Despite everything, I enjoyed my high school experience, certainly enough to sign on for the voluntary 6th year of high school. To my eternal shame, I managed to fail Higher English the first time around, so I had to resit it (along with Chemistry, but I wasn't overly bothered about that, to be honest I re-sat it just to make up the minimum number of classes I had to take). 6th year was, if I'm being honest, pretty much irrelevant. I wasn't there 49% of the time. Now, I know what you are thinking, you are tutting inside your head saying "what was the point of going back if you were going to play truant all the time". Well, I have never once skipped school in my life. It turned out that when I took the classes I needed to either re-sit failed classes, or just take new ones for the heck of it, I filled 21 of the available 40 periods of class. Yes, I know that the 19 free periods I had is actually 47.5% of the time, not 49, but there will be no grading on this memoir. Thursdays, for example, were double Chemistry, single English and then... well, home. My classes for the day were done by first break. I still don't know how I was able to get away with it.
But, like all good things, my reign of apathy at Queen Anne came to an end. In time honoured fashion we congregated in the senior common room on our last day, having various pieces of furniture signed (bad luck to anyone who wanted to sit on a chair the day after we left school - I even think someone went home with the dart board), hanging out with our friends, promising each other that no matter what, when we left school we would absolutely stay in touch. Then we left school and that was the last time any of us saw a fair proportion of each other! Take me, for example, probably an extreme example, but apart from my best friend (and fellow Portrait) Ian, I have not clapped eyes on any of my former classmates in 10 years or more. A couple of them are friends on FB (hi Bradders, Peggy, Weaver, Denise and Shaun!!), and there are tentative plans to meet up with Mark for a day's shooting at some point. Who knows, maybe I'll wind up bumping into some more at some point!! I've not made a concerted effort to avoid anyone from school, it's just the path life has taken me. I actually would quite like to meet up with some of the people from school I didn't hate (if you are on my FB page you can assume you are in that select group!). Hopefully one day I will! After I've lost more weight!!
So, glossing over a few bad decisions I made immediately after leaving school, it wasn't too long before I found myself thrust into the big bad world of employment. My first stint was as a trainee HR administrator for Marconi Command and Control Systems (a company which, purely co-incidentally, no longer exists). To say it was a bit of a culture shock, was something of an understatement. Office politics was something I was at that point blissfully unaware of - that changed pretty damn quick!! I was the only guy (apart from the HR director, who had terrible halitosis and lived in his separate office) in an office full of women. Sounds like fun? Yeah... not so much. There were two clear factions - the HR Officer (although back in those times, HR was still called 'Personnel') and the training officer, versus the secretary, with the HR manager trying to keep out of it, mostly by shutting herself away in a meeting room. Then of course, there was me. Stuck in the middle, sadly, not literally. Actually, there was one other male in the vague environs of the HR department. There was an office which was more or less annexed into HR during a remodelling of the offices, which belonged to our legendary safety manager. Jim was indeed, a legend. He came in one day saying "I'm sure I had something to do today..." It turned out he was on holiday (and yes, I've done that too). He once dropped a car on his head, and fell down a hole holding something vaguely dangerous. However, not long after I started (fresh of face, 17 years old, naive in the ways of the world, really) Jim, who was something of a letch had been caught looking at the secretary's admittedly ample bosom. Just as I walked round the corner I was treated to the sight of once fairly animated secretary rip open her blouse to expose her breastal corsetry with an exclamation of "There you f**king go, have you had a good enough look now???". I didn't know where to look (well, I did, but I didn't want to be obvious in case I was next in the firing line), Jim, I don't think ever moved as quickly before or since as he did that day when he bolted to his office. The next day when I came in, the secretary had a bunch of flowers on her desk. No prizes for guessing who sent those!
When my time as a trainee in HR ended, I was moved to QA, where I wound up doing a whole bunch of stuff, until my temporary contract came to an end and I found myself looking for a job. Fortunately, I was lucky enough to have made a couple of contacts with agencies when I was in HR, and I wound up getting what turned out to be almost 5 years worth of continuous temporary work with an agency called Bordax (who, again purely co-incidentally don't exist any more). It was during this time that I was able to accumulate a wealth of experience in a number of fairly diverse jobs. Looking back, I am actually fairly glad that I had that period in my life, by the time I thought about settling down I'd managed to knock off most of my rougher edges and had started to develop into a much more rounded (although at that point, not round - that came later, sadly) and more driven person. I'd acquired a lot of knowledge which had stood me in good stead in later years and in retrospect, wouldn't change this part of my life. I worked for defence companies (well, the Dockyard in Rosyth, where I think everyone in Fife has worked at some point or another), the oil industry (that opened my eyes!! That could be a whole chapter on it's own!), construction, each job gave me new skills and new ways of approaching obstacles in my path.
On the downside, it was during this phase in my life that I drifted away from many the friends I had from school, as I previously said, not intentional, just the way things happened. I regret that part, although at the time, it didn't really cross my mind. During the week I worked, at the weekend I went out usually with Ian and Shaun, we got drunk, tried to pull the ladies, mostly failed (some things never change, sadly!!), went to concerts, played squash, played pool, drank some more. The usual. Good times.
The good times of course, couldn't last forever, and before long, my life was about to change, initially for the better, or so I thought, but ultimately, for the much worse. I was about to make the 3rd cardinal mistake of my life (and yes, I know I've not divulged what numbers 1 and 2 were, hey, I gotta keep some air of mystery about me). I was about to meet the woman who was destined to become my ex wife.
If crappy dramas in TV have taught me anything, it's that it is always best to leave your audience with a cliffhanger. So, with that in mind, tune in (probably) tomorrow for Stuart 401 - The Wilderness Years.
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