Papering over the umm...books!

I was at an open day in my former primary school at the weekend and it got me thinking to how things have changed so much there over the years.

For instance, one of things the school has now is a terrific library packed with recycled books.

As I flipped through one of the books, it reminded me of how recently I had found a book at home that I had many years ago as a student.

What stood out for me, was not that I had found the book, but more that I had neatly written in the corner the price I had paid for it.

I can only assume at this stage that the reason I had written the price on the book, was to ensure I could determine the best possible price whenever I would decide to sell it on.

Since I found the book, I'm guessing I never did actually sell it but it did get me thinking about the way we went to great lengths to keep books in good condition years ago.

This usually involved wallpaper.

I’m not exactly sure where the relationship with wallpaper and schoolbooks began, but whenever I was at school, if you didn’t have wallpaper on your school books you were nobody.

Or maybe you were somebody.

And somebody who could be trusted not to scribble your name or any kind of mindless doodles on your book which in most circumstances would be sold on - or passed down.

I know I couldn’t. Which is why the wallpaper always came in handy.

It was probably around that time that I also discovered that covering a book (we used to always call it backing a book for some reason) requires the same kind of dexterity that people who are good at wrapping presents have.

I was not one of those people back then and funnily enough it is not something that has come to me with the experience of years.

There was a particular knack to it, making sure the paper was cut and folded in just the right places so that when you tried to close the book it wouldn’t spring open again.

I also discovered that using wood-chip wallpaper always made things that little bit more difficult, not to mention the fact that it increased significantly your chances of getting a splinter every time you reached into your schoolbag.

Instead we usually used old pieces of left-over wallpaper - mostly very old pieces from wallpaper that was nowhere to be found on any wall in the house any more.

The reason for this apparently was - we couldn’t use left-over pieces of wallpaper presently on the wall because these were needed in case a piece had to be fixed or patched.

The trouble with this of course was that this usually meant that your book was ‘backed’ with wallpaper that was terribly out of fashion.

Indeed I’m wondering now if there were at least some teachers who spent their lunch breaks trying to imagine what the inside of the various students’ houses looked like on the basis of how their books were covered.

Perhaps they thought that every wall in your sitting room was still covered with that dodgy looking flowery wallpaper that made an appearance in the mid seventies.

This may also have been the reason that some people began to put brown paper on their childrens’ books. And, if they couldn’t afford the brown paper they just turned the wallpaper around leaving the blank side on the outside.

If you wanted to be really fancy you used that sticky plastic paper, (fablon I think we called it at the time) - sometimes stuff with wood patterns on it so it looked as if your book was covered with a cheap sheet of wood.

Well that is of course, if you could imagine a sheet of wood with bubbles in it.

But it’s all different these days - or so I thought until the open day when one of the students showed me the fancy interactive whiteboards all linked up to a laptop computer

“So, do you know how the whiteboard works,” I asked.

“It’s all worked off the laptop computer, you can write on it like an ordinary board, but you can play games and all too,” she said.

“And do you know how to work the laptop,” I asked further.

“Oh yes,” she replied, “I have my own – I just put a new wallpaper on it this morning…”

Okay, so maybe things haven’t changed that much after all…

What's in a name?

Don’t you just hate it when that happens. You know, when somebody comes up to speak to you and you can’t for the life of you remember their name.

It happened to me once at the airport just as we’d checked our bags in and started to amble away from the queue. As I glanced around a girl in the queue spoke to me and caught me right off guard.

‘I know what you’re thinking – I should know that face from somewhere,’ she said to me confidently.

Actually I was thinking, if I don’t find the loos quickly there’s gonna be a huge puddle here in the middle of check-in area 4.

The thing is, even when she spoke to me and I looked towards her, I hadn’t the foggiest idea who she was. 

No siree, nothing registered up in the old grey matter to suggest that – ‘well now that you mention it your face does look familiar.’

So, I had to wing it and edged towards her wondering how I was ever going to talk my way out of this one.

And then it hit me – her baggage label – all I’d have to do is get a glance at the label and I’d be okay. But the dang thing was hanging on the case at a very awkward angle this was going to be tough.

‘So off to America then too,’ I said dumbly, since she was standing in the same queue I’d been in and the plane wasn’t going anywhere else.

‘Yeah,’ she said, but she sensed my unease and just as she added ‘you don’t know me do you,’ her hand moved, the label flapped around and I confidently replied – ‘yeah, course I do and proceeded to tell her.’

The thing is, once I saw her name I knew right away who she was – what hadn’t struck me until much later was of course that if she’d been married to the guy she was standing in line with and who I definitely didn’t recognise (and who I’m sure saw me looking at the label) and she had taken his surname - I’d still have been stumped.

