I’ve just been going through the 2000 or so channels available on European satelite tv.
So much available and so little to watch. Every few stations appear to be earnest folk calling on us all to repent and turn to whatever branch of religion they are selling.
They split into two types. The lean and hungry, with swivelling, guilty eyes. They must have done something terrible in their own eyes at sometime and now feel qualified to demand we all join them and help them atone for their pasts.
The other sort look fat and prosperous. These are the religious businessmen who are in it for the career prospects and the self-glorification of being on tv.
The one thing that unites these two types is that they are voices in the wilderness of dubbed baywatch repeats, shopping channels and recycled pop videos.
Sweet! Yes, that’s me – about six years old with very cold knees. I started boarding at the age of 5! This is Eddie Rosser-Rees who ran Drayton’s School in Warminster – His wife was the headmistress.
I distinctly remember that the “back to school” signs didn’t go up in the shops until about two weeks before the end of the holidays when I was young. When the signs went up, my heart would sink and the remainder of the holidays would be tainted with the oncoming threat of school and the end of freedom.
This may have been heightened by my attending boarding school which, in the grand scheme of things, wasn’t too bad when it wasn’t my turn to take the crap.
We didn’t go on holiday. Going home was special enough. Summer holidays were endless days of making and building and cycling and grubbing around in hedgerows, studying wildlife and generally hanging out and remembering what family life should be about.
Then the signs went up in shops and the countdown would begin.
So why do W H Smiths now put their “back to school” signs up the moment the summer holidays have begun – before most people have even left for Spain or the damp caravan in Porthcawl? Don’t they know the torture they are inflicting on the children of the nation, or do children who live at home not feel the same way as I did then?
My holidays were never the same as the local kids. I’d always have a few days when I’d be hanging around on my own while the rest of the world seemed to have gone back to a school routine. It could sometimes feel like I was special, allowed out when others weren’t, but then I’d see the “back to school” signs in the shops and I’d shrink into myself, wondering if some truancy officer might catch me and not believe my story and lock me up in some awful place for children that don’t go back to school when they’re told to.
Fans take picture of JordanI happened upon Katie Price in WHSmiths in The Mall, Bristol today. I didn’t actually see her because she was surrounded by people gawping and taking pics on their mobiles.
It is quite extra ordinary how someone can have that effect on people. I was surprised that the secruity people referred to her as Katie Price – I thought she had reverted back to her old persona of Jordan.
She had so brilliantly reinvented herself as Katie Price and had a whole new future set up for her and Peter and the kids. Then she went and blew it. Took her top of and danced on the tables again, metaphorically speaking… well, and practically speaking too.
And here I am writing about her, so she got what she wanted. If everyone stopped taking pictures and writing articles about her, would she just shrivel up like a old balloon, or do you think there’s a real person in there trying to get out?
