Eat My Minge

The first school that I ever went to was St. Ignatius Catholic School in Preston. It was an old Victorian era school and the teachers used to make us be quiet by saying, “if you stay quiet enough for long enough you’ll be able to hear the angels sing”. I really wanted to hear this. I expected harps and fanfare and the sweetest choral voices and I used to get really angry at anyone who broke the silence. (In reality the silence was probably broken by much wiser kids shouting, “This is bullshit miss”, “yer lying bitch” or “eat my minge”. (Actually maybe not the last one)(Or any of them!))

I used to walk to school from the age of 5. It was a 1½ mile round trip but half way along my journey I used to call for Keith Jones. Walking this distance used to take a lot of time, not because of the distance or the stamina but because of the adventure, there was so much to do and see. We were constantly picking rubbish up off the floor, elastic bands, old ring pulls or anything shiny, or looking for the ghosts in the railway tunnel, annoying colonies of ants or wasp nests, not stepping on cracks in the pavement, climbing up stuff, swinging off stuff, getting up to mischief and running away, kicking leaves or playing any kind of game anyone would care to mention. Sure it wasn’t an efficient way to travel but it was a lot more fun.

I was reminded of this when yesterday Darwin and I walked from the car up to our house. There isn’t enough room at the top of hill to park both cars so I have to park at the bottom of the hill and Darwin and I have to lug it up the hill on foot. He’s changing rapidly now and likes to be very independent. He won’t hold my hand when we walk now, he prefers to walk alone. We got out of the car and Darwin held 2 empty bottles of Fruit Shoot. He said, “Bin”, and pointed to the front of the corner shop where there was indeed a bin. We stopped to look at various wheels on vehicles between the car and the bin and also said ‘hello’ to a doggy woof woof, and stopped to look at some birdies flying in the sky, at which point we also saw an aeroplane. Darwin said “Hiya” to Mary in the shop and made it his mission to jump in every puddle we saw. We stopped and had at look at the river from both sides of the bridge and saw a spider. Darwin wanted to stroke it but I convinced him that it was tired and having a sleep. There is a small wall running up the side of our road and Darwin likes to walk slowly on it, it’s like toddler parkour. Then we met the little cat who appears to live on the wall and surrounding bushes before playing with the hose pipe outside our house.

I love walking up our hill with Darwin.

"St Ignatius a little before I attended"