I had a friend over for dinner last night. We've known eachother since school and once upon a time, we were thick as thieves until I left the Roman Catholic girls' adventure playground that passed for an educational establishment, to pursue a more earnest and foolproof route into university.
After my fifth year at this secondary school, I managed to get accepted into the closest thing I'd ever get (or want) to a private education - this time a Roman Catholic Boys' spanking club. Only 50 girls made it into its sixth form every year. It must have been a real imposition for the boys. Hurtling groin-first towards peak time of their rampant trouser jiggling years, they were suddenly and hellishly faced with the morphing and untouchable bodies of pubescent lady-girls. Plain cruel if you ask me - what were the school boards thinking?
Mind you, we girls were no better off surrounded as we were by a bunch of sexually crimped baboons at a time when we would rather have our new lumps and bumps go unnoticed. And man oh man could they be BRUTAL especially once the anaesthetic of familiarity took hold. We were outnumbered and out-hormoned. Some of us got it worse than others, it was the law of the jungle and very possibly the best preparation for life on offer. That said, I still know quite a few of those animals today (lovely boys all shackled to strong women in twinsets and pearls...Ha Ha) and got myself a great education along the way not that I've set the world alight with it...so far.
Which brings me to the revelations of last night's conversation. For all our achievements and despite needing both hands to count how many people I know with First Class degrees, very few of us can really be said to have truly excelled in life . I know it's hard to qualify what makes excellence - so we used the media measuring stick...in other words how TV and newspapers depict success.
We came to the following conclusions (possibly):
1.) The effort of achieving so much so early in life effectively drained them of the last bit of drive they had; drive that was supposed to last a lifetime.
2.) Our parents are to blame. OF COURSE! They worked too hard, gave us too much and in an attempt to instill in us a hard working ethic - they exhausted us before we even got started. Yes, it's their fault.
Astonished by our collective findings and after a sloppy mental audit of what friends were and were not doing, I thought about The Lish and the pushy parent syndrome...and decided two further things:
1.) Lishy will never be scaremongered into 'getting an education' for the sake of it though she will be encouraged to do something she loves
2.) I'm leaving everything I have to charity all £17.53p of it
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