Stephanie’s Pillowbook

Some time ago I was chatting to a friend who had recently been awarded his doctorate and we remarked how neither of us, looking back over the years, could have imagined ending up with such a degree. I don’t think anybody says, when they are young, “when I grow up I want to be a philosopher”, do they? We also found it interesting how it was that we became fascinated by certain problems within philosophy.

Well, I had my first philosophical thought at the age of six or seven. I remember it quite clearly. A group of us were standing in the school playground talking about what presents we hoped to get for Christmas. I felt suddenly very aware of the fact that other people had different desires to mine. For some time I had noticed that there was a voice in my head which was me and yet, somehow, not-me. I wondered whether everyone else had this voice in their head, too. It didn’t seem obvious to me that they did. In fact, I suspected they didn’t - I suspected that my voice in the head was an anomaly. And for some reason I thought that if my school-friends did have this voice speaking in their heads it should say they same things as mine. Clearly, I was being exercised by the so-called Problem of Other Minds and unfortunately, as I was more likely to read the Moomins than Wittgenstein at that time, I was unable to solve the problem!

Well, while I became reconciled, as I grew older, to the idea that other people were not automatons (!), my own feelings of oddness and difference became more acute. No doubt much of that is attributable to my gender confusion. That did leave me with the suspicion that things were not necessarily as they appeared. It has always seemed to me a sign of lack of intelligence to consider conditions as they exist now to be natural and obvious and “the way things have always been”. The more I learned the more I understood that things have been different and can be different. Nothing, it seemed to me, was necessarily normal. Indeed, the very fact that the world existed and that I was living in it at that very moment struck me as strange. I can recall walking to school and laughing to myself that I was on this huge rock hurtling through space. Yet all around me were people scurrying about like ants convinced that their business was of the utmost importance and wholly unaware of the sheer oddity of existence.

So, by the time I was 16 I had definite metaphysical urges. Those urges were fed by a number of books I read during the sixth form: Jack Kerouac - especially Dharma Bums and Desolation Angels - which led me to the poetry of Gary Snyder; John Cage’s Silence and the Cage compilation by Kostelanetz - which led me to Daisetz Suzuki and Alan Watts; Jonathon Cott’s Conversations With Stockhausen, and Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics. It’s difficult to explain, especially after thirty years, what I found so captivating about this impressionistic melange of science, art and Zen Buddhism. So I will just quote from the Preface to the Capra book which had such a profound effect on me in that summer of 1976 (although these days I find its analogies strained and unconvincing):

Five years ago, I had a beautiful experience which set me on a road that has led to the writing of this book. I was sitting by the ocean one late summer afternoon, watching the waves rolling in and feeling the rhythm of my breathing, when I suddenly became aware of my whole environment as being engaged in a gigantic cosmic dance. Being a physicist, I knew that the sand, rocks, water and air around me were made of vibrating molecules and atoms, and that these consisted of particles which interacted with one another by creating and destroying other particles. I knew also that the Earth’s atmosphere was continually bombarded by showers of ‘cosmic rays’, particles of high energy undergoing multiple collisions as they penetrated the air. All this was familiar to me from my research in high-energy physics, but until that moment I had only experienced it through graphs, diagrams and mathematical theories. As I sat on the beach my former experiences came to life; I ’saw’ cascades of energy coming down from outer space, in which particles were created and destroyed in rhythmic pulses; I ’saw’ the atoms of the elements and those of my body participating in this cosmic dance of energy; I felt its rhythm and I ‘heard’ its sound, and at that moment I knew that this was the Dance of Shiva, the Lord of Dancers worshipped by the Hindus.

