Wednesday Afternoons

In the UK your time at school between the ages of 16 and 18 is known as the "sixth form" and this is when you sit A-level exams in order to earn a place at university. (Unless you were a thick twat and left at the age of 16, which is perfectly permissible.) This part of the school experience is a bit strange because you don't have to be there, so the teachers are torn between treating you with a little more respect and acting like the same miserable, bitter, tossbags that they've been for the last five years. I moved to a new school for the sixth form, close to the sea and all the way over the other side of the country from my previous residence. Most of the week was taken up with lessons but on Wednesday afternoon there was free time. In theory you were supposed to devote this to General Studies, which was taught by a diminutive prick with a Hitler complex and no sense of humor. This, we decided, was an utter waste of a perfectly good afternoon.

By this time I had discovered something much more important than General Studies - alcohol. We weren't old enough to be (legally) served in pubs but a couple would turn a blind eye, and there were also off-licenses where you could buy bottles to take away, so long as you didn't look like an obvious skinny kid, talk in a whiny voice like your balls hadn't dropped or stutter like a nervous spaz. So we drank in the evenings. I came home and pretended not to have been drinking and my parents, for their part, pretended not to notice that I had. I figured that if I could walk across the living room carpet and sit down in a chair without knocking the TV over, tripping on the coffee table or vomiting then I was in good shape. I think my parents' attitude to drink was pretty healthy. My dad once told me that what I did was up to me and it didn't reflect on them. The fact that I grew up into a productive member of society and not a piss-soaked tramp begging for coins in a shopping center car park might make them a little more relaxed now about their decisions in this regard, but who knows?

There must have been a point where I knew that they knew that I drank, but where I didn't yet trust the reaction that I would have got had I showed up at the house with, say, a bottle of scotch. I remember going drinking with Des and Melvin (both nicknames, in case you start to think all my mates were twats). Melvin was visiting from Bristol; Des and I had little cash but Melv was flush so he offered to sub us for the booze. So Des bought Merrydown cider (suggested slogan "Pisshead's Choice") and vodka. Turns out that Melv didn't like cider or vodka, but apart from that everything was OK. So Des and I ended up drinking the cider and about half the vodka before making our way home. We stashed the other half of the vodka down the back of a beach-hut on the seafront, making bloody sure in our inebriated state that we remembered which one, since there were hundreds of the fuckers.

The next Wednesday Des and I left school and walked to the seafront where we retrieved our vodka and spent a pleasant afternoon in contemplation of the importance of a broad curriculum in secondary education. So successful was this sortie that when the vodka was gone we replaced it with a fresh bottle so we could continue our studies.

I'm not claiming that I learned to drink responsibly during this period. I didn't - I learned to drink irresponsibly and try to cover it up. But I learned to drink while at home, with some serious restrictions in place, not least of which was financial. I didn't have the money to drink to excess on a regular basis, and I still had to be able to function when I got home. My parents weren't going to look the other way if I started puking in my cornflakes, messing up at school or keeping a bottle of meths under my pillow. Besides, an interest in booze is educational. A girl in my class lived on an apple farm and we learned that you could take weak apple wine and, by freezing it, cause ice to form, leaving more concentrated spirits behind. Actually the stuff tasted pretty crap, but it's the stimulating effect on young minds that's important.

We learned a lot of other important lessons under the tutelage of Smirnoff and Merrydown. For instance, the simple pleasure of urinating up the side of a transit van on the way from pub to chip shop. Or that the pain caused by your face impacting the road while running from the police (Des) is only temporarily dulled by alcohol. I also learned that Ripley, who was a fat twat when sober, was not improved any by drink, and the sight of him climbing over a railway crossing gate when a train was coming gave me hope that I would never again have to see him lie on his back with his shirt off and proclaim "I'm a whale, I'm a whale" in an attempt to attract girls. Yes, those were glorious days, and I can't think of anything the school could have taught me in General Studies that would been more useful in preparing me for life ahead. You really can't beat community-based educational programs.


Copyright 2007 Edward Bison