French lessons.......

When i was 11 years old...... i was either a naughty little tinker, intellectually challenged or......... in my own little world...... an undiscovered terrain, untouched by man or beast....... a lone being, unsullied by the grime and filth of modern life.....



Or maybe....... i was just an child idealist

Seeing things as they should be and not as they are.....

Hearing words and not understanding...... not processing....... unthinking.

What's a signifier without its signified ?

They're just words, words, words...... and they can be a dangerous thing without a translator.

And in the hands of an 11 year old.......... they can be just plain embarrassing to look back on!

The red 'est WHO?' is my addition

My french exercise book from a time when my sense of grammar seems to have been as bad as my sense of decency!

But in my defence..... it had only been during the two years preceding this lexionical debacle, that i remembered hearing expletives for the the first time.....

The memory is as clear as day...... no clouds or whiteout blizzards to sully the halcyon idyll......... an innocent in a primary school playground...... suddenly hearing the adjective..... fucking

Of course, i'd heard the word before..... but hearing without meaning is simply being subjected to noise.....

Nothing more....... nothing less.....

The chud-i-di-lug...chud-i-di-lug...chud-i-di-lug...chud-i-di-lug... of your commuter train journey

The gentle breeze of your CPU cooler.....

The background hum of North Circular traffic........ the irritated beeping....

.....until.......

.... the police siren

That one sound, just another noise.... signifies.......

Background to foreground............

........ to playground

"Fucking......"

I heard it lucidly that day......... i was aware that it was a bad word and that my repeating it at home, would mean risking my life.

No-one told me not to say it........

Maybe it was subconscious self-preservation.....

In which case........... why did i write wanker, not once but twice, in my french exercise book only about a year later??

I'm still astounded.....

Not that i wrote it...... but that i got away with it.......... and only with a possibly incomprehensible red circle

Funny thing is, i remember that particular class exceptionally well........ we were asked the questions and had to write the answers, there and then. My french teacher, Françoise Major, was possibly the least eccentric of the middle aged female foreign language teachers that smoked cigars in the dept staff room...... but actually being french, meant that her accent was fluid and faultless......

It's not my fault she made moins le quart sound like............. wanker.........

My transliteration skills, or should that be lack of them, could have got me a conduct report....... but i got away with it then.....

.......... and i'm still getting away with it now.........