Blast from the past

Corin has been busy sorting the loft out, so I snuck up there today, whilst he was out fixing my Great Aunt's fence and garage, to have a nosey around and see if anything interesting had turned up.

Aside from all the photos of me that I had hidden due to my fatness, I also found all my old school reports. The oldest one was from 1980, so I would have been 7. That probably means I was in Mrs Robinson's class. My favourite part of the report is the bit that says

"...she must learn that sometimes she will come up against something that isn't easy and tears aren't the answer."

Well, Mrs Robinson. I agree. I also disagree. The answer is quite often one, or any combination, of the things off the list below;
1. Chocolate
2. Vodka
3. A nice cup of tea
4. Shouting and screaming
5. Spending money
6. Eating cake
7. Playing music really really loud
8. Pulling faces / making rude gestures behind someone's back
9. "Quality time" with one's husband
10. A nice hot bath

But sometimes, tears are the only way!

Other favourite comments include:
"She must check the accuracy of her spelling and punctuation" - apparently, at age 11, I wasn't quite the grammar freak that I appear to have become in my middle age.

"She created a delightful witch dance" - at High School, as part of my Dance performance in PE, just in case we were wondering what sort of school I went to. Apparently, I was also "developing into a useful forward in the hockey game." Bless Mrs Thorley - she was the scary Deputy Head, whose clothing was colour co-ordinated to the max. If she was wearing a green suit, she also wore green tights and green shoes. She was strict and she could stop a whole corridor of girls with just one word. How I loved her. Genuinely, I have such fond memories of her - she was such a support to me at school, always there and we never fell out (probably because I was a good girl and scared of getting into trouble!).

"Her essay writing is technically accurate and fairly imaginative." - damned with faint praise? My humour and imagination must have developed as I got older, because clearly it wasn't that impressive at school.

I also enjoyed the discovery that my best pieces of work in the first year of my GCSE in English were
* An essay on smoking and
* A comprehension from the 1984 16+ examination on the subject of advertising prunes.

What the hell is an advertising prune?

Apparently I talked a lot too - virtually every subject report card for 5 years at high school states that I made lots of oral contributions, which is teacher code for "she's a chatterbox".

No surprises there then!

All girls school. Needlework for 6 months every year, cooking for the other six months. All before political correctness. Happy days.