Chatterbox Tuesday

Aston.

It's not quite like Narnia.

Well maybe if the white witch had been heavily in to industrial pollution rather than snow and had abandoned the whole place some years ago to fall in to ruin.

Apart from that you are spot on

Bit odd.

My school had a little booklet (the blue book) which listed everyone. It included all the teachers including full names. I think it might even have included their addresses. It certainly included all the pupil's addresses.
I think it was to encourage everyone to know who everyone else was. I think I've still got a copy from one year somewhere.

This was in a more innocent age. Pre the existence of stalkers obviously. It does seem an odd thing to print though.


We still had to call the teachers sir or Mr. It was a boys school so there were not many women teachers. 
There were a few with odd first names. Martin, Stanley, Giles. A few foreign names as well. 

You are right. That's why he grew up in the US.

There were reasons for wanting to be apart from South Africa at the time and the aeroplane had been invented.

It's still one hell of a commute from the U.S.A to a day school in Brum.

The conspiracy deepens.

I lived in one bit of Brum and went to school in anther bit and even that was a hefty commute. An hour plus each way.
It might have been a bit shorter if I hadn't spent time in Hudsons bookshop or HMV almost every day i suppose.

I would say two fifths of the pupils at the Birmingham grammar school I went to were known by surname only.

The school I went to in Southport was a bit strange. You had to carry briefcases rather than shoulder bags, and also had to stand up wherever a teacher entered the room. Female teachers were all called Ma’am. It wasn’t a bad place, though, really.

I feel there should be some sort of medal or other reward for me, for stoically resisting the urge to make a potentially deeply inappropriate joke about your use of the word "apart".

Edit: although your phrasing is unusual enough to make me suspect you'd already considered the possibility. So it's your fault, not mine.

That joke works fine in a Birmingham accent.

Why else would I have put it that way? Of course it's my fault.

I sometimes get the impression that my jokes are too subtle for the box.*

What was your joke? I need to know what kind of responsibility I have taken on.

*Edit: coming from a German, you should all be worried.

Hello.
I went to a state school. So as it's the West of Scotland this was the "Proddy" school.

Most folk were known by their nicknames. We had a terrible South African teacher who wouldn't be in a job nowadays. Tales of shooting {insert South African racial slur here} in the Transvaal. Marvellous.

It was suggested by the guidance folk I join the army. Despite having worked for the summer previous for a video production company and had an interest in the media. That was the level of thinking. Ambition? Don't be silly.



{Edit}Steven Moffat of Dr Who fame taught me English for a while. He was maybe there a year or so before Press Gang kicked off.

Come to think of it, there was one teacher who encouraged us to use his first name, but he subsequently turned out to be a right old wrong'un. sandybahookie will probably know who that was since iirc we were educated at the same institution.

The yards were fucked by the time I was 16. I did go for work experience week to the Scot Lithgow training place. Absolute murder. Japes like trying to weld your steelies together. A lassie from my year was there doing a YTS. She had taken in her boiler suit legs as she felt the cut was too loose.