It was around this time that I was first introduced to philosophy as such. Mrs Poole, in General Studies one sunny afternoon, told us about Socrates and the Allegory of the Cave in Plato’s Republic. Briefly, we were asked to imagine prisoners in a cave watching a shadowplay of images on the wall and believing that is reality. The philosopher is said to be like one who has escaped his imprisonment and sees things clearly, as they really are, by the light of the sun. The imagery is related to other scenes in Plato: the end of the Symposium, for instance, when Socrates, having drunk his companions under the table, rises to greet the sun and meet the new day; and the manner of Socrates’ death when he drinks the hemlock and faces death without fear. At 17 this just struck me emotionally - I was moved but without really understanding.

So, I had no idea of studying philosophy. Although it seemed to be a settled thing since I was 11 that I would be going to university what subject I would take was a problem. I have written about my school education already so I won’t repeat all I said there. Except to say that I wasn’t obviously brilliant at any particular subject but I was pretty good at all of them. Up until about 14 history was probably my favourite subject. But then music took over. However, when I suggested studying music at university everyone was aghast. How was I going to make a living from that? My father had this mad scheme where I would study engineering or something before becoming an officer in the army. Well, that wasn’t going to happen! So a compromise was reached where I would study Physics with Music as a minor. In the end, though, I ended up somehow at Surrey University to take straight Physics.

I was not uninterested in physics - optics bored me and I could never make head nor tail of electricity but atomic physics was fascinating indeed. I just preferred the more spectacular stuff. I was a poor student, though, and once you’ve lost your way in physics it’s very hard to catch up. And then I was making up for lost time - away from home at last I went a little wild. It was no surprise to anyone that I failed my end-of-year exams so abysmally. What shocked me, though, was after acting like I didn’t care I got a stern talking to from my friend Karen. She berated me for wasting such an opportunity. I still feel the shame she instilled in me that morning. Only a couple of years ago I was seriously considering taking the Open University degree in Physics. It’s not just a sense of failure that I find hard to live down but even more the realisation that the past thirty years or so have been the most exciting ever in mathematics, science and technology - and I missed it. I could have played some very small part in that and I didn’t and now it is too late.

Then, in May 1981, when I should have been doing my finals at Surrey if I hadn’t been kicked out, I was lying on some rocks underneath a birch tree on an island in Stockholm mulling over my life. I decided I would go back to university. For the next eighteen months I read madly in English literature. I read everything. So, English Literature was to be my subject, I decided. I did a couple more ‘A’ Levels at the local Further Education College in my early twenties and passed English with an A after just six months. Getting that grade in such a short time and memories of Brideshead Revisited in my mind (the television series had just been shown) I decided to apply to Oxford. This must have been the autumn of 1982. Well, the last person from my FE college to have applied to Oxford was five years before and nobody could recall the process. Anyway, I had to take an entrance exam. I loved that. It was a an excellent examination, I thought, and very testing. The questions were mostly general - I can still remember a few: “How do you explain the rise of Christianity?” “Is political assassination ever justified?” At a good public school you get a term of coaching; I had a few lunchtime meetings with one of my teachers. They were probably the most intense and enjoyable sessions in my whole education. Then I discovered that you had to apply not to the University itself but to a separate college. This was the kind of thing, I think, which kept so many in the past from applying. I’m sure I was not the only one to have had no advice and there was little information available. In the end I chose to apply to Merton - I’m not sure why. It was only much later I discovered that was probably, for various reasons, the worst choice I could have made. Well, I did enough in the exam to be called for interview. We had to stay in the college for two nights. I can safely say they were the coldest and most uncomfortable nights I have ever spent! The buildings may look romantic from the outside but inside those bare stone walls it was freezing. I did feel out of place. One mealtime I was spoken to by a very fey couple of students - spitting images of Charles and Sebastian. They plainly regarded me as some kind of fascinating alien rough trade. I visited the college bar on the second evening and chatted to a fellow candidate, a Wykehamist. He was very pleasant but I sensed the gulf between us - especially when he revealed that he was being interviewed by a family friend. I was not interviewed by a don but by the Professor of Poetry. That is an elected post - held in the recent past by Auden, Heaney, Fuller and at this time by one Jones. I realised I was doomed to be rejected when he started the interview by saying that as I was a couple of years older than the average he expected me to demonstrate that I was a couple of years further educated. I resisted the urge to ask that I be put forward straightaway for the DPhil in that case… He swanned about the panelled room in a purple smoking-jacket sipping sherry (he did not offer me a glass). It is ungracious of me I know but I could not contain a smirk when I read, at the end of his term, that he was widely considered the worst Professor of Poetry in living memory.

