Category Archives: School

Jun 25 2012
2 Comments
Ice Cream, School

Scribble Your Name Across My Heart (a love story)

There was a boy, once. I was six and so was he. We were in First Class together, back in the days when First Class meant making your Holy Communion. With that massive ecclesiastical millstone around our necks, he’d be sent off to the Boys’ Academy of Learning and I’d be left behind in the Convent School for Premature Harlots. I suppose that was heavy on my mind. I did not want to be separated from him. He was a dashing little fellow.

Anyway, we were on our school tour and on the way back, the teacher allowed us to stop at a playground so we could stretch our legs and flake each other over the few available swings. We were each given an ice-pop as a treat. They were cheap, frozen splashes of chemicals that tasted fucking amazing but have probably since been outlawed. They were called Scribblers. They looked like pencils and so were better than the more economical Sparkles.

Behold the Scribbler, bottom row.

I loved Scribblers. Of course, I loved all of the HB ice-pops: Sparkles and Fat Frogs and Super Splits and Tangle Twisters and the Brunches I gorged on once a year when my uncle came back from the UK, laden down with disposable income and misty-eyed generosity. I loved the Loop The Loops, with their chocolate top, and the Maxi Twists, with their miserable sliver of sorbet tucked into the bone-white ice-cream, and the Calippos that came in a cardboard tube that went soggy and made your fingers sticky and your mother cross. But especially I loved Scribblers. Maybe my tongue knew I was going to be a writer before the rest of me figured it out.

The little boy that I had drawn designs on was on his own, going up and down one of the taller slides at the far end of the playground. It was as good a chance as any to ingratiate myself. We were in the same class, but we weren’t special friends, which must have stung something shocking because I’m nothing if not a stereotypical Leo. Even when I was six I expected everyone to be in love with me. I had long blonde hair and hazel eyes and I looked like I’d been gently rolled out of a Timotei ad for being too scruffy. I was the perfect best friend for a six-year-old boy.

He was going up and down on the slide and I wanted to join him.

But there was the Scribbler in my hand. I’d been savouring it. I never bit an ice-pop, whether I could help it or not (and I never have since, either. Sensitive teeth). Teacher had told us that we were to finish our pops before using the playground equipment, and I was no rebel. Nor was I used to choosing any treat over a Scribbler. But this was love.

I put the Scribbler very carefully on the grass, well out of the way of racing, kicking feet, and rushed to join the little fella on the tall slide.

He was inching himself down the chute, chubby little fingers clutching its sides. The steel had been smoothed to optimum launch speed by years of little arses speeding down onto the gravel and grass below, and I guess he wasn’t the most daring young man. Not so I. I climbed the slide behind him, sat at the top and slid down with the grace and speed of some sort of space-age angel, blonde tangle sailing out majestically behind me, head thrown back like the photogenic little astronaut I was. I hit him squarely in his reticent, blocky back with my patent Clarks’ best.

He went flying off the end of the slide and landed on his backside on the gravel. He got up and turned around and his lip was quivering like a maggot on a fishing line.

“I’m telling Teacher on you!” he said. “You’re bold. You hurt me. I’m telling.”

And off he went as fast as his plump six-year-old legs could carry him.

Well, I was heartbroken. You might as well have buried my She-Ra doll or unravelled my Read Along tape of A Little Princess or told me that The Phantom Menace would one day exist. It was a feeling so desperate and so deep and strong that I still remember it  and wince, twenty-four years later. Not only had I made the object of my affection cry, but now I was going to be in trouble with Teacher and I was never in trouble with Teacher. And what a fucking wimp. Not that I knew the word fucking back then, but it formed in bile in the back of my throat as a concept and I’ve not been able to dislodge it since. Miserable little… fucker. And hot tears blurred my vision and my nose went out in sympathy with it and it was the worst day of my little life.

The worst, worst day. Because when I went back over for my precious Scribbler, some other little fucker had nicked it.

I have never forgiven that little bastard. I hope he dies roaring.

(by Lisa McInerney)

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Jun 06 2012
10 Comments
Education, School, Wexford

What were the skies like when you were young: When Inter Cert English became nebulous

I sat my “Inter” 25 years ago.

For those of you who don’t go back that far, the Intermediate Certificate was the fore-runner to the Junior Certificate. It was replaced by the latter in 1992.

