Monday, September 24, 2007

[immaturity] you're only young once

Laboratory Bunsen Burner

The Coodabeen Champions made these immortal words their theme: "You're only young once, but anyone can be immature," and that's the theme of this post - a meme with a difference.

Anyone who reads this is automatically tagged and is duty bound to post his or her greatest act of immaturity, at any stage of the aging process. Then don't bother tagging anyone else.

Here's one of my better ones:

In my late schooldays, we did Chem in a huge, cold, red/brown painted concrete mausoleum of a lab with parallel benches, with large, admittedly quite light windows which opened outwards. The Chem teacher's name was Bunter [as in Billy - see below].

Now we had rows of these bunsen burners [see pic top left] and it was the job of two boys to have them lit when the lesson started. I don't know who first suggested it but we saw their immediate possibilities if we attached the rubber tubes to the water nozzles but now we had a problem.

What to call these new devices.

We decided on "Bunter Burners" and so every single one of them was attached to the tap and the tap turned on. My, it was a wondrous cascade of fountains except that things went a little awry when the small, white, rectangular sinks began to overflow onto the floor and we feared the water would run out the door and down to the Principal's office.

We needn't have worried. Now a party of four persons, one bright lad pointed out that in fact there was a step of six inches at every door, obviously designed for such situations as this and so we rested easy, observing, in true scientific fashion, the rising of the floodwaters. Somebody may have mentioned Winnie the Pooh and his umbrella at this stage - I can't remember.

It was now felt best to switch the taps off and escape through the windows. We never did have that Chem lesson for two days.

Bill Bryson, in this excerpt from Neither Here nor There, Black Swan, 1998, pp 98/99, recalls his area of expertise:

I had no gift for woodwork. Everyone else in the class was building things like cedar chests and ocean-going boats and getting to play with dangerous and noisy power tools, but I had to sit at the Basics Table with Tubby Tucker and a kid who was so stupid that I don't think we ever learned his name. We just called him Drooler.

The three of us weren't allowed anything more dangerous than sandpaper and Elmer's Glue, so we would sit week after week making little nothings out of offcuts, except for Drooler who would just eat the glue.

Mr Dreck never missed a chance to humiliate me. The class roared. Tubby Tucker laughed so hard that he almost choked.

He laughed for twenty minutes, even when I whispered to him across the table that if he didn't stop it, I'd bevel his testicles.

Billy Bunter

5 comments:

  1. I have to say that my favourite saying in this context is:

    Growing old is compulsory,
    Growing up is optional.

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  2. What a naughty boy you were, James! Nice story. I've gone all nostalgic now at the pic of Billy Bunter and "Old Quelch".

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  3. Despite finding this quite funny I can't help wondering why on earth you had to light the bunsen burners before every lesson. Seems to me we only used them two or three times a term at most. Things to do with hot water baths as I recall.

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  4. Ian - good one.

    Welshcakes - We were young. We needed the money.

    JMB - not before EVERY lesson! Just an isolated incident, you realize.

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  5. Sounds just like the stories my husband tells me about when he was at school...one story I remember is he had read a book about making gun powder...he or him and his friends did, took it to the top of sports field, lit it and OMG did it go off with a BANG...!!!!!They were worried.

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