I also took Sociology A Level at the FE college. My tutor had written in one of my reports: “S is an extremely intelligent student, but he seems always to allow himself to be sidetracked into the interesting philosophical byways of the subject. He has shown far less enthusiasm for the more routine material“. Quite. So far as English was concerned I had looked at the classic works of criticism - William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity and I. A. Richard’s Practical Criticism (which I’ve just discovered you can download from the Internet Archive) for instance - which had given me the taste for such theory. Then, reading Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey and the rest of the Bloomsbury Group led me to G. E. Moore and his Principia Ethica which I managed to find in our town library. This was the first work of philosophy I had ever read and it proved something of a revelation. It was not so much the subject matter - a critique of ethical naturalism - that astonished and attracted me as the style. It was logical and lucid. It forced me to read slowly. I had to take as much care in following the argument as Moore had evidently taken in formulating it.

I arrived at the University of Kent at Canterbury in 1983. First years in Humanities were encouraged to take multi-disciplinary courses so I chose 20th Century Poetry, Literature and Science and Knowledge and the Humanities. The latter was taught by the Philosophy department and the first part of the course was concerned with the traditional arguments for and against the existence of God. I wrote my very first essay on the Ontological Argument. Handing back the essay my tutor said I should switch to Philosophy because I evidently had a talent for it and should be able to get a First in the subject if I wanted. I did nothing at the time but the compliment stayed in my mind - naturally! Then in the summer holidays I read Jonathon Culler’s On Deconstruction. The book itself I found interesting but what really stimulated me was the preface in which Culler introduced a notion quite new to me:

… a domain as yet unnamed but often called “theory” for short. This domain is not “literary theory”, since many of its most interesting works do not explicitly address literature. It is not “philosophy” in the current sense of the term. since it includes Saussure, Marx, Freud, Erving Goffman, and Jacques Lacan, as well as Hegel, Nietzsche, and Hans-Georg Gadamer. It might be called “textual theory,” if text is understood as “whatever is articulated by language,” but the most convenient designation is simply the nickname “theory.” The writings to which this term alludes do not find their justification in the improvement of interpretations, and they are a puzzling mixture. “Beginning in the days of Goethe and Macaulay and Carlyle and Emerson,” writes Richard Rorty, “a kind of writing has developed which is neither the evaluation of the relative merits of literary productions, nor intellectual history, nor moral philosophy, nor epistemology, nor social prophecy, but all of those mingled together in a new genre.”

Culler gave some recent examples of this new-fangled theory: Michael Thompson’s Rubbish Theory, Douglas Hofstader’s Gödel, Escher, Bach and Dean MacCannell’s The Tourist. I read all three that summer. I wanted to do theory! The mixture of subjects appealed, the whole approach seemed innovative; this was surely where the intellectual excitement was in the humanities. Nowadays there are courses aplenty on this kind of thing but there weren’t in 1984. It seemed to me, though, that Philosophy was closer to it than English, and surely less conservative I supposed. So I switched departments at the beginning of my second year. Still, having begun with best of intentions my interests at university had soon turned to drinking, politics, late nights, smoking spliff and sex. But I did read during the holidays and in term-time I browsed the journals - especially Diacritics with its rather heady brew of post-structuralism, postmodernism, psychoanalysis, feminism, Marxism, literary theory and philosophy.