Back then the Department of Education had toyed with a number of different commencement days for the state exams. Monday starts had shifted to Friday by 1984 before eventually settling to Wednesdays when my turn came in 1987. That suited fine as we had four full days to study.

The first day was taken up with two English papers. It had, by then, become my favourite subject and I had high hopes of doing well. All three volumes of Exploring English had been tackled and devoured with relish while I could mentally conjure up the plot of Julius Caesar in reverse. Paper I was, however, the tricky one; this was where a poorly-written essay could throw a spanner in the works and destroy one’s hope of an A grade – the ultimate prize.

As it happened the essay wasn’t an issue. Feeling pleased and confident, I proceeded to Section II and quickly scanned the comprehension piece. It didn’t really make much sense so I read it again with increasing apprehension and a growing feeling of desperation. It was awful and I started to panic. After a few moments I gradually regained my composure and tried to make sense of the words. OK – it seemed like a travelogue; somebody describing an aerial view of Ireland.

“Frisky blue skies”.

“Clouds lying sick and white”.

The writer then described the plane flying over Arklow or Wicklow

“In these moments the country looks wan and exhausted. You reach for the whiskey flask”.

I knew how he felt. Make this nightmare stop.

“Those wan sick clouds, only a few hundred feet above the earth, might be damp souls of little value”.

So that was it. The clouds were meant to represent the shite state of the country. And to top it off we got a stark illustration of the different geographical cloudscapes – Howth (“cherubic”), Dublin (“black umbrella”), South (“flat white”), South West (“cumulus on the boil”), North (“motionless slate”) and West (“hilarious wisps).

In keeping with the chaotic prose the final line is confusingly doom-laden

“You have reached the beginning or the end of creation”.

There were four questions that needed to be tackled.

The first one asked that we sum up the principal ideas in 140 words. One wonders if a single tweet could cover a satisfactory response now.

The remainder dealt with style, mood and word definitions (“anarchy” and “bizarre” among them; how fitting). Throughout the second hour a number of us exchanged forlorn glances and shrugged shoulders in bemused despair. This was a real whiskey tango foxtrot moment.

Thankfully I wasn’t alone in my bafflement. The following day’s Irish Times saw Christina Murphy describe the piece of prose as “extraordinary” and “stylised nonsense”. Numerous complaints had come in throughout the day to the paper’s Examdesk section while ASTI representatives referred to it as “far too precious and unsubstantial a passage for that sort of question”. To this day the identity of the writer remains a mystery.

But that’s not all. The craziness continued when I turned over the exam paper. Have a look at Section III, Part B.

What about this for a great idea? Let’s ask a bunch of 15-year-olds to compose a letter of condolence to somebody who’s lost a loved one. Isn’t it a little early to be imposing such a morbid task on a group of nervous teenagers? The cautionary guideline about not using your own name and address merely added to the oddball dynamics of the paper. At least that question was optional and you’ll note that I avoided it.

1987′s results took a while to touch down – not arriving to schools until the beginning of October. Our headmaster wrote a covering letter to every student’s parents which took a somewhat ungracious attitude to the exam results. He sternly warned us of the pitfalls of dossing during fifth year and bid a curious goodbye (farewell and thanks in quotation marks) to those who had decided to leave or change schools during the summer. In retrospect it’s probably a fitting epitaph to one of life’s more surreal chapters.

(by nlgbbbblth)

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May 11 2012
5 Comments
School, Toys

Great Lolo Balls of Fire!

Of all the crazes that swept our bored little nation back in the eighties, the Lolo Ball was probably one of the most unsafe, unstable, unsteady and unbelievably fun ways to spend your time as a child. I don’t remember exactly how it started…all I know is that I wanted in. And fast. During my primary school years, I was the proud owner of two Lolo Balls. The first was a blue ring around a fat yellow ball (not the original brand, but it was all they had in Quinnsworth at the time), the second looked just like the one in the picture below. I have to admit, I got a twang of nostalgia when I saw that pop up on my screen…along with a pain in my gum but that’s for a later part of the story.

The chief source of most major dental work on eighties kids.

For those unfortunate enough to have been born after this awesomely ridiculous hobby exploded onto the scene, here’s how it worked. It was about the size of a football, and looked like the illegitimate love-child of soccer and Frisbee. Here’s how you use it:

1: Lay it on the ground, placing your foot flat on the plastic ring.

