Try Dumping

So, once the ‘rich kids’ (and hanger ons) had attended the shop and come back with their special purchases. They then positioned themselves, carefully, to allow us to observe them enviously, as they consumed the excessive upgrades from the tuckshop tucker they had acquired. Then sometimes, to prove how well off they were, they would often only consume a part of what they had purchased. They would sometimes stop eating and then complain of being “too full, to eat any more”. Picking up what was left, (half a pie, cream bun, never the chocolate bars I noticed), ensuring we (the ‘poor children as they had labelled us), were observing, they would cross to a nearby rubbish bin and dramatically drop the ‘left overs’ into the trash. Criminal. Sad, and particularly wasteful. It did nothing to enhance our feelings towards them. I was also, while angry, disappointed that such behaviour was never stopped by the teachers, who also observed the behaviour of these children. Unfortunately, what happened next, started a series of events, with important consequences for myself, my attitude to others, my future behaviour and not just to the relationship to my teacher Mr Walsh.

One particularly hot summer day (hot by local standards anyway, it must have been at least 28 degree’s Celsius), the twins ‘E’ and ‘K’, with a few hanger ons following, obtained permission from the teacher on duty and left the school grounds to the shop. They returned a short time later, laden with buns, and ice-creams. Very expensive, top of the range ice-creams, bags of lollies and bottles of soft drink. Not just one bottle each, but three. In those days a bottle size was around 280mls (compared to 600mls which are today’s soft drink bottle average, what does that tell you about change in attitude over the years?) And they loudly laughed and sat themselves down in the eating area on the bench. Now, the eating area was under a shaded area, but once you had eaten you were expected to leave the area and go out into the playground and ‘play’. So of course while it was a hotter than normal day, were we still expected to leave the shaded area and go out into the playground. Many made a beeline for the tree and it’s shady area.

Actually, there’s another unusual interpretation of a phrase. A ‘Bee line’. It is meant to refer to the shortest most direct route taken by a bee to the hive. Have you ever watched bees? Even when returning to a hive? They seldom fly in a dead straight line to, or especially from the hive. They fly up, circle a bit, orientate and drift a little sideways before getting the course correction (somehow) and then the tend to straighten up the direction of their flight. Not the vertical of course. They go up and down as they fly. So while the direction may be sort of straight, the bee line is like a sine wave of drift and can lengthen the flight by a large amount. But there’s always a back up re: travelling in a straight line, “as the crow flies”.

(Continued tomorrow)