Unfortunately, this played into my great fault when it comes to formal education: following my own interests at the expense of the curriculum. I had been the same at school. I was a stranger to seminars and I only wrote essays when forced to by the Senior Tutor. Then, in my third year I had all the trouble surrounding my desire to transition which I’ve spoken about before. Because of that I had to intermit for most of a year. Anyway, in the end I only scraped through my finals. Well, the external examiner might have been willing to give me a first but the department apparently said they couldn’t give one to such a lazy sod as I’d been. So they gave me a very high 2.1 instead. However, they did allow me to register the following October for an MA by Research and Thesis. So I spent another year at the university reading Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas and Derrida without really knowing what it was I was actually researching.

I returned home towards the end of the ’80s. I postponed completing my MA and began a series of tiresome temporary jobs. The final one was at Dixon’s Warehouse. Twelve hours a night I unloaded televisions from lorries. It was backbreaking. If you got a 19” Sony portable that Christmas I hate you! Well, I ended that year with a bad case of bronchitis, I was unemployed again and determined never to work like that any more. So what should I do? Most of my friends from university were at this time embarking on careers. I wasn’t interested in a career. What did I want to do with my life? I asked myself seriously the question “what makes me happy?” Some answers I rejected because they relied on somebody else. I realised there was one thing, though, I could rely on myself and that was reading and studying. That was the thing that never failed to please and interest me. So, notwithstanding my unimpressive past as a student, I decided I was going to read and study and to hell with anything else.

By now I had become obsessed with Nietzsche. I had, of course, read him quite a few years before, but now I was interested more and more in the interpretation of his philosophy. Around 1990 it had become commonplace to view Nietzsche’s philosophy as fundamentally aesthetic. Many readings based on Heidegger’s first volume of Nietzsche lectures were appearing and Alexander Nehamas’s Nietzsche: Life as Literature was acclaimed everywhere. Nietzsche was hailed - and sometimes criticised - as the godfather of postmodernism. It was a superficially attractive point of view. And yet I saw a problem. If Nietzsche viewed the world as a work of art, if Nietzsche believed all was perspective, then why did he make such a big thing about Wagner? At the time, following the usual post-structuralist way I considered it simply as a contradiction within Nietzsche’s thought. With that idea I quickly wrote an MA thesis - some guff about art and chaos in Nietzsche’s philosophy.

The day after I sent off the thesis I began to read a book which really marked the beginning of my research, although it had nothing to do with Nietzsche directly. The book was Music and Trance by Gilbert Rouget. It is a gloriously rich and fascinating work. The gist of its argument was that music does not induce trance as is usually thought. Music’s role is rather to accompany and control the trance. Rouget does make certain analogies between trance ceremonies and operatic performance - analogies justified by Renaissance theorising regarding ancient Greek tragedy and opera as its modern counterpart. I realised that Nietzsche’s critique of Wagner insofar as it rested on the deleterious effects his music was credited with having on its listeners was possibly not justified and in fact might rest on some rather old and unexamined ideas. And I soon discovered there was a long history behind the idea of the “effects of music” and I started to read whatever I could find on the subject.

About a year after that I came across another book that influenced the direction of my research - Wagnerism in European Culture and Politics edited by Large & Weber. From the essays contained within I learned that Wagner’s importance in the nineteenth century rested not only on his status as a composer but as the head of a movement - Wagnerism - that took a variety of forms in different countries. Wagner’s writings preached cultural renewal, German nationalism, anti-Semitism, Schopenhauerian pity mixed with Christianity and Buddhism, vegetarianism and so on. It had a stirring effect on many and arguably can be regarded as one of the intellectual ancestors of National Socialism. I realised that Nietzsche’s critique of Wagner was spot on as regards its social, political and ethical aspects. So I started to learn more about Wagnerism.

