I had a highly productive day yesterday. I spent three hours in hospital finally having the physical evidence of being used as a sixteen year old human yo-yo removed. It was my first experience of undergoing surgery while still awake, although quite heavily sedated, and it was very strange listening to the surgeon and the [...]
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The next morning I was given two envelopes, one addressed to my Games Master and one addressed to the Headmaster. The one to the Headmaster went to his secretary of course one could hardly expect the man himself to take notice of the trivial matter of a broken Fourth Former. Delivering the other letter to [...]
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We finally got in to see the doctor and I was asked to do my customary underpants only performance. I’d looked up scoliosis and didn’t like what I’d read so I sort of forgot to mention it to my parents, hoping that it would go away. It hadn’t gone away, it was the first thing [...]
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I was beginning to hate being 15. It seemed that when it suited my parents and School Masters I was expected to behave like an adult but when it came to decision making I was immediately returned to childhood status and denied a voice in things that affected my life. I bemoaned that fact to [...]
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After another long wait my name was finally called and I was escorted into the august presence of the Consultant. Like so many men of his station he had the sort of demeanour that made a boy automatically call him Sir. It seemed that I was the victim of serious disinformation as far as procedures [...]
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After what felt like miles of corridor the nurse stopped outside a door, pushed it open and ordered me inside with the instruction “There’s a gown in there, take everything off, put the gown on then go out the other door”. “What?” I squeaked “Everything?”. “Yes, everything now get a move on!” “But I’m only [...]
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There’s really nothing more to tell about the choral course. No further untoward incidents took place, the concert went very well and my parents seemed satisfied that the course fees hadn’t been wasted. All in all a success, I surmised. The rest of the Easter holiday just drifted by, beyond my music I had no [...]
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I wasn’t too clear in my last post about the principal of parenthood. I’ve got no problem with the idea of being a parent I think I’d be a damn’ good Dad and indeed, I regard not having children as one of the things missing in my life. It’s something that nearly happened to me [...]
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That I’d dodged a very nasty bullet the previous night never occurred to me. In the benighted days of the 60s we lived under some fairly frightening misapprehensions regarding sex and chief amongst those was that to get a girl pregnant you needed to have visibly started puberty. When I finally learned just how fallacious [...]
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While we were enjoying our evening free time one evening the 2 boys I was sharing with tentatively asked if I’d be offended if they had girls in our room, after lights out. This was, of course, the ultimate offence and being found out would mean instant dismissal from the centre, a report to school [...]
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