"Schools train you to be ignorant.... they prepare you to be a usable victim for a military industrial complex that needs manpower. As long as you're just smart enough to do a job and just dumb enough to swallow what they feed, you're going to be alright." Frank Zappa 

Part One: General Reflections 

Some time near the end of January 2019 I received a surprise email. It was from somebody I hadn't heard from,or heard of, for several decades. His name is Bob, and I was at secondary school with him during the late 1960s. Along with several others, he was organising a reunion of old school pals; would I like to be included in the loop?

To simply locate me would have been a major exercise in advanced level detective work, and I accepted Bob's invitation. Cue the expected flurry of communication with slightly old gentlemen, who I knew previously as schoolboys in blazers and briefcases. A good deal of friendliness was exchanged, with reminiscences aplenty. I found it quite an enjoyable interlude. A few of them actually got together, and then the covid story kicked in, with all ideas of further meetings duly abandoned.

This communication with beings who apparently form part of my past brought to a head a feeling that has lurked in some shady corner of my consciousness for nearly all my life. We got on fine, amicably, but....... Beyond that, what constituted 'my life' was running along different lines to those followed by these old friends and acquaintances.

I wrote to two of these former school chums about my life over the ensuing years and decades; a brief, general review, careful to avoid saying anything too extreme or offputting. One replied briefly that his own life, based around a career in the civil service, had been more conventional; the other - Bob, actually - failed to reply at all. 

It's a funny feeling. I did all this stuff - studied algebra, French verbs, photosynthesis, swotted for exams, spent time and hung out with my school mates - but it had nothing to do with why I had turned up on this planet in the first place. Not really. Nothing at all.

'Education' is the one aspect of life that I just passed through, did because it's what you do. Many people do all their life in this way, simply moving along a conveyor belt of pre-programmed events and activities, until one day they drop dead. I went to grammar school because I happened to pass some exam. I went to university because it's what I could do. I went to Oxford because my school entered me for Oxford entrance: it's what you did if you could.

I thought seriously about opting out of 'education' before university: I was so fed up with it all, I applied to work as a hospital porter. And again two years later, I nearly dropped out of the education system. On both occasions my parents exhorted me to carry on. Since they intervened in the events of my life rarely, I took it as serious when they did so. So I continued until the end. Just passing through, just going along. 

These former school pals all had a career, a profession, I discovered. This was another thing for me. At no point did I harbor any notions of having a 'career'. It was simply an alien concept. I've had 'jobs' because I need some money. But that's it really. I've always been off somewhere else. 

Ironically, I always did well in academia. Not hard science, but the rest, yes. I don't know why. It just seemed that way. For most of my time in the system, I probably studied averagely. Enough to do what was needed, but without taking it so seriously as to engender anxiety, depression, and the rest of the stuff that can clog up your mind.

I felt a bit guilty at the end of my time at Oxford. Of the group of six in my college doing geography, I came out with the highest grade of degree. Two of the others, in particular, had put far, far more work into it; one in particular took it all too seriously, almost gave himself a breakdown, and came out with a rubbish-level degree. I just strolled in, breezed through, watched all these other people frantically filling page after page while I quietly considered how to make best use of the modest amount of info I knew. And I came out tops.   

Part Two: Bye Bye Little Boy

When I was seventeen years old, the family moved from Aylesbury twenty miles west, to a village just outside Oxford, called Wheatley. I still had a year of A-levels to finish, but none of the local Oxford schools could offer the combination of subjects that I was studying. As a result, I spent my final year of 'school' at Oxford College of Further education instead.

This was great; just what I needed. I was leaving behind the nine-to-five-like treadmill of conventional schooling, in exchange for the newfound freedom appropriate to an independent fledgling adult. No more school uniform. No more prefect system. No fascist teachers around every corner, ready to order you to get your hair cut. There were still classes to attend, but I had far more freedom to live and study as I wanted. A few months in, I returned to my old school for university entrance exams, and I was shocked at what I found. Old school buddies still behaving like kids in uniform, overgrown adolescents, while I seemed to have graduated into another classroom altogether.

My newfound status as junior adult meant that I mainly kept the company of people a little older than me in classes. This, too, was great, rubbing shoulders with folk who had left juvenalia behind, and who could teach me a thing or two about life.

This was particularly the case in the French class. The French lessons took place well away from the main college buildings, in deepest East Oxford, in the Cowley Community Centre. Here a merry band of young adult students would convene and chat away, waiting for the hurried arrival of our French teacher, Madame Rees. We had a French language teacher who actually came from France; how cool was that?

It was in this class that I had the pleasure to meet, for the first time, some real freaks. Michael - who went on to join the Hare Krishna people or someone - was slim, rangy, olive-skinned, and wore an outsize ring in one ear. He was sometimes very funny, and infinitely cool. "I'm going to fuck that French teacher" he would tell us all, as the petite Madame Rees made her normal rushed entrance. He seemed to be kidding, but there was always that uneasy feeling.....

