Thursday 10 October 2013

Best days of your life?

Ok, post two and I suppose I'd better get personal...

30th June 1983 is remarkable for me in three ways; firstly it was my sixteenth birthday, secondly, and completely co-incidentally, it was the day I left secondary school, Arnold Hill Comprehensive, and thirdly it was the day I started full time employment at Tabletop Games.

Its always make me smile to think of myself as working at 16, Old-fellas that you'd hear would say, "I started down t'pit at 14", or "I've been at the factory, man and boy" and although the work that I was just starting wasn't 't'pit' and the factory was only a cottage industry, not some huge old textile mill, I did rather enjoy being thrown-in at the deep-end, a boy in a mans world.

I left school with virtually no skills and very few qualifications, I'd always struggled to write, I'm dyslexic, so getting loads of O levels was never going to be an option.
I scraped a C at Geography on my Boy Scout map reading skills alone, and stumbled over the line for a C in Maths, simply because there were less numerals for me to muck-up, and numbers worked in a way that words never did...
There were I'm sure, other lessons (English Lit & Lang, Physics, Chemistry and Social Studies) but nothing inspired me enough to be bothered to pass the exam... And in the only subject I did enjoy, Pottery, no writing see, there wasn't an O level graded course...
I could see that me and formal education weren't going to get on...

Getting to 16 had been the easy part, getting out of school, only a matter of time, getting a job, let alone doing something that I enjoyed, might have proved more tricky...

In part 3 dear Reader, "Giz a Job".

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