2: Then in some sort of upward jumping motion that would make a Russian gymnast gasp in admiration, leap into the air while simultaneously placing your other foot on the other side of the plastic ring.

3: While airborne, use your two feet to grip the ball tighter than Kim Kardashian clings to fame.

4: Bounce like a grinning idiot for hours to prove to your parents that this is something you are seriously committed to after breaking their balls to buy you one.

Of course, it was called something different in America – Pogo Bal. I don’t know why they left out the other ‘l’..or why we called it ‘Lolo Ball’ instead. But anyway.

This is the first time I’ve seen that ad. What blatantly false advertising. Where are the countless split lips, the missing teeth, the stitches on foreheads?? We must have been doing it wrong. However, we forgot one very important difference between us and the Yanks with regard to Lolo Ball Best Practice policies…the weather.

You know it’s a cool craze when the schools start putting an embargo on it. I’m pretty sure I was the reason St. Nessan’s N.S. in Mungret issued a blanket ban on all things Lolo Ball-related circa 1986. To be fair though, I was too young to be aware of such things as the laws of physics and how water affects smooth surfaces. If I had known, for example, that when a round, bouncing, spinning disc/sphere of plastic comes into contact with wet indoor floors on rainy school days, it becomes less of a fun hobby and more of a Flying Ball O’ Death, then I may have reconsidered my actions. However, I was blinded by ambition.

The lure of being an Ultimate Lolo Ball Stunt Girl was too much for my fragile ego. The Ball came out, and off I went, to bounce towards immortality. My plan was to hop along the corridor, up the two steps that lead us to our classroom and finish with a turn and a flourish to face my cheering classmates, who would no doubt write many lines about it in their ‘My News’ copybooks the next day. What I wanted, and what I got, however, were two very different things:

As I sat in the staffroom with a manky facecloth held to my mouth soaking up the blood from my battered front tooth, I took a moment to consider what might have gone wrong. Those steps got bigger overnight, obviously. That sideboard came out of nowhere. Maybe I wanted to kiss the floor at high speed, did you ever think of THAT, Mom?? But I digress…

After my painful run-in with the Funky Ball of Doom, my bouncing days soon ended. But the craze lasted for quite a while. It got to the point where you chose your Lolo Ball colours with the same precision of a wannabe gang member in South Central Los Angeles. Through trial and error, you learned what shoes worked best..and, in a completely unrelated move, what plasters stayed on longest. Part of me still longs for one more shot at those steps in Mungret school, so these days I keep my cravings at bay by indulging in Roller Derby. Out of the frying pan, rolling at high speed into the fire. Maybe one day I’ll arm myself in my safety gear, find a Lolo Ball lying around, and hop my way to greatness. Although this time, I’ll wear a gum shield.

I can but dream…

(by JayRow)

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May 09 2012
7 Comments
Drink, Fashion, Guest Post, Music, School

Hail Fido, King of T-Shirts

[Today's guest post is by Rob Curran. Rob has written for The Wall Street Journal, the Liffey Champion and fanzine Analogue Bubblebath].

Somewhere in the sweatshops of Indonesia, one of the criminally abused labourers who we depended on for our leisurewear must have hit the one-billion button instead of the one-million. And so Fido Dido’s Irish campaign began. He sounded interesting, the bastard son of a family dog and a maudlin Carthaginian queen, but he was so much less than that.

Even 7-Up, his father, couldn’t stomach the John Lennon sunglasses, spindly limbs and frizzy hair for more than a few ads.

And so, the young man primed to be the Ronald McDonald of fizzy drinks filled a brief interregnum in the ancestral rule of bubbles, floating lemons and vague refreshment claims.

Other nations tore down the Fido Dido posters, and forgot he ever existed. Ireland should have condemned him to the same advertising Glasnevin as the Caramel bunny and the Thataway Indian, the latter of whom would probably have rolled over upon Dido’s arrival and said: “I don’t get it. What exactly is your shtick? I point people the wrong way. Bunny gets people to relax by flirting and giving them chocolate. What do you do? Just look smug and drink 7-Up?” He was patently a gobshite. But Fido Dido was to imprint himself on our consciousness forever through sheer t-shirt affordability.

