Arms. Later on, there might even be Sunday afternoons sprawled on a blanket in Forbury Gardens reading a good book and listening to the oompahs of the reassuringly anachronistic tuba wielding gentlemen in the bandstand.

And, at the other end of the year, there is “Porkfest”, Glenn and Lucy’s annual fireworks party in November. It sounds like an orgy - and I’ve done that joke hundred of times - but actually it refers to the giant joint of pork they roast every year for hours, meat meltingly soft and crackling crispy and studded with coarse salt. Again, it has somehow come to herald the changing of the seasons. It ties in with dark mornings, seeing your breath materialise in front of you on the walk into town every day. The blue overhead lights go on in the funbus come hometime, making you feel like you are locked in a German disco circa 1982 as you speed down the dual carriageway. The ground floor of John Lewis is already festooned with cards and bottles and jars full of gorgeous foodstuffs, like the poshest grotto that ever there was. And before long, the Salvation Army will be parping away outside Marks and Spencer every weekend.

Porkfest happened last Saturday, and since it was a social gathering I did what I always do at these things - holding forth and showing off. Dangling my feet off the very edge of appropriate, singing a happy tune and thinking about jumping in. You might not like me if you met me in real life. And then there was a pause and one of Glenn and Lucy’s friends, who I don’t know well, said:

“You’re quite disappointing, aren’t you?”

Pause. I didn’t know what to say.

“I just expect more from you. I keep waiting for you to say something that really grabs me. You seem like you might be capable of it, but you never do. It seems a bit of a waste.”

To everybody’s amusement, I was completely dumbstruck. All I could do was mumble a feeble comeback about how I kept my most brilliant outpourings for my blog, which of course isn’t even true.

“I can see you might be more interesting on paper. Do you have a link?”

I gave her a card and the conversation moved on. But I had that uncomfortable feeling you get when somebody skewers you completely, so casually, that it might as well have been by accident. I know that feeling well, but I’m usually the one wielding the skewer. It was probably a lucky guess and looked like a cheap shot, but it was painfully close to home and it all has a lot to do with what I learned from Miss Close all those years ago.

Let me explain. In 1986 my mum and dad were at a parents’ evening. These events generally held no fear for me, because my test results were always annoyingly good and so were my school reports. The only exception was PE, where my teacher Mr Fossett lamented my ability to “get into silly situations” (as time has gone on, I’ve started to wonder if he was as dumb as he looked). My parents sat down at table after table as teachers lavished praise on my academic gifts - while neglecting their most fundamental duty which should surely have been to say something like “He never seems to show any interest in girls, is this right?" or "Does he own a comb at all?”

And then they got to Miss Close. This is not an inspirational Dead Poets’ Society type story, far from it. Miss Close was a sour-faced and charmless woman if ever there was one, clad in knitwear so uninspiring that you could easily lapse into a coma simply putting it on a hanger. But she still managed to sum me up better than any of the teachers I actually liked.

My mother returned from the school, came through the front door, hung her coat up in the hall, and told me.

“Miss Close says she knows you’re bright, so she always prepares additional material for each lesson. That way, when you finish ahead of the rest of the class you can do some extra work. But apparently you still finish at the same time as the rest of the class so you never get round to doing any of it. She’s very disappointed in you.”

The moral I was supposed to take away from it was this: clever people work harder and achieve more than everyone else. The reward of being smart is that you get extra work. Unfortunately, I had quite a different interpretation of this parable. I decided instead that the reward for being smart was that you could achieve just as much as everybody else without ever having to break a sweat. All that extra time could be used for dossing. What was the point of being smart if it didn’t mean you had an easy life?

It was a revelation.

So at sixth form, while all the tryhards were doing Duke of Edinburgh Awards or learning the clarinet I was playing Black Maria in the heavy metal corner of the common room with all the kids who were putting off work for another year doing something vaguely vocational. It may, with hindsight, be my fault they ended up failing those exams (I kind of feel bad about that).

This attitude is of course completely incompatible with studying at Oxford. But the thing is, when I applied I genuinely didn’t think I’d get in. And when I did I expected it to be difficult and for some weird reason it just wasn’t as difficult as I thought it would be. My time there wasn't an uplifting tale about me raising my game or stepping up to the plate or any clichés like that; I’ve never done anything even approaching that in my life. If I’d found it difficult I just would have failed.

Fate had the last laugh, because I could do exams but when it came to working out what I wanted to do for a living, organising my own life outside the hermetically sealed environment of college life I was hopeless. Doing the filing for an insurance company for less than the minimum wage after university, I became like a stock comic character rather than an actual person. The Oxford graduate temp. My education was somehow unreal to everybody I worked with.

“You went to Oxford? Honestly? No, you’re kidding.”

Then the saddest thing of all, it became unreal to me. Nobody could believe I had ever achieved anything of that magnitude and eventually, nor could I. Anyway, nowadays it doesn’t bother me so much, or at least I didn’t think I did. But that chance remark at the party made me wonder.

What have I been doing all this time?

My contemporaries at university are reading the news on television, or running large parts of the company I work for, or being featured in the Sunday Times. I, on the other hand, fail to sum up complicated ideas on a single Powerpoint slide in an ugly font for somebody who is too busy to think. By night I write this blog. Really, if I do want to end up running the world I need to get my skates on or it isn’t going to happen.

And something seems to be changing in me, because I find - rather unexpectedly, as it happens - that I might be bothered after all. Maybe, just maybe, I don’t want to be a disappointment any more. Not for Miss Close, not for some woman who heckles me at a party, but for me. So what do I do now?

Later on. Glenn and I are out on the patio smoking a Hoyo de Monterrey Number 2 apiece. It is the quiet time towards the end of the party, the guests are slowly trickling home. I have known Glenn for seven years now, but we don’t get to catch up like this very often. Our conversation is interrupted by footsteps down the path. It’s the woman I have disappointed.

“I read some of your blog in the front room. It’s not bad. You being a writer makes much more sense than that job in telecoms.”

“Thanks. That‘s very kind of you.”

“I’m still a bit disappointed though. I find myself wanting more, I think you can do more. You should write a novel.”

“I hope I will some day. At the moment I’m still working out what to do, and enjoying writing the blog.”

“Yes, you could probably recycle some of the stories in the blog when you write your novel, I can see that. Oh, and you should include more dialogue in your blog. If you’re going to do a novel you’ll need to write more dialogue.”

“Okay. I’ll see what I can do.”