Just imagine if you had to blog to order, to blog on demand, to come up with an original idea for a blog post every week. It would be awful, wouldn’t it. Well, luckily I don’t have to. I don’t have to do anything, although the Robagraph is a self-imposed habit that’s rather taken a hold this year, partly as a discipline, a routine to force myself to rise above the apathy and brain-death so readily engendered by this miserable plague we’ve had inflicted upon us from afar.
Being put on the spot to create something off the cuff is never easy. Blogging, prodding a keyboard in isolation, asynchronously detached from the real world, taking one’s time, changing one’s mind, correcting, editing while completely unobserved, is one thing, hard enough in itself. Enforced do-it-now creativity when combined with an instinctive fear of public speaking in front of thirty nasty little smartarses is something else, and can be intimidating and life changing. As we shall see.
The most intensely anxiety-provoking, mind-paralysing instance of this that I can recall, occurred when I was in my mid-teens. It was caused by the man who taught us English, a language which all of us could speak already. He – like most English teachers – read the “Guardian”, was under-sized, and took pleasure in embarrassment. His classroom overlooked a small thoroughfare that was allegedly part of the city’s peripatetic red light district. One of his less endearing habits was to order bashful teenage boys out onto this street, and to shout at the tops of their voices, so that they could be heard from within the classroom, words like “prostitute”, “intercourse” and “fornication”. I thought I was lucky in that I was never selected for this ordeal, not appreciating that the long term downside was that I remained singularly unprepared, in adult life, to fully exploit and enjoy my subsequent transits through Amsterdam, the Pigalle, or King’s Cross. I really wouldn’t know how to go about it, or know what to say.
And now the paralysing episode. One afternoon (memory suggests it feels like a Monday) this man - whom we will call A.L. for arbitrary reasons not necessarily though just possibly connected with his initials - decided that we should each give an impromptu speech, on any topic we liked, anything at all. We had five minutes to think up an idea and scribble some headings, and then for the rest of the 40 minute period A.L. would select victims to give a five minute oration. The selection was made on such factors as where one was sitting, the first letter of one’s name, one’s birthday, whether one was looking particularly keen or the opposite, and similar quasi-random parameters. There was one boy, whom we shall call P.M. for reasons that escape me, who was an extraverted and very sweaty endomorph, incontinently vocal in class, and thus a great favourite of A.L. He was, as I recall, fond of drama, not of the hissy fit queeny variety, but the more tiresomely serious literary sort that ac-torrrrrs and schoolboy show-offs do. If the whole class was asked a question P.M.’s hand would reflexly shoot up: “Sir, please sir, please sir, sir, sir”. Whatever the question, his answer was always the same, “sir, it’s because of society, sir”, and it was always correct. Even now I occasionally dream of P.M., and in the dream he’s always a woman. Sure enough, he was one of those selected to give a speech that afternoon, and he was in his element. I forget the details, but I expect it was to do with society.
Meanwhile I sat there frozen with fear, completely unable to think of anything at all, least of all a subject upon which I could waffle for the allotted time. To the extent that my brain functioned at all, an occasional wandering neuron might glance against old favourites – topics I’d “done” for school projects, like the Forth Bridge, the solar system, or the Stock Exchange stamp forgeries – or another ambling thoughtlet might graze up against newer passions like the Mersey Railway or the inert gases. I loved the inert or noble gases, lined up down the far right of the periodic table, in what was then called Group VIII. Don’t get me wrong, I loved the Mersey Railway too, and in particular the low level station under Liverpool Central, but the inert gases were really special. I was especially fond of krypton – that was, as it were, my element - long before it became a factor in the televisual lives of the masses, and while it still just quietly went about its business of contributing to approximately 0.0001% of the earth’s atmosphere. I wasn’t the only pupil thus enamoured. My friend H.C.P.R. (it sounds like a nineteenth century North American railroad company, doesn’t it), who sadly died not long ago, had a major fetish for the isotope krypton-86. I could see his point. But no, nothing would gel coherently, nothing I could expound upon, not even anecdotes involving my strange relatives, like Uncle Rhos who did dangerous things with scissors or Uncle Willie Tom who had yellow skin and weekly injections in his bum. Nothing at all, completely mentally blank, total cerebral paralysis. No plausible topic out of all the immensity of time and space and growing up.
Somehow, I survived the lesson. I’ve no idea how, but I did. Chance, luck, fate, I suppose.. My name began with the same letter as it always did, my birthday was in the month it always was, I was sitting where I always sat, and my face was white with fear. None mattered that afternoon. By the end of the lesson I was a total nervous wreck. However, while enjoying that blissful moment of relief and escape I reflected too that I might not have been selected for a different reason. I concluded that I had just experienced a fundamental judgement about me as a person, an assessment that has become more familiar and more expected with the passing years. That day I understood for the first time that no one was remotely interested in anything I might have to say. Education is character building, it certainly is.
So, if you insist that I should produce a blog this week, like every other week, I’m afraid there’s nothing doing. Nothing, zilch, rien, nada, nichts. My silence is an act of retrospective revenge.
A long while ago I learned that A.L. had emigrated to New York. I visualised him on a seedy stretch of 8th Avenue, on the block where Hungry Hilda’s once stood, yelling “hooker” at the top of his voice. I hope he was successful. For yes, it’s true, it’s about society, it always is.
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