This was 89-90, the golden age of t-shirt printing. In the Virgin Megastore, annotated Taxidriver portraits held eye-scalding-rainbow-brite Never Mind the Bollocks XLs at double gunpoint. There were cryptic one-liner t-shirts and long-form narrative joke t-shirts. T-shirts were how we twittered our beliefs, how we booked our faces in the minds of others, how we belonged to a network of like-t-shirted people.

Not even the greatest of the t-shirt artists would see their work attain the ubiquity of Fido Dido. Designers of Italia 90 t-shirts came close, perhaps, but these were the t-shirt equivalent of standard-issue army uniforms. Imaginative as the artists may have been with their Charltons and Sheedys, Italia 90 was far from a t-shirt led phenomenon.

Fido Dido was his own man, and soon putsched the 7-Up logo from his t-shirts. The 1990 Beat on the Street on Westmoreland Street was his Nuremberg Rally. Anyone who couldn’t afford a fish-tailed shirt had the frizzy one on their chest.

Fido Dido’s cultural icon status had struck me a few weeks earlier when “Fats” Kelly used him in an Irish sentence, chuaighing him go dtí the siopa as if he were a mathair or a madra. (“Fats” appealed against his nickname around this time, contesting it on the grounds that a) he was not fat, b) the appellation hardly did justice to his athletic status as the first-choice keeper on a school footie team that was bound for the Leinsters, and c) we should stop being such wankers. His defense made perfect sense until you considered that Fat Shite wasn’t fat either.)

Bop’s clipped response: “Cé hé Fido Dido?” sent an existential shiver through the room. How could you explain Fido Dido? How could you explain why he was absorbing the runoff from the roll-on deodarant beneath so many of our grey shirts? And how could you explain anything as Gaeilge?

There are three theories on the rise of Fido Dido:

First, there is the “Bart Simpson conflation” theory. The Simpsons were just taking off around this time. Bart, around whom the cartoon was initially built, was a popular t-shirt figure among those who had no musical affiliation but some counter-cultural leanings. Bart’s animators had rendered him crude in every sense, and the t-shirt artists rendition was even more aesthetically displeasing. With a flat(tish) top haircut and basketball shorts, Fido Dido bore a superficial resemblance to Bart. There’s some evidence that the two figures were conflated in the popular imagination, and that sporting a Fido Dido shirt became a way of endorsing Bart without bearing a yellow blot on one’s chest.

Second, there is the “Mas liked Fido Dido” theory. Nominally, most people over the age of 15 bought their own clothes in 1990 Ireland. In reality, many spent the money they got to buy jeans at the Pierrot arcade, and mothers were still the de facto source of raiment. It’s conceivable that presented with a choice between the borderline nudity of the Pixies’ Come On Pilgrim t-shirt and the relatively well clothed Fido, they would lean Fido.

And lastly, there is the self-explanatory “At Three Pounds for a Semi-cool shirt, are you Really going to Shell out Thirteen for that Quintessence of Cool Cramps T-shirt?” theory.

I had been slagging Fido Dido off for some months by the time my mother bought me one of the t-shirts, presumably from Gogarty’s on the Main Street. At a time when most people were wearing more experimental Fidos, she had opted for an introductory design: a simple black t-shirt with the grinning Frizzman holding a can from his lemon-and-lime sponsor (a side note: surely the limes don’t add anything that the lemons haven’t already brought to the picture). I was outraged, and considered making the t-shirt a reprisal for my defaced Crass poster. But I bore the gift in silence. Eventually, underarm injuries to my Off The Bone t-shirt forced me to introduce Fido into the rotation, and he eventually went an entire week without substitution. I told myself my Fido was clearly ironic, but that’s probably what everyone at the Beat on the Street thought.

If 7-Up’s goal in flooding the Irish market with surplus Fido t-shirts was to make their drink more popular, the move could not have fired further back. Before Fido, 7-Up was one of the most popular things in Ireland, full stop. It was the white wine to Coke’s red. Anno Fido 23, and 7-Up is only seen at hospital bedsides and (green fading from the can) last in the line-up on the refreshment stand at carnivals.

Fido Dido, meanwhile, is still a meme, though he has migrated from the t-shirt to the Internet.

