• I don't recall having any particular conversation with anyone, though I left end of 5th year.
Later, at the end of year 2 at Dacorum College, I remember a conversation I had with school and college classmate, David James Smith, where he was saying about going into journalism, and I believe he made a success of that having deeply covered the Jamie Bulger case among other things.
Me? After a summer at Butlins, I had interviews with RAF, British Gas, Eastern Electricity, and Shell Mex & BP Ltd, 3 of those in the same week, and went with the latter. I always wondered about journalism so it's perhaps no wonder that I wrote umpteen letters to the Gazette, wrote blogs, and ran Facebook Pages for many years afterwards and continue to admin a bunch of FB Groups in my 70th year.
• In '67 I think 6 of us went from KL juniors. Regardless, I never felt like part of a KL group. Besides, it wasn't long before our family moved to Hemel. On day one we went in before the rest of the school and got orientated. I would have had a new shoes, regulation tie, blazer and trousers, grey shirts, pe kit, cricket kit, football kit and boots, pullover, plimsolls, shoes, regulation socks, Name tapes, too. Most of it came from a shop in Watford. ,(Gamages?) My mum says it cost around £120 plus she had to embroider my intials on the PE kit. Then there were pens, pencils, rulers and so on. Like any new place it took some getting used to.
• I was so bad at French I resorted to reading the text book upside down. It might as well have been upside down as I just couldn't get my head around the subject. Attention seeking, I suppose. But I didn't get any help. It's put me off visiting France all my life. It would have made more sense to have had Spanish lessons considering all the holidays I've had in Spain and its islands.
• If you turned up with PE kit instead of swimming trunks on swimming day, they made you wear your shorts. Fine on the walk to the pool, but they were see-through on the way back!
• My step grandad had a writing hobby. He wanted to find out how long his new biro would work. Everyday he would copy out a piece of text from a newspaper or book into his notebook. Unfortunately the pen lasted longer than he did, so we never did find out how long his biro might have lasted.
• At school I didn't understand the point of chemistry. It was all, "add x to y and watch what happens when you heat it up. Next test the residue with litmus paper. Then write up your conclusion." If the teacher knew the answer why didn't he just tell us? Anyway...
When it came to the O level mocks, I was stumped for something to write. I wrote something like, "... litmus paper. ..Chalk. And that's why the Americans called the British "limeys" when they came here in WWII."
Afterwards, the teacher read it out and the whole class laughed. 😀
• One year we were doing track events and were asked to do 200m. I won but I knew I wasn't particularly fast. Other classes had to run it later that week. I had a feeling that there might have been a conspiracy to run slow to avoid further competing. It transpired that I was through to an inter-schools meet-up. At that event, I might have taken another half second off my qualifying time. But I came last.