The more I read about Nietzsche, Wagner, and Schopenhauer, the more I read about history and nineteenth-century culture, the more I became convinced that most interpretations of Nietzsche were fundamentally flawed. That is because most interpretations of Nietzsche are ahistorical. He is read as though he were a contemporary primarily interested in contemporary issues in academic philosophy. That is all very well but it leads many to consider Nietzsche’s writings then as literary, unsystematic, fragmentary, contradictory. It appeared to me that many problems in interpretation could be resolved by reading Nietzsche in historical terms. So, I wrote my PhD thesis to argue that Nietzsche’s philosophy is best understood as a response to Wagnerism. To take one example - why does Nietzsche expend so much effort on the concept of pity? That is a question inadequately answered by most discussions of Nietzsche’s ethics. In the main that is because they see pity in terms of Christianity. Pity, however, was a pressing problem for Nietzsche. It was the fundamental concept in Schopenhauer’s ethics and was taken up in those terms by Wagner. And even where Nietzsche does link pity with Christianity it is a Christianity seen through Schopenhauerian lenses. Nietzsche’s ethical ideas are largely determined by such focus on particular concepts as these.

Anyway, studying for a PhD is quite wonderful - at least in England, and doing a subject in the Humanities - because you are simply encouraged to haunt libraries and read whatever you like for a few years. All that is expected of you is that you keep in touch - so I used to meet my supervisor for a pleasant chat over lunch once a month. Of course, at the end of it you have to produce a thesis. I had my moment of panic about a month before it was due to be handed in. I was, naturally, advised simply to write up something - if I had anything else worthwhile it could wait. A lot of people flatter themselves that because they get accepted onto a PhD programme, and because they manage to do some research, then it doesn’t really matter whether they complete. Except - it is the ability to complete a cogent and concise piece of work that is being tested. I just about finished on time: I wrote the introduction on the Monday; the whole of Tuesday was spent printing out several copies; and they were bound and posted on the Wednesday with a day to spare. Friday I was off on holiday with my younger sister and her children.

My viva was about five or six months later a few days before Christmas. The viva is a relic of medieval times when a doctoral candidate was expected to defend his thesis in public. Fortunately nowadays you only have to stand up against a couple of examiners - and if your supervisor likes you the ones chosen will be broadly sympathetic. Even so it can be quite gruelling. On the other hand you have spent years studying your subject and it has all come down to this one interview. You feel like an athlete who has trained their whole life for one race in the Olympics. I confess I was on top form that day. It was exhilarating. The conversation begins quite generally: why did you think such and such subject worth researching? And it becomes more and more specific: on page 70 you assert so-and-so but surely Professor X has shown that blah blah blah. After an hour and half you are asked to step outside. Twenty minutes, half an hour later you are called back in - handshakes, you’ve passed. It’s curious, though. It’s not like you’ve passed an exam. Rather it’s like they are saying, welcome to the club, now you’re one of us. That evening I was as happy as I’ve ever been.

I was stroppy the day of my first graduation. It didn’t help that most of my friends had graduated the year before. So far as I was concerned it was all a load of flummery and I went through the whole thing exhibiting a permanent sneer. My parents came down, of course, and both my sisters, and they were all far more excited than I was. The trouble is, I couldn’t escape the suspicion that I didn’t really deserve to get a degree - I had put in so little work. I didn’t bother going to receive my MA - I got my certificate in the post. I had no intention of going to my PhD ceremony, either. However, one day my parents said they didn’t expect me ever to pay them back for their financial assistance but… they wanted to see me get my degree. It would have been churlish - and ungrateful - to refuse. So, on a hot July day I sat glumly in the car on my way to Canterbury. Against all expectations it turned out to be a lovely day. When we arrived it was already afternoon and we went for a late lunch. The food and wine made me feel more relaxed. In the early evening we made our way to the King’s School in the grounds of Canterbury Cathedral. Going into the hall I realised things would be different this time. The undergraduates were handed plastic packs containing their gowns. Doctors were taken aside and helped to dress. That’s more like it! The gown, I noted, was heavier than before and much more pleated and lined with velvet. The hat was like a squashed top hat with a broad hard brim and two purple tassels - the sort of thing you see Thomas More or Erasmus wear in paintings. I stepped out of the hall to rejoin my parents. As we strolled in the grounds a woman and her daughter came towards us. The woman gave me a funny look and said loudly to her daughter, “Why is that man’s gown more colourful than yours?” “Oh, he’s a doctor”, she replied. I happened to glance at my mother at that moment and she just beamed. I thought, well, that has made up for a lot. From then on I enjoyed myself.

