20 Years Later

Hello,

At the outset I know that this blog will probably only be read by me and possibly those who know me (until they get bored). It's mainly intended as a diary. Whenever I get to the end of a project, I always think 'I wish I'd kept a diary of this or taken some pictures'. So, I thought I would do it with this.

I've decided to do an A Level in History, 20 years after when i should (indeed, 20 years after when I started it and quit about a month in). History was always my favourite lesson in school, despite some awful teaching (i.e. a teacher who was about 90 who couldn't remember dates or which king or queen did what, or even whether it was a king or a queen). We also had a teacher who was obsessed with medieval torture. It was a Catholic school, so this was somewhat to be expected.

Anyway, so I loved history at school and did my GCSE in it. I did great with my coursework and produced model answers in the exam....but I only ended up with a D. I can fully absolve myself of blame in this as straight after the exam, the teacher (the torture one) took us into the school hall and said that he had just rediscovered a letter that the exam board had sent him earlier in the year. Apparently, the way that he had told us to tackle the answers was in fact wrong. He apologised and we filed out. At the start of the course he had written 'FAIL' on the board and told us that was a word that we would come to know, so he was right about one thing.

Rather than having to resit, I managed to get on an A Level at a local 6th form. One of my teachers subsequently became a Lib Dem MP - which is ironic given what the Condems are doing to the arts and humanities. I always found him a supercilious knob (hence presumably his career choice) and quickly discovered that there was a hierarchy in the class that stretched from those who he had taught for the previous 5 years down to me and my friend who were newbies. He also poo-pood my suggested coursework topic on celtic art (he was probably right about this). The other teacher wasn't much better and had borderline autism or at least awful social skills. He would come in the room, lay out his things in a certain way and start the class. If you moved the stuff around while he was out, he would panic and lose his thread. I can't remember much of his classes apart from that.

I managed a month of this, did one essay on 19th C France (got an A, but think that this was done politically) and then decided to pack it in. I was offered a different teacher, but I made one of my (not infrequent) grand symbolic gestures and told them to stick it. Luckily I quickly found communication studies which led me to psychology which led me to sociology which led me eventually to a PhD and a job.

So why the A Level? As I said, I've always had an interest in historical things and some of the things I've written have had historical elements to them. I always get warm eyes at the end of the final episode of Simon Schama's History of Britain, which also must count for something. But, what led me back was wargaming. I got into playing Flames of War and stemming from this I started to read WW2 histories such as the Richard J Evans Trilogy on The Third Reich, and the Anthony Beevor books (ironically it was playing with toy soldiers as a child that probably got me interested in history). I thought initially that I would just develop an interest in an auto-didactical-type way, but then a Middle Class moment took over me and I thought 'no, I have to get a qualification out of it'. I looked around and found that ICS did a course that included topics that I had done at school: Russia leading to the Revolution and Europe between the wars.

I've paid my money and the course-pack has now arrived, so it's too late to go back. History awaits...