A Matter of Little Consequence…

It took me many weeks to pluck up the courage to ask my History teacher what the “NWM” I repeatedly found scrawled across my essays actually meant.  Judging from my marks, I was fairly certain that it wasn’t praise (and he certainly was not the kind of teacher to use an acronym for ‘No Way Man’ – he had leather elbow patches on his short-sleeved shirts) but I felt as though I was entitled to some kind of explanation.  “Not Worthy of Mention,” he said when I finally cornered him.  “It might not be wrong, but it is of no consequence whatsoever.  Much like your essays in general McQueen.”  Sometimes you’re better off just not knowing.

I had always enjoyed History at school despite the fact that I was useless with dates, and names, and pretty much all historical fact if I’m honest, but I always found the past a very productive place in which to allow my imagination to roam.  I very clearly remember being taught about how people in the past lit their homes with candles made of animal fat.  I would be, I suppose, seven or eight years old and I pestered my parents into giving me access to Sunday’s beef dripping and a length of string from which I made myself a candle to light my bedroom.  I insisted it was to be the only light in my room and I stuck with it until the candle spluttered to its death after a couple of days, leaving me, the room and all of my clothes smelling like I had been present at an abattoir fire, but with an imagination sufficiently sated to allow me to behave like a normal human being, if only for a short time.  I’m sure my parents were delighted that I didn’t learn about Bazalgette until much later.

The History teacher – lets us call him Mr Wilson, for that was his name – actually managed to destroy my interest in the subject and simultaneously placed a chip on my shoulder that I now realise has taken me fifty years to knock off, because what I included in those essays were what I imagined to be engaging little asides that I fondly thought would bring a little colour into the monochrome life of a teacher whose only source of light relief appeared to be the gleam from his toecap, tired of marking forty identical essays (twenty of them copied from the same swot for two bob a time) without relief.  I discovered that he wasn’t interested in being entertained – least of all by me.  He didn’t want my ‘colour’, he wanted to get as many of his pupils past GCSE as he could and if bland repetition is what it took, it was a price he was willing to pay.  History was not Roman Legionnaires building arrow-straight roads; peasants burning dried-up cow shit because they couldn’t afford firewood; debauched Tudor kings, or diarists burying cheese to avoid it becoming fondue during the Great Fire: it was simply a list of dates to be memorised.  He would – he made no secret of it – have been much happier to have lived in a world, or at least a classroom, without me in it.  There was not, to his eyes, any benefit in seeing things differently, particular if it wasn’t included in the curriculum.

I have spent most of my years viewing what surrounds me in this way – searching for different – whilst, if I’m honest, my own life seldom moves beyond ‘second-to-last local colour feature’ on the regional news: Peter Levy: (insert your own regional TV kingpin of choice) following on from stories about a pot-hole in Bardney that looks like Arthur Scargill; a new shop in Scunthorpe selling ‘Skegness-fragranced’ candles, and why local doctors are advising against sticking red-hot needles into your eyes, saying “and briefly, in other news tonight…”  I would be there only to remind people that they had about thirty seconds to get their notepad ready before the weather forecast.  I’m not at all sure of what I would have to do in order to make myself national news, but I’m pretty certain that I wouldn’t want to do it.  I can’t help but wonder how often those who seek, and achieve, notoriety are smiled upon by history,

Back in the day we had regional daily newspapers which were bought by just about every household in the country.  They were the only source – barring the Post Office queue, Mrs Hutchinson whose husband worked for the council and the barber’s chair – of reliable local news; of births, marriages and deaths; of What’s On; of who did what, to whom and why, and best of all, which of your neighbours had found themselves in court (again) for knocking off a policeman’s helmet on the way back from the football.  On Saturday, within minutes of the final whistle they published a special sports edition (The Football Echo) which was printed on blue paper to differentiate it from the normal Saturday paper.  I never worked out how it was possible, but you could buy it on the walk back to the bus. 

Nothing counted – nothing existed – if it wasn’t in the Echo.  I found myself in its pages from time to time, although to be fair, as it was the preferred herald of hatches, matches and dispatches, most people made it onto its pages at least once or twice in a lifetime, and extra copies were always bought and stored on those days to be found decades later, tucked away in the effects of aging parents with a crumbling slice of unidentified wedding cake, a pair of woollen bootees and a used corn plaster that might well have once been used by somebody famous. 

The Chronicle (a weekly paper, taken in addition to the Echo by those with money to burn) was the first to disappear, becoming a free paper – paid for by the advertisers who dominated it – delivered to every house in the city and used only by those with pets to clean up after, until its eventual, largely unlamented demise.  The Echo, like all such publications became tabloid and then ‘went digital’ before disappearing completely: lost to a world filled with digital gossip.  Making the Socials doesn’t have quite the same cachet as finding yourself in the papers, does it?

By and large my life plods along without the intrusion of social media – a fact that I like to think explains the miniscule readership of my blog – and I’ve always had the feeling that if anyone really wants to know about me, they’ll find out.  Curiously, hardly anyone ever has.

Now, the point of all this (oh yes, here it comes) is that it has taken me fifty years to wonder at the perspicacity of an ancient (at least he seemed that way back then) history teacher to get my number so very quickly.  People normally have to know me for ages before realising that I will amount to nothing. 

I would like to say that it bothers me, but honestly, it really is of little consequence…