When I was a kid, I used to fall in love with a different girl practically every week. In fact, I used to keep a frequently-updated list of all the girls at school that I fancied, ranked according to how much I fancied them at that particular moment in time.<\/p>\n
Fortunately, such documentation was long ago lost to landfill. However, it would be a shame to forget that it had ever happened.<\/p>\n
In my day, at least, when schoolchildren start secondary school at 11 years of age, they become different people overnight. They move from an environment where they are surrounded by 4-11 year olds to one where they are surrounded by 11-18 year olds. I am aware that in this modern world, children are exposed to bad influences at an increasingly early age, but back then sub-11 year olds were innocent and naive, and acted like, you know, children.<\/p>\n
While all the other children were embracing this new, mature environment, for some reason I was at the back of the line. One reason may have been that I was resisting this change from “big fish\/small pond” to “small fish\/big pond” and assuming, in my naivety, that if I stayed still then the whole world would stay still around me. Dumbass.<\/p>\n
Another reason could have been Stephen. Allow me to explain.<\/p>\n
I went to a primary school on an RAF<\/a> estate. As a result, at the end of each year I’d always have to say goodbye to one or two of my friends forever, as their dads were restationed elsewhere. My lovelife ((used to describe the act of holding hands and kissing without tongues, naturally)) at this early age was a real tear-jerker, as you can imagine, and I can still remember the names of those girls who were snatched away from my life while they were still perfect.<\/p>\n At the end of my final year at this school, the numbers came in. Out of the entire class of 30 ((this is almost certainly not the actual figure, but it’s adequate)), 6 had passed their 11+<\/a> and were eligible for the Grammar school<\/a> in the next town. The rest would be going to other local non-Grammar schools. I, naturally, was among those 6.<\/p>\n No problem so far. Grammar schools are very selective, and I doubt that many other schools in the county attained a 20% pass rate. However, due to the aforementioned disappearing-friends trick, there would only be one other boy going to that school with me. Stephen.<\/p>\n Stephen was quite an immature person. Not in a derogatory way, but in the most purely factual way. He had the innocence and the desires of someone half his age. He was also, as I would later discover, a textbook geek-to-be. I counted him among my friends at primary school, but only because I counted everyone among my friends at primary school. I was, without a word of a lie, quite popular. Subsequently, I was totally unprepared for what would happen to me at secondary school.<\/p>\n September came around, and I started secondary school. Now, I don’t know about you, but if I had 120 children that needed sorting into 4 classes of about 30 each ((again, I’m pulling numbers out of my ass, but they are adequate for the purposes of this exercise)), and 50 of them were boys and 70 were girls, then I’d try to put about 12 boys and 18 girls in each class, right? Seems obvious to me. Well, that’s not the way that it went down at my school. Three of the classes got a 50\/50 split, and the rest got the balance.<\/p>\nAmble<\/h3>\n