Yeah, so, it’s all very well when you’re at an airport and somebody happens to have a name-tag on their case for you to get a glance at, but these old memory blanks can hit anywhere and rarely is there a way out like I had at the airport.

After all there are not too many people who trundle a case up and down the street to the shops.

So what do you do when a sudden memory blank hits when you’ve been spoken to by somebody who obviously recognises you and who thinks you should know them too?

Do you small talk in the hope that something will trigger a memory, or do you just get away with a ‘ah, how are you,’ and walk away torturing yourself all day trying to think, now ‘who was that then?’

One old guy I knew said he had a solution because he called everybody male ‘Matt’ and everybody female ‘Mary.’

“Ah, It’s much simpler than trying to remember a whole lot of names,’ he told me one time, adding ‘and it means I never get anybody’s name wrong.’

Course it meant that he actually got most peoples' name wrong, but that never seemed to bother him too much.

To me there were just a couple of things wrong with his logic. For starters, every conversation would start as if there was an echo.

John: ‘Well how are you Matt?’

Paddy: ‘Ah, not so bad Matt.’

Mick: ‘How’s Matt, and Matt?’

John: ‘Fine Matt’

Paddy:  ‘Grand Matt.’

Another thing if the men were all Matts, well women would just walk all over us, wouldn’t they?

The real bugging thing for me though is that it wouldn’t be my right name!
And it gets on my nerves when some people I know seem always to get a mental block when they see me and feel obliged to call me by the first of my brothers’ names they can think of.

To be honest it’s not a new thing. I mean it happened (as I suspect it does in most families) when I was growing up – ‘I said stop that racket Raymondjosephconor, I mean Liam.’

It was even worse if my mother struggled with one of the girls names, with eight of them in the family it was like a litany sometimes before she got the right one out.’

But then that’s something you never mind (and even have a laugh at) in your family. You expect more from strangers don’t you!

I mean they might only ever see you once in a while, but you still expect that the very least they could do is get your damn name right.

You know, maybe I’ll start hauling a suitcase around with me after all…

Organised confusion

I’m not sure this week whether I actually hate my shed, or love it.

You see on the one hand I am thinking that whoever came up with the concept of a shed, came up with one of the best inventions ever.

After all when you have a shed you can throw all sorts of junk out into it and, well, that’s that, until of course you actually need to go to the shed to try and find something.

This can often be a problem. Especially if your shed looks like mine.

You see not everything is quite as easy to get your hands on in my shed as it might be in somebody else’s.

And yet the thing is, if it is in there, I usually have a fair idea of whereabouts it is.

Yep, that’s right - it’s not like I don’t have a system or anything - it’s just, well it is my system.

Okay it might be a bit of a stretch to call it a system, but I kinda know where the stuff is which usually means that I can find it... and sure isn’t that what counts in the end!

Still, every now and then I wonder why I can’t be more organised and be like some of the people I know who have sheds where everything is catalogued in rows and the tools are hung up in alphabetical order.

And then I remember... I have a life. 

I mean come off it. Who the heck has time to be standing working out whether spade, shovel or scythe comes first in their alphabetical line-up of tools?

Well okay, I’m pretty sure not too many people use a scythe these days, but you get my point.

And anyway, as I say, it’s not like I don’t have a system, it’s just that I usually tend to file most things, (well okay then everything), under ‘M’ for miscellaneous.

This filing system of course gives me a little bit of flexibility on where I can actually store things, which of course in reality just means – I can throw it anywhere into the shed.

But there is a problem with all of this and it brings me back to the start of the blog post, which is pretty unusual you’ll have to agree cos usually when I go off on a rant about stuff like this I tend to get sidetracked and, hey did you see that penalty in the Chelsea game tonight, a bit dodgy don’t you agree.

Ooops there I go again, almost sidetracked.

Oh yeah, the problem with just throwing stuff into the shed, is well, this…Sometimes when you want to get stuff out you might have to take about three hundred other things out first, climb over another few, move another couple around a bit and then hope it is in the corner you thought it was before you started.

I was thinking about this recently when I had to get something from my shed and had to wade through all sorts of crap to get it.

And then I wondered why half of this stuff was in there at all. 
Of course I knew why it was in there, it was because I was told to get rid of it last year when the last spring cleaning session was taking place.
And well, some of the stuff I thought might be useful and I decided, umm, I’ll get a chance to go through it again and I’ll sort it all out and then I’ll dump whatever is useless and keep the rest.

What a bloody lie!

Once it gets to the shed it just adds to the mountain of bikes and toys and old lamps and well all sorts of crap that, if you didn’t have a shed, you’d probably just get rid of.

Having mountains and mountains things stored away like that can really drive you crazy if you are trying to find something amidst all the junk.

But then again, it would probably be far worse if you didn’t have a system...