So what now for my education? It was asked of me in my viva whether I was doing philosophy in my thesis or history of ideas. I said philosophy, of course. But the truth is, I think, that I am more interested in the history of ideas. I never wrote a revised version of my thesis for publication. I’ve just never been able to rouse myself. I guess I just lack the necessary ambition and drive, I suppose. I did apply to do post-doctoral research on the theme of the effects of music but I never got the grant (well, they are extremely hard to get). If I had a year’s income and access to a university library then who knows? At the moment my interests are varied and my reading desultory. I have a pile of books on transgenderism waiting to be read - I want to take a look sometime at work being done on philosophy and computing - and I need to revise my knowledge of aesthetics and study some more recent theory (Ranciere, for instance) - I want to learn more about music in general. So, that should keep me busy for a while….

My first school was a kindergarten somewhere in the countryside outside Brampton in Canada. I don’t remember too much about it - except that there was a Magic Circle where we all had to sit and tell everyone what we had done the day before. There is a photo of me with a crewcut looking rather chubby and wary on the path waiting for the bus on my first day. I had to wear a piece of cardboard attached to my coat with my name on it. I don’t think I was very happy about that. I certainly wasn’t happy with Infants School when we came back to England. Pitched battles, bullying, taunting, strict teachers, vile school dinners which we were forced to eat (I can recall hapless children sitting the whole afternoon in the dining-room over some wretched meal).

I went to two very different Junior Schools. The first was called Peartree. It fancied itself as some sort of Prep School - we had Houses, the cane was wielded indiscriminately (not on me, though, I was a goody-two-shoes!), and we spent hours on italic writing exercises. Still, I flourished there - achievement was praised and I was very keen to acquire stars for my work. And what I learned at Peartree stood me in good stead for many years. Then, when we moved across town I went to Martins Wood. That was quite different. The teachers were in thrall to the latest trendy theories in education. In the fourth year for instance we were encouraged to direct our own learning and to make our own lesson plans. I came up against the limitations of that ideology. The freedom is largely illusory and constrained by the idea that children need to know only so much (what teachers have decided is “relevant”). For example: there was a maths syllabus which we could follow as far as we could at our own pace. I completed it before Easter. So what did my teacher do? Write more lessons? Direct me to a more advanced textbook? No, I was simply told I didn’t have to do maths in the summer term!

I do have my school reports from the third and fourth years at Martin’s Wood. According to Mr Finlay I am pleasant and produce satisfactory work. I am “interesting and intelligent” with an “original style” and a “good fund of general knowledge.” I used to enjoy Composition in his class - he would throw a pile of cards with colourful pictures cut out of magazines stuck on them and we would have to write something, anything we liked, based on one of the pictures. According to Mr Haslam I show “originality” and an “enquiring mind” and have “very wide interests” although “almost any form of historical literature appeals” to me. Most of my art “always seems to include some aspect of mathematics” and he wishes he could see something more relaxing. I play “a good game of football” and show a “liking for country dancing“! An “ideal pupil“, apparently, I am “friendly with everyone and in spite of [my] tremendous ability there is nothing spoilt about [me].” The headmaster adds “outstanding“.

