D at last

Today’s blip is my Dth entry on this site. It has been a long time in coming because I have had a few lengthy sabbaticals from blipping since I first blipped on 8th March 2011, without which today’s entry would have been number 1038.

Anyway, today’s blip is a stamped imprint of the letter D, which as you all know is the Roman symbol representing the number 500 (really sorry for insulting your intelligence by explaining that). It is the same theme as I used for my Cth blip back on 6th July 2011 but chosen on this occasion mainly because of an amusing story attached to this particular D of which I learned yesterday by fortunate coincidence.

Mrs W works in a school and they have just issued these stamps to the teachers to track poor behaviour and an accumulation of stamps leads progressively to more severe punishment, which can also be monitored by parents as they are stamped in the students’ Home Learning Diaries. The stamp is a D, which in their case does not represent 500 but represents ‘Disruption’.

Now, imagine the confused teacher who threatens to give her badly behaved students a “D” and the response was hysterical laughter by the class. Teacher gets more annoyed, “You don’t want to be the class who’s getting all the Ds!” Continued laughing all round with teacher reconsidering her career choice.

A bit of shared experience in the staff-room threw some light on the cause of the laughter as it transpires that the otherwise innocent letter D to us has become the young person’s vernacular for a shag, a screw, a f…. well you get the idea: apparently D = Dick (classy!). So if you were not already aware of this terminology, reread the above paragraph and imagine the scene in the class. ROFL, LMAO, etc., etc.

So, now that I have reached 500 blips in the conventional manner, I am going to do a bit of back blipping to fill in some of the gaps as I didn’t stop taking photos altogether in my absences, I just stopped being driven and obsessed by the need to maintain my journal. A lot of that was down to the fact that since starting out I have lost both my parents following lengthy periods of illness and the travelling to and from their home about 400 miles from me took its toll. Additionally, the pressures of work impacted on my enthusiasm to put myself under any additional pressure in my personal life but, having retired from my old life, I have a renewed enthusiasm for my new version; 50 is the new 40, which as we all know is the new 30. Any time soon, I’ll be a teenager again at this rate - I might even aim a bit lower than I did in the old days when studying and hope for a few more Ds than As, Bs and Cs