space travel

Now, this makes more sense. I did dinosaurs in Topic 1. Now to tackle my other great love - space and all things futuristic. I could forget all about the messy geological time table I made on Page 3 and get my teeth stuck into something much more forward-thinking and optimistic. Just like the bold new sci-fi adventures I was writing about in my English book, it was out with the old and in with the new! I can almost see the hope and enthusiasm pouring out of my newly-sharpened pencil as the page begins. Yes! Space flights now… and BEYOND! I also imagine I see the enthusiasm slowly leaking back out of the pencil’s back end as it started to write slightly less interesting words than it was expecting to write and draw slightly less interesting shapes, getting softer and fainter in the process until it basically runs out of lead. Because this book I was copying wasn’t actually about the kind of space I liked. This wasn’t about getting shot by aliens or agonisingly yanked into a black hole. This was about the truth - satellites! Satellites so powerful they can relay telephone messages, take photos of the weather and already I’ve fallen asleep. It almost picks up again on the third page with its prediction of futuristic space liners ferrying passengers to space stations in the late 1970s (which seems ridiculous until you change the word ‘liner’ to ‘shuttle’ and remember they sent the first one up in 1981), but that’s not enough to save this topic from oblivion. It was probably something more practical that actually stopped me copying out the space travel book. I’m sure one day I just went to get it off the shelf one day and it just wasn’t there. That’s the basic problem with asking a class of twenty-odd kids to copy stuff out of books when you’ve only got one copy of each book. I do remember finding that sort of thing frustrating and, knowing me, I probably complained. But obviously Mr Geraghty just told me to pick another book and copy that instead. It’s been a life-long problem of mine, not always being able to stick with the same idea from start to finish. But I’m pretty sure that’s not what’s happening here. Because I know me, and no matter how boring I found the space travel book, there’s absolutely no way on earth I’d ditch it for a book about trains. Unless of course the space book tricked me into writing about trains by stealth. There’s a similar tagline after all - WHAT OF THE FUTURE? Well, whatever the future held, it obviously wasn’t going to be about trains, as you can tell by the way the bell went and I didn’t even finish the word I was writing. That’s how much I hated writing about trains. Then again, when you see what I ended up copying out next…

January 1980

Space Travel