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May 08 2012
9 Comments
Advertising, Guest Post, School, Toys

Spinning Class

[Today's guest post is by Lisa Carey. Lisa explains things for a living, mostly to humans. When not writing about stuff, she plays clarinet and keyboards with zombie noiseniks The Jimmy Cake and tweets nonsense at @msleedy].

Ah, to be in primary school in early 80’s Ireland, where some sort of pre-internet mind meld meant that every so often, suddenly everyone was “into” the latest vaguely pointless craze. Fancy paper. Tying patterned shoelaces round your head in the manner of a proto-Axl Rose. “Illuminous” socks. Deely boppers. “Doing Buck’s Fizz”. Watching That’s Life after you’d done your homework on Sunday in the hope that there’d be a talking dog and not just an exposé of Guar Gum. And, of course, Coca-Cola Spinners.

A Spinner was, basically, a yo-yo, blinged out with Fanta or Coca-Cola colours and logos. Like this:

Of course, I know now that they were called Spinners rather than yo-yos for legal reasons – yo-yo was a trademarked term here in 1981, so they were marketed as Russell Spinners instead. But at the time it made them seem like an exotic new toy, not a boring old yo-yo.

Not only did they have a shiny name and shiny covetable colours just like their namesake minerals, they also had a further secret weapon of coolness: the professional Spinner experts. One afternoon in school we were all marshalled outside the prefabs to watch a group of hyped-up cola representatives demonstrate Amazing Feats Of Spinning. Beverage-themed plastic yo-yos “walked the dog”, hovered in mid-air, defied gravity, formed cat’s cradle patterns, always whipping back into the operative’s hand with a satisfying “thunk”. There was talk of competitions, giveaways, special prize Spinners. The Spinner experts were on the Late Late. Suddenly being able to do yo-yo tricks had instant cachet.

Soon like every other child that summer, I got my Spinner, purchased in the local newsagents. I went for the red Professional one, not because I particularly cared about weight and handling (apparently the clear-edged Professionals were slightly heavier than the opaque-edged Supers) but because I liked the colour. I was that serious about my yo-yoing career.

I can still remember the plasticky smell of the thing, the glowing boiled-sweet beauty of the translucent red bits (bear with me, it was the 80s), and the brisk whizz as it whirled its way down the string. And, well, stayed there. But no matter! I was going to be like the Coca-Cola Spinners team. I would do tricks! I would amaze my friends!

One major problem with this plan was that I was possibly the least coordinated child in Ireland. I was the kid at tennis in school who wasn’t given a ball. No, I just had to stand beside the gym and practice “making shapes like a banana” with my tennis racquet. My haplessness in all feats of physical dexterity was such that I have no idea why I became convinced that I could become a yo-yo expert.

First, of course, I would work on “back up”. Whizz. Nothing. Roll it back up. Whizz. Nothing. Roll it back up. This went on for some time. I became convinced that there was something wrong with my Spinner and handed it to a more dextrous friend, who promptly whirled it into something resembling an Escher painting, still spinning, then snapped it back up into her hand. Back to the drawing board.

Of course, with persistence, even the most cack-handed child can figure out how to operate a yo-yo, and for some reason I persevered with the Spinner for longer than I had with, say, the tennis racquet. Finally I mastered the flick of the wrist needed to propel the thing down the string with such force that it shot back up again, and was able to move on to other vital life skills such as clicking my fingers (eventually mastered in a Gaeltacht céilí aged 14) and drinking.  And I’m proud to say, it’s like riding a bike – to this day, I can make a yo-yo go back up the string. Still need to work on “walking the dog”….

(Before writing this I hadn’t realized there were multiple Coca-Cola Spinner campaigns – there was a second, much-documented campaign in 1989, when I was in college and only interested in Fanta if it had gin in it. As far as I can remember, “my” Spinner mania took place in 1981.)

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May 07 2012
7 Comments
Books, Guest Post, School, Television

This Is The End, My Only Friend, The End

[Today's Guest Poster is Colm Tobin. Colm is not an award-winning novelist but he has done stuff like two series of Langerland.TV for RTÉ, which he wrote and produced, three series of the kid's series Science Fiction for RTÉ (and now CBBC) as well as writing on radio projects like Irish Pictorial Boatly for RTÉ Radio 1.]

