Life and Times Par vi

So my period of tranquility was at an end. A period of 18 years studying beckoned, a truly frightening prospect. At least the beginning was gentle, slap a bit of paint about, stare blankly at the odd book and sing out of tune to "puff the magic dragon". Yes, amazingly enough our teachers had us sing a song that blatantly referred to smoking a joint. It seemed we weren't the only ones that needed educating. Apparently the main objective of this studying business was to get the 3 r's - reading, (w)riting and (a)rithmetic. Why we were taught to say rithmetic rather than arithmetic i never discovered, maybe it was the first steps in understanding the fact that in Britain no one really knew how to spell or pronounce anything.

My first scribblings showed a staggering lack of imagination. My reading was slow, mainly due to the fact that i preferred kicking a football to looking at a book. My rithmetic (maths) was good, i always found it necesasry to be able to calculate the exact chance of getting caught. At 6 i was sent to Gospel Oak primary, after a couple of school terms the headteacher summoned my parents and informed them that i wasn't very clever. Father found this odd, since by then i'd asked him to teach me chess and very shortly afterwards he was unable to beat me. This led him to conclude that he was stupid as well or the teachers didn't know what they were talking about, either way he refused to play chess with me again.

After a couple of years there i had begun to settle in. Probably my only talent as a student was knowing precisely the minimum amount of effort required to get the necessary results. My parents decided to intervene -for some reason they thought it would be good for us to move 100s of miles north where it was dark, cold and people spoke with a weird accent. Yorkshire. My dad had got promoted, he was now the manager for Midland Bank in Rotherham. I was not best pleased. Goodbye friends, goodbye cousins, goodbye everything. I had to step up my escape strategies - a bit of rope wasn't going to work here.

HELP!