Mornings Eleven – The Magic Numbers (2005, Capitol Records, Taken from ‘The Magic Numbers’)
When I was eleven I went to grammar school. On my first day, I remember walking to school with a lad called Graham whose mum owned the local sweet shop. She stuffed our oversized blazer pockets with bags of liquorice allsorts and jelly beans before we walked nervously down the road to the school.
You hear rumours about new schools, the way that a bullies pick on first years and flush their heads down the toilet or use you as a goalpost. These rumours were all discussed by Graham and I as we walked to school our teeth blackened by the liquorice. Graham and I decided that it would be Michael, an annoying lad from our old school who would be first to get his head flushed down the toilet.
On arrival we were all herded like sheep in a large room that the school called the Wind Tunnel and there, in something that when I look back on it, was probably the inspiration for JK Rowling’s Sorting Hat Ceremony, we were placed into houses.
It wasn’t as glamourous as the Hogwarts thing, your name was read out and you went and stood in a line behind the sour face looking teacher, and then you were lead up some manky stairs which had chewing gums stuck under the plastic bannisters, to your form room. I was placed in Newton. A house named after Isaac Newton, the man who along with gravity also invented the cat flap and stood as an MP (incidentally Isaac Newton’s only recorded contribution to the smooth running of government as an MP, was asking if the window in the chambers could be closed – absolutely true).
We were given a red stripe (a piece of material, not sadly, a can of the Jamaican lager) which was to sit just above the badge on our oversized blazers. Our teacher was a PE Teacher, who like most PE Teachers appeared to spend his entire life in a tracksuit and only ever wrote in capital letters. He left the school a year or two later, under a bit of a cloud of scandal, something involving a science teacher and some chloroform, but I forget exactly what.
To make things easier, the teacher told us to sit next to the person whose name was next to yours in the register. That meant I got to sit next to a girl called Paula – she later became smelly Paula after she fell head first into a cow pat on a school trip to a farm. In front of us were Vicky and Allan – Allan later became an actor of some note, as he appeared in at least one episode of the Bill, and two episodes of Casaulty and an advert for Converse Trainers. Allan was a favourite with all the girls and before the end of year eight was dating girls two or three years older than him. He also loved U2 and would regularly repeat Ben Elton’s comedy routines from Friday Night Live word for word on a Monday morning to an adoring crowd.
Behind us sat Nick (who later became Smelly Nick, because, well he had BO and no concept of soap) and Zoe. Zoe had the sort of permed hair that you only ever saw sad old ladies with. She looked like she was 65 when she was 11. As first days go, it was pretty rubbish. My first week wasn’t much better, I tried for the football team, didn’t get in. The centre forward places going to two lads from another house, called David and Richard, both infinitely quicker and more talented than me
XI – Richard Dawson (2013, alt.vinyl records, taken from ‘The Glass Trunk’)
By the end of the first week I had became the first person in Newton to get a detention, something which at least made me slightly more interesting for about a week. This was handed out by a complete bastard of a science teacher called Mr Duncan, who dished out detentions like vicars dish out words of advice. My crime, putting the Bunsen Burner back in the wrong place.
#11 – Aphex Twin (1994, Warp Records, Taken from ‘Selected Ambient Works Vol. 11)
No Badger Required 