West Cork. 1994. It was all school uniforms and angst and people smelling generally of sweat. In retrospect, I realise I was basically living in a seaside paradise. But at the time I couldn’t really see beyond the misery of secondary school. What can I say? I was a teenager.

Although I can look back now and smirk and even laugh at it all, there was one true horror during those teenage years, a horror I didn’t fully comprehend until many years later – worse than the prevailing nightmare of t-squares and protractors and having to sit next to some bollocks from the rugby team in double-geography. It was the horror of being stuck in Two-Channel Land.

Two-Channel Land consisted mostly of RTÉ 1 and Network Two, kids (Yes, it was temporarily rebranded Network Two, presumably because some RTÉ suit had been holidaying in Florida and saw some telly in a hotel). It was a precursor to Four-Channel Land which, some say, still survives to this day. Now, I’ve never seen a map of Two-Channel Land but in my head it’s the general area outside the Pale. I’m sure it was actually much smaller though and located in the general area around my house.

So, that’s about 100 channels on our TV set that were devoted to varying shades of grey static and subtly shifting textures of white noise. Good God, when I think of it… And we were well out of range of any BBC/S4C/morse code signals too. You’ll hear no Peter Sheridan-style anecdotes from me about being stuck up a chimney delicately positioning an aerial while your Da shouts up instructions from the living room. The only signal you’d ever receive on our roof was the “Colm, get off the fucking roof” signal my Dad would send up from the garden.

Anyway, I digress. I realise I’m entering “I used to go to school over stones in my bare feet” territory here… I’m just trying to put in context why The End, when it started, was just about the best thing that ever happened to my televisual world.

For those of you who can’t remember – The End aired on Network 2 from 11pm to 2am on Friday and Saturday nights. I only know this because Wikipedia remembered it for me. And for someone living in Two-Channel Land this show was the equivalent of a visit from outer space. Friday nights consisted of a range of mostly British sitcoms and cartoons interspersed with wonderfully odd studio-based madness hosted by Barry Murphy. It was basically Barry and whoever he could pull out of The International that night, from what I can tell. This was the kind of thing that happened, which I watched over and over, and was basically the genesis of Apres Match.

And then you had this sort of thing – Peig, the first ever cartoon series produced by Brown Bag Films – a spoof of the book, which I so happened to be studying in school at the time. Believe me, on a Friday night, after a week of Irish classes featuring the catalogue of drownings and cliff falls that is Peig, this was a rather wonderful antidote. It also featured a talking pig called Humongous. What more need I say?

And then there were re-runs of amazing British sitcoms that were a bit before my time, like The Fall And Rise Of Reginald Perrin, the wonderfully surreal 70′s sitcom starring the outrageously talented Leonard Rossiter.

The End on Saturdays was a treat too – hosted by Sean Moncrieff, still one of my favourite broadcasters. I seem to remember an amazing bit where they played back random, drunken messages from the public but can’t find any evidence of it online. I also vaguely remember it turning into a chat-show of some sort but, like Brown Bag’s Peig, my memory is getting the better of me. Sure I’m an old woman now with one foot in the grave and another on the edge. Sure all I’ve left now are me memories.  Maybe you lot can help refresh them?

And wouldn’t it be great if RTÉ saw fit to throw open Friday or Saturday nights to something weird and wonderful like this again?

(by Colm Tobin)

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Apr 28 2012
10 Comments
Collectibles, Limerick, School, Stationery

Fancy Paper: A Survivor’s Memoir…

Oh, you hateful, lily-scented bastards...

Something dark and subversive was going on in the suburbs of Limerick in the 1980’s. It was taking over the lives of young vulnerable girls who had no idea of the edge of the dark precipice on which they stood. It began as all habits and addictions do, on a small scale, just experimenting; alone, with friends, in their bedrooms and eventually spilling out onto the streets. In time it made its way to that most precious of all childhood havens – the school-yard. If you were transported back in time to a typical Eighties Irish school-yard, in the heady days of Fancy Paper swapping, you could be forgiven for thinking you had inadvertently stumbled onto the set of The Wire. Little cliques of wild-eyed girls huddled in corners bartering their wares and negotiating prices, debating whether they were getting their money’s worth for their product. The phenomenon? Fancy Paper…and I was involved up to my neck in it. This is my addiction story, triggered by Aoife Barry’s reminiscing of pre-internet Irish childhoods here. I write this post not to inspire sympathy for my plight, but to raise awareness in future generations. Wake up and smell the rose-scented stationery, people. If Fancy Paper had a chance, it would consume you and everyone you love.

