Of all the books I wrote in Fairburn, this is the only
one which - give or take a few weeks - covers the
entire time I was there. A whole two-and-a-bit years
of methodically copying other people’s writing into a
book I’d probably never look at again.
Why did we copy things out of other people’s books?
I don’t know - I talk about that a lot more cogently
here - but we did. And the one clear mood memory
that leaps out at me when I look at this stuff is
absolute stultifying boredom.
Unlike the other major subjects we tackled - mainly
English and Topic, but also to an extent, Geography
and Maths - in this one, I wasn’t encouraged to
engage with the subject matter on a personal level
or apply any original thought. And it’s obvious,
looking through this book, that I didn’t enjoy it.
There’s one lesson at most every week, maybe less,
some of them quite short. Some pieces fade out
halfway through. Sometimes the pencil changes
halfway through a page, suggesting I dragged my
heels, ran out of time and had to catch up the
following week. I just didn’t find it interesting enough
to pick up the pace.
The result is though, it’s actually got a coherence
that - apart from maybe Topic 1 - none of the other
books have. There’s a section about prehistory,
followed by a selection of pieces about Nelson, then
the entire life story of Napoleon Bonaparte. It’s all
about the past. It actually makes sense as the sort of
thing you might learn at school, and especially, the
sort of thing you might learn about in a History
lesson.
I don’t remember having any interest in History until
some time in my late twenties. Now I’m older, it
seems like one of the most exciting and important
pastimes you can ever lose yourself in. But back
then I hated it. I might have thought learning about
cavemen would be fun, but several months of
copying out stuff about stone age toolmaking put
paid to that. My brain still glazes over when I think
about Nelson. And I probably settled on Napoleon
because no one else was using the Napoleon book
that day.
But there’s a certain joy in looking at this stuff -
seeing how the handwriting develops, if only slightly;
watching the artwork slowly improve over time. If
you can call it improvement. Because some of these
pictures are truly dreadful. I mean, shockingly bad,
on a gut level. I wasn’t going to upload this book at
first, thinking it just too dry to be interesting for
anyone else to see, but genuinely, it’s the pictures
that have convinced me. From the first wonky
picture of a cave lion to that final half-arsed picture
of Napoleon, via some truly abysmal attempts to
draw animals and women, this truly is a cavalcade of
bad artwork by a kid who’s out of his depth.
As with most of the stuff here, I’m uploading this
book bit by bit as I find the time to do so over a
period of several years. Please bear with me as I
slowly strap you into this slow-motion Historical car
crash…
FAIRBURN
The place where I wrote
all this rubbish
SCIENCE 1
Sept 1979 - Apr 1980
GEOGRAPHY 1
Sept 1979 - Feb 1981
The Forgotten World
John and Mick fall foul
of some extreme
potholing
History 1
October 1979 - October 1981
TERM 1
A day-by-day account of
Waen’s first term at
Fairburn School
TERM 2
The birth of the 1980s -
Blake’s 7, Blondie and
battles in space