Unfortunately, once I got to secondary school it was downhill all the way. It’s still a mystery to me what went wrong, exactly. The school itself - Nobel - had been a technical grammar but had become a comprehensive the year I arrived (the year before me had been the last to take the 11-plus). It was a well-equipped school. But somehow I think the teachers lost heart. It was an undemanding education in any case. I soon became bored and spent half my time idly daydreaming. My first form-tutor confidently predicted a place at Oxford or Cambridge - my last didn’t think I was good enough to go to University at all. And whereas I had been a bright and curious pupil before I became increasingly withdrawn and sullen through my teenage years.

Well, the first term started off decently it would appear from my reports: “well-prepared“, “most pleasing“, “very imaginative“, “lively interest“, “splendid results” “great deal of ability“. Every single teacher, however, said I was too quiet. Now, even today I don’t understand what was wrong about that - but it caused great concern and I got a talking to from my Mum and Dad after parents’ evening, would you believe? The second year was good, too: “S continues to work very quietly. There are flashes of high quality in his written work, but he is reticent in oral work” (English). “S’s contributions are not very numerous, but always high above average” (Music) - quality, my dear, not quantity! “S works quietly but has produced work of a good standard” (Geography) But? I don’t understand that “but”. The rot had begun to set in by the third year: “S has worked well if a little too unobtrusively. A little more positive effort would work wonders” (German). “I think S has coasted a bit this term. Do not let this decline continue!” (History). My form tutor warns me at Christmas that I “cannot rely on ability alone“. Unfortunately at this stage I could - at the end of the year he writes: “Once again S has demonstrated his ability in all subjects“. Never fear my comeuppance is not far away.

The fourth year, though, was better - three different teachers use the word “conscientious“. Best report comes from Music: “S’s work is scientifically thorough and yet reveals imagination and even humour: excellent!” Good old Miss Auerbach. I was, you may not be surprised to know, teacher’s pet. Well, she was lucky to get one pupil a year actually interested in music - so I was given free rein over the music rooms and all the scores and records, which was wonderful. That’s what education should be - giving you the means to satisfy your curiosity to your heart’s content. Miss Auerbach was an eccentric German woman who spoke very fast with a strong accent and loved her subject in a very Middle-European way (indeed, she later resigned from teaching in protest when the National Curriculum was introduced). Her family had escaped the Nazis before the Second World War - and she herself refused ever to listen to Wagner, I remember. My doctoral thesis, many years later, was on Nietzsche’s critique of Wagner and I wondered as I wrote whether Miss Auerbach had laid the seed for my interest. My younger sister (a later pet) and I still do impressions of her - for instance, when someone was talking too much she would say, in a deep, slow and exasperated voice, “Stephanie, pleeeeeaaase“, and then flop down until her hands almost touched the floor.

Brows began to furrow in the fifth year - I have “slightly underestimated the difficulty of the task” ahead, I have “a lot to learn” after a “disappointing mock result” and so on. My French teacher writes that I “must make an effort to speak French in class” I suppose that would have been a good idea! Music, of course, is still favourable: “S copes easily with all aspects of our syllabus; it would be good to see him share his often original thoughts and the results of his wide interests more readily“. Now why do teachers say things like that? The previous year in English we all had to give a ten-minute talk to the rest of the class about something in which we were interested. I chose to do mine on supernovae. What do you think happened? That everyone sat entranced, bombarded me with questions and came round my house in the evening to look at the Crab Nebula through my telescope? Or that they sat staring at me with undisguised boredom, loathing and contempt? Share my interests, indeed. Perhaps I could have mentioned my cross-dressing!

The Lower Sixth was fairly satisfactory, except for Miss Guppy in Maths who wrote: “S seems to find new ideas difficult to understand“. Cow. That’s my one and only talent, I’ll have you know. In the Upper Sixth everyone is predicting failure. In Physics my work “has deteriorated considerably” and overall I have made “almost negative progress“. My favourite maths teacher writes “S appears to be working, but does not produce much written work as evidence” - the story of my life! Oh well, I managed to scrape through and with great luck managed to secure a place at Surrey University.