Brief background: at Year 9 (13-14 years old) you could pick and choose what GCSEs you wanted to take, with compulsory subjects and optional ones in various categories. There were two things I actually wanted to take when I was at school, which was considerably after y'all were at school; Home Economics (by this point Food Technology, which if nothing else sounds cooler to the only slightly gender-questioning nibblet I was back then) and History. Food Tech I was prevented from studying by being both actively and inventively hazardous at times, so I don't consider it exactly unfair. In terms of destruction to the work surfaces and kitchen area, my crowning achievement being trying to make a dipping sauce for some grapes out of Mini Babybels with nothing but a cook's torch and a frankly enormous overestimation of my own competence. Longtime sufferers of Traitor conversation around these parts will know that the last part has not changed much over the years. =]

History, however, I was slightly more displeased at being barred from taking, by which I mean it sent me into an apoplectic fury that led me and my mother to be forcibly removed from that year's Parents' Evening and banned from attending it the year after. See, the head of the History department, one Mr. Baker, was not entirely convinced that I was doing my homework. My handwriting was and remains slow; despite regular exercise in this field, I find that my writing speed with the common-or-garden biro was, to quote J.K. Rowling, outstripped by passing butterflies. Thus, my classwork had an element of précis to it that Mr. Baker took for indolence rather than, well, just being slow, and it wasn't helped by the fact that I corrected the cantankerous old shart on a matter in the first lesson of that year. My homework, on the other hand, was a rather different matter. Since I actually had the time to work on the poxy stuff, I was passing everything he threw at me with flying colours. He most definitely did not like that. At the time, my mother was studying for her History Ph.D, which she has now passed with minor corrections.

So at that Parents' Evening, the first thing he said to my mother was that he would not allow me to study GCSE History because my mother was obviously doing all my homework.

I was a very slight youth, and was unsuccessful in restraining my mother from grabbing him by the lapels and screaming at him until she'd gone a variety of interesting colours.

And I'm now studying for a History degree, so joke's on him, the shit. =]

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"She's old, she's lame, she's barren too, // "She's not worth feed or hay, // "But I'll give her this," - he blew smoke at me - // "She was something in her day." -- Garnet Rogers, Small Victory

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