The Worst Pupil

About twenty five years ago, three fourth year girls wearing ball gowns decided to rollerskate up Lanark High Street in aid of charity. This event lead to me becoming a published writer. A physicist colleague was supervising them but I went along as support. Said colleague had come out from Glasgow and handed me the newspaper he'd bought to read on the train. "Here, take that, I'm finished with it."

I had a look at it when I got home. There was an advert for their science fiction short story competition. I entered and got nowhere, though a friend was runner up. Undaunted, I tried again the following year and was a runner up, as I was again the next year. This lead me to believe that I might have some talent as a writer and I began submitting articles to the likes of the Herald (rejection) and the TESS (acceptance).

One of the not-quite-winning stories was called The Worst Pupil. It was a tale of a teacher who is a member of a secret society who have mastered "time viewing". They can look at a landscape and watch what happened there in the past. Wish-fulfilment on my part - I'd love to be able to do this when I stumble across remote examples of industrial archaeology on my rambles. Anyway, said teacher cheeses-off the grand masters of this organisation by leaking their secrets, discovering that the elaborate rituals involved in time-viewing are completely superfluous. He is told that they will send him the "worst pupil". He expects to be forced to view one of the troublemakers from his past but speculates that this will be no great hardship as he'll be better prepared to deal with them. Instead, he sees himself aged fourteen, and cannot cope. This is predicated on the teacher having been placed in his old school. This happened to me.

At the time, I think I would have found the fourteen year old me an embarrassment. I wrote of his failed attempts to be cool, of his chat-ups that were ill-judged to the point of artistry. Of pseudo acts of rebellion. I couldn't write that story now. If you're going to teach, I think you have to accept that a lot of that behaviour comes with the hormones. You have to treat it with a metaphorical hand on the shoulder rather than an equally metaphorical slap with a Monty Python fish. No exceptions, not even your younger self.

There are one or two things I haven't let myself off with, but that's another story, as was my tale of aliens observing someone doing the ironing. I won £50 worth of book tokens for that.