Lorna Sage, and "Bad Blood"

I have re-read it ("Bad Blood") for the n-millionth time.  What a memoir it is.  She re-creates the era of my childhood.   And I am going to put a couple of quotes in the blog to give a flavour of it.  Both are to do with school, one refers specifically to difficulties with sums. Both I really relate to.

Its sunny but cold this morning - Mark the Butterfly may be over for coffee - but if so it will be early, so I must have my shower asap. I need time for my limbs to return to me after the night.    At least I have cake in as I made a carrot cake yesterday - half of which is frozen waiting its re-appearance as part of the Captain-s pack.  And Diane, my physio will be calling by too.

Jackie is back.  Hurray! Hurray!   We are asked over for supper on Saturday.

This is all so Diary of a Nobody - but I am not going anywhere (apart from medical) or doing much (apart from reading).   I have made a tiny tiny start on some spring cleaning - the hall china has been washed and I've made a start on the kitchen cupboards.  I am also starting to wean us off foods from the Supermarket chill cabinet and back to home cooking.  And made a big veggie stew yesterday in pursuit of said aim.


Quotes from Lorna Sage (and "Bad Blood"):

(Of her first school:)   "So the playground was hell:  Chinese burns, pinches, slaps and kicks, and horrible games.  I can still hear the noise of a thick wet skipping rope slapping the ground. There'd be a big girl at each end and you had to leap through without tripping.  Joining in was only marginally less awful than being left out.  It's said (truly) that most women forget the pain of childbirth; I think that we all forget the pain of being a child at school for the first time, the sheer ineptitude, as though you'll never learn to mark out your own space.  Its doubly shaming - shaming to remember as well,  to feel so sorry for your scabby little self back then in small people's purgatory."

"Hanmer school left its mark on my mental life, though.  For instance, one day in a grammar school maths lesson I got into a crying jag over the notion of minus numbers.  Minus one threw out my universe, it couldn't exist, I couldn't understand it.  This, I realised tearfully under coaxing from an amused (and mildly amazed) teacher, was because I thought numbers were things.  In fact cabbages.  We had been taught in Miss Myra's class to do addition and subtraction by imagining more cabbages and fewer cabbages. Every time I did mental arithmetic I was juggling ghostly vegetables in my head.  And when I tried to think of minus one I was trying to imagine an anti-cabbage, an anti-matter cabbage, which was as hard as conceiving of an alternative universe."