Like most addictions, mine was a gradual one. My strongest memory of being addicted to stationery is still The Summer of the Pencil Case. Having come back from a foreign holiday (Santa Ponsa was the venue of choice circa 1987) just before the start of the school year, and my birthday being the first week in September, my parents had bought some of my mini presents out there just for a little something different. I don’t even remember what my main present was that year, but I still remember the pink art deco wonderland box of miracles that was a brand new pencil case staring back at me. Built in compartments housing an eraser and a pencil sharpener that popped out at the simple touch of a button, along with a false bottom under where the pencils were stored so you could house little notes declaring ‘I Heart Michael Jackson’ and various other imperative factoids. It was the Swiss Army Knife of school stationery. I imagined that some genius like Q had a wife that left the house every morning at the same time as him; and while he went into MI6 to make weapons for James Bond, she went to work designing multi-compartment stationery for the discerning girly school nerd. That little drawer for paper became the most exciting little mini universe for me that school year; for it was there that I first began to store my fledgling Fancy Paper collection.

Take this beautiful horror from mine eyes...

Everywhere you looked in newsagents and bookshops, there seemed to be a magical array of Fancy Paper delights of all shapes and sizes. Their value was arbitrary, depending on your neck of the woods and personal taste. The most common were those small printed paper pads with a wonderful design or pattern on the front which then revealed the same pattern in watermark form on each sheet underneath. You wanted to get a good selection of them under your belt to really start trading. Next up from those were papers of the same size and style, but scented. Lightly fragranced notepapers with the watermark were highly sought after, mostly because your entire fancy paper collection would undoubtedly gain some form of olfactory benefit from having a few odd rose or lily-scented sheets scattered amongst the regular ones. The bartering process was a long arduous one. I learned a lot about supply and demand back then. One girl had the most awesome Japanese-style scented pad, brought back as a present from her Dad while on a business trip. For an entire week this girl called all the shots. She was charging upwards of four to five sheets for a single one of hers – and like fools, we paid it. But it was worth it just to have one of those precious leaves with the geisha girl design and powdery fake Jasmine scent infiltrating our collection.

The storage of your assets was also a serious issue. Most of us graduated from giant birthday card envelopes to shoe boxes, which were nigh on impossible to carry on our underground dealings in school. We would need to recall the envelope as a form of travel luggage if we wanted to get any business at all done during Big Lunch. Because of the volume and weight restriction, you had to choose what went into the envelope carefully. The photographic memory of those involved in the swapping and dealing of Fancy Paper was terrifying. Wanting to swap for a sheet you had your eye on, but being told it would be considered only if you brought in that birthday invitation notepaper that was in the shape of a vinyl record with the matching envelope that you hadn’t shown anyone in five months was a sharp wake-up call that this could get very messy very fast.

This is all too much temptation. I have to go to Eason's now. Don't try and stop me.

Sleep was lost, as were friends and colleagues in the field of battle. The Parental Task Force was drafted in to quell the rising violence and so-called ‘bad’ paper that saturated the market; soon you weren’t sure whether the quality and standard of the paper you were swapping was top notch any more. The buzz just wasn’t the same. People were starting to care less about quality product in the face of ever-increasing demand. There was nearly a Fancy Paper civil war in our school one day when a girl was caught spraying perfume onto previously unscented paper to raise its value on the open market. Caused ructions. Plus the paper was stained something terrible after it. What an eejit. She broke the cardinal rule…try scented talc powder first (so I heard).

It’s been over twenty years, and I still get a hankering to start ‘collecting’ once again. But I need to start thinking of the consequences. Soon I may choose to marry, have a family. Nobody needs to be brought into this seedy world without a choice. Being a primary teacher, some would say I have channelled my love of stationery into a career that can benefit society and feed my habit in some roundabout way, and they would be right. But until school inspectors start accepting lesson plans and monthly schemes on 10th Birthday invitation paper in the shape of a vinyl record with a matching envelope, my habit will have to remain firmly printed on my memory – with a Chinese-style pattern watermark and, of course, a light powdery freesia scent.

(by JayRow)

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