One cold winter's morning I caught the bus down Cowley Road on my way to classes. From the top-deck window I could dimly make out the first faint glimmerings of an icy dawn. Halfway down Cowley Road, Michael got on the bus and came and sat next to me. He gazed blurrily out the window. "Look at that sunrise" he murmured dreamily, gesturing vaguely with a slow movement of his hand. I looked outside, and saw precisely - nothing. Meanwhile, Michael continued to gaze in wonder and awe. And thus was my first known encounter with a being absorbed in the psychedelic state. 

Then there was William. While not given to consciousness-alteration with the aid of substances, William was nevertheless a freak, full of freakish enthusiasms. On Thursday afternoons students were supposed to attend a general studies class. There was a choice, and the college put on a William Blake class. William - the other one - had a childlike enthusiasm for the paintings and drawings of Blake. A whole roomful of freaky people would sit there drinking it all in.

William's love of life spilled out in bucketloads when we went to the 'Yes' concert in Oxford Town Hall. I didn't know the band's music very well - they were still in their infancy - but William's eyes would light up in recognition at the first few notes of every song. He would stand there with his long, slightly greasy hair, his verging-on podgy face, John Lennon specs, and moth-eaten short dark overcoat (which he wore whatever the weather) enveloped in innocent delight. The music of the entire evening seemed pervaded by a unique warmth; melody and rare complexity interwoven by sheer professionalism that was rare in concerts of the time.

Then things moved on, and William disappeared. It happens like that when we are young.

Part Three

And then I was off to Oxford University. Geography. I decided to study geography because it was a middle-of-the-road kind of subject, and I didn't have a clue what I might be doing afterwards. If you went for inorganic chemistry, you were making a statement of sorts. But geography? I was surprised to attend my first lecture, and to discover that the hall was full of eighteen-year olds studying a middle-of-the-road subject and without a clue about the remainder of their lives either... 

Oxford University. The cream of the cream. The envy of the world. Well, not exactly.

If I mention this place, I tend to get either a raised eyebrow of suspicion or disapproval, or a gasp of wonder and awe. Both reactions are way off the mark. I went to Oxford because it is where the system landed me. The students are a mix of those from posh private and public schools such as Harrow and Eton; and those, like me, from the state school system who happen to do well in memorising information to regurgitate in examinations. When it comes to these two strands of undergraduates, it's a case of 'ne-er the twain shall mix'. Socially, the two remain fairly discrete, and have little to do with one another.

Intellectual rigour was pretty moribund. I spent most of my study time doing the same as I'd done for years before: reading and listening, making notes, before putting it all together in an essay. To begin with, I would accompany the flocks of other first years heading through the morning mists to the School of Geography for lectures. It soon dawned, however, that most of the lecturers put little effort into these presentations: it was one of their obligations, but their real interests lay elsewhere, in obscure areas of personal research. The lectures were to be got out of the way so they could get on with what they really wanted to do - and it showed.

Study time was better spent in one of the libraries, at the School of Geography or the Bodleian. During the winter months the heating was full on, which meant that the reading rooms were full of students sent to sleep by the dry heat, rows of heads slumped on top of thick volumes. And on May 1st, whatever the weather, the radiators were turned completely off, and you might need to brave the library in gloves.

The creative highlight was the personal thesis, and I took myself off one late summer to the Peak District to have a look at different land uses there. This mainly involved sitting by the road and counting the number of cars entering and exiting the park at various times of day. From this I came to all kind of questionable conclusions.

The best bit was in the evening, when I would return to the youth hostel and meet up with these two girls from Grimsby, a never-been-there kind of place on the Lincolnshire coast. Dee was very beautiful and had a boyfriend back home. The other girl had a name that I forget. She was warm and friendly, but failed to hit the spot. In an act of unwitting torture, Dee sent me a photo of herself a while later. I'd look at it regularly, before one day chucking it in the bin. 

Two great benefits accrued from those three years at Oxford. The first was that it allowed me plenty of free and flexible time to follow the things in life which were actually important to me. The second was that it afforded me a close-up view of those who, I knew, one day would be in positions of influence and power the world over. The academics, the politicians, the scientists and economists, the media people. Nearly all were remarkably unimpressive people, with tiny minds and narrow horizons, fully devoted to perpetuating life within an extremely small box. It's a lesson that I've never forgotten as life has unfolded, and sometimes threatened to unravel. I have never been taken in by academics, people in office, people with qualifications. It's all a sham, a deception intended to blind people with fakery. Most people fall for it, and the consequences are dire.  

I left Oxford with a good level degree, and set off in search of people I could properly take seriously. If the pot of gold existed at the end of the rainbow, it was going to be located elsewhere.....  

Hertford College, where I occasionally studied....

The full life story posts can be found in the 'Archives' section on the front page