Bank of geeks

I was googling some of my old school colleagues the other day. I was at work, a little bored I suppose as I revisited my A Level years in Harrogate. I remember those years as rather lacking direction. I was in the top set at English, but competing against a bank of geeks to the desks on my right who all looked down on me.

I was in love with one, Thomas. He was slightly more introverted than the rest; somewhat posh, goth with beautiful, thick nut-brown hair. We sometimes walked home over the Stray together after school. He was also rumoured to be out.

Hockney's swimming pool,
Roosevelt Hotel, Hollywood

Part of the problem, as I see it now, looking back on my isolation as a more confident fortysomething, was a lack of many role models in my life. There was David Hockney, I suppose, who I discovered one day in a spread in the Sunday Times magazine, discussing his forthcoming Retrospective at the Tate (and whose current exhibition at the Tate I am very keen to view). I actually bunked off from Lower Sixth for a day to see that exhibition in London. And it blew my mind away. His use of perspective and colour is incredible. Just look at that photo I have taken of the swimming pool he painted at the Roosevelt Hotel on Hollywood Boulevard.

I was probably obsessed by Thomas. He was very bright and went up to Oxford. I wrote him a letter from my digs in Reading later that year in 1989, declaring all. He never replied. I have googled him too recently and I have an idea of what he is doing. And he is doing rather well.

That bank of geeks tormented me. And in the normal rules of the universe, fate would have caught up with them. Yet I see that one is on the Legal 500 list, another is a professor in California; another is a City success case with a huge house in Fulham. It's hard not to compare and contrast.

Back in 1987 I so wanted to return to that school for my A Levels. My earlier years had been disrupted by my parent's divorce and my mother's remarriage to the aforementioned stepfather, who took me out of Harrogate and moved us to the other side of Leeds, much rougher and far less refined. Two years of hell followed, where I was considered the "posh kid" and ostracised whilst I channelled my loneliness into my O Level studies. With glowing grades I was able to return to Harrogate, and into the top sets, when we all moved back to that area in the summer of 1987.

Yet after two years of longing to return I was bitterly disappointed to learn that the world had shifted somewhat. My younger school friends had moreorless vanished and a new, more Sloaney set taken their place for A Levels. Again I was the loner, mocked for being "not posh enough" and feeling culturally inferior when incidents such as a mispronunciation of "Achilles heel" in English class left me the butt of jokes and torment.

I was never going to be a high flyer. I was told that at Harrogate several times. Thomas told it me, as we walked across the Stray after school one day when I disclosed to him my interest in attending the Oxbridge introductory sessions. "You're not good enough for that," he said.

On the one hand I look back at that bank of geeks with awe. They mocked me, humiliated me, tormented me and I took it with homoerotic enthusiasm. It made me introverted. It took me on my journey with David Hockney, my love of his double portraits, the theatre of his art, embossed with colour and tone. I was never going to be much of a success, partially because they forced me into a mould of self-imposed isolation and partly because of my lack of role models. My father was absent. My stepfather unapproachable. My elder brother also quiet and self absorbed. 

What a lament I have going on here! On the other hand I look at those geeks with disdain. They were part of the clique I envied but also shunned as I tried to make sense of my own life. They were better than me academically but they were no Ed Sheeran. I was reading his article in this month's GQ. What a guy. Pure drive, talent and focus. I had none of that. I wonder how many fortysomethings took a career they were only mildly interested in and have done okay in, but who have never really been high flyers. They just turn up every day to work and keep going, without ever finding their niche.

That bank of geeks is now an irrelevance to me. I'm much happier in my skin than I used to be. I haven't yet found my niche and I'm not channeling my energy like Ed or David Hockney, but I'm sliding along, content with life.