The School Desk
My daughter has just started high school, and one of the things she complains about (apart from the teachers, the subjects, the timetable and the uniform) is having to carry around her school bag all day.
She feels shackled to it. In our day we had a wooden desk which was like a replica of our bedrooms minus the bed. It contained:
an apple core
a pencil case with the anarchy sign on it, even though we lived in Howick
a three-week-old mandarin
the notes you have been writing to your classmates (Do You Like Me Y/N)
a picture of Simon Le Bon cut out from Smash Hits. The Blu Tak has soaked through
a pretend cigarette made out of lined refill
one of those chatterbox things where you choose a colour then number then the answer is always that you are going to pash Jonathan in Room 5
gum that dates back to 1974
My point is, that you didn’t have to carry your life on your back; you could offload it. Even at high school, having a locker was a rite of passage. There was nothing more fun than opening it and seeing someone had slipped an orange peel through the little gap in the top of it. It’s probably how most drug deals were done, now I think about it.
The wooden desk, though. You’d get into class and put your crap into in it. It was yours. Sometimes, the unthinkable would happen and the lid would fall on your head, or your teacher (if you were from the 80s) might slam it on your hands, but all good. What a versatile piece of furniture.
If you were hungry, you could go into the desk and pretend you were looking for something, like your School Journal, and have a quick bite of your cheese and marmite sandwich. My mother tended to lean into the marmite and celery combo, but that is another newsletter for another time.
You could also have a quick korero with your neighbour in the safety of the wooden shield.
Pssst. Your fly is down. Your underpants are showing.
Finally, you could write stuff on the underside of the lid such as:
K.S v P. S v eva
In Twink.
At the end of the year you’d spend a miserable day sanding down your desk, while the Deputy Principal watched with an undeniable sadistic pleasure.
It was the best of times, it was always the best of times.