“Cusp” series of articles

2013

2013 Jan

Jan 06 Sun

Mum gets loads of Christmas cards: I’d even say she gets more than I give, annually.

So people could see the many Christmas cards my mum has amassed, we had strategically positioned candles in strategic positions about them. Sister 2 only noticed the smallest of the candles today, and she started waxing lyrical about it. She even wrote a song about it, which she has kindly let me publish here:

Actually, as with pretty much everything on Duncan’s Childhood Blog, I wrote the song.

When Sister 2’s enthusiasm for extolling the candle had burned out, she began to say how cute kiwis are, though I wasn’t sure whether she was referring to the bird, the fruit, the nationality of the New Zealander, or Nintendo games-consoles that are as important as door-openers. Mum called me precocious for that last option.

In fairness I always thought “precocious” was a compliment, meaning mature for one’s age instead of pretending to be. But Mum and Sister 2 are correct: it is fair to say that I was wrong in suggesting that there are any Wiis that are as important as a key. Sorry Nintendo, but it’s true.

It is also fair to say that I can be rather childish. Just witness my Charades interpretation of “the Sussex Carol”. Or me in a game of water polo. Yikes. I need to grow up.

But how to start? I guess abandoning childhood frolics might help. I have already donated my teddy bear to a charity appeal to support orphaned greyhounds, but there’s a whole lot more to childhood than teddy bears.

What did I do when I was eleven that the new mature me might not do? I wrote for my blog, but that started when I was ten, not eleven, so that’s ring-fenced. I’m not ditching that. I need to keep some part of me into the future, including this blog.

I took swimming lessons when I was eleven. Those can go. Never really enjoyed water polo anyway.

I studied Latin when I was eleven. Yes. Like the candle on the mantle-piece, my Latin studies illuminated pleasure: the pleasure of the exploration of orthography and pronunciation, accidence and syntax, conjugation and declension. And like the candle-piece, the time will come, if not today but when I’ve finished that important A-level in it, to say “vale” (or goodbye, even) to the little light of my life.

Hence my resolution to study Chemistry at university. There’s money, jobs, a life in Chemistry. None in a dead language.

So goodbye Latin. Hello a more realistic reality.

Jan 19 Sat

Greetings from Chester, where the temperature is in a state of reflux about the melting-point of H₂O, as a result of which expanded ice crystals (known as snow) and granules of ice crystal (known as hail) are precipitating onto. No, not the solute-to-solid sort of precipitation.

The angle between my legs was also in a state of flux, because I’ve been walking. With my camera. Around Chester. Yes, again, but, this time, it had snowed, and, it was snowing, and, it’s still snowing, and that is just so cool!

So I have two hundred and fifty-two photos of chilly Chester: wintry walls, glacial gates, an arctic amphitheatre, chilly churches, a freezing Phoenix Tower, a cold canal, a frosty flyover, snowed-on schools, bitter bridges, parky parks, hail-hit homes.

I probably should have mentioned this earlier, but school’s closed today. This has given me lots of time to think about things.

Everything is icy. Is this Jack Frost’s idea of a future? Everything is white. Is this the BNP’s idea of a future? Everything is covered in water. Is this Hurricane Sandy’s idea of a future? What’s my idea of a future? Oh yes, chemistry. A certain amount of job satisfaction, a certain amount of job security, for certain a state of stasis for my brain.

But I have to stir it up again. How does this work? I enjoyed the sense of flux that the weird weather brought. Stasis? Staying in bed is a sort of stasis. So stasis should stay in bed. Let’s embrace flux instead. Let’s enjoy the luxury of fluxery! Let’s do Latin. As I like to say, I’m a Latinist at least. Latin has been in my heart since 2007. I love Latin. I should do something classy and classical with my life.

But hang on. Latin has endured for years in me and millennia in mundo. Does that not indicate stasis? Meanwhile scientific ideas are coming and going. That’s flux. I’ve been thinking about this wrongly.

I am thinking about this wrongly. It’s not just about flux and stasis. It’s actually a really simple decision. I enjoy Chemistry. I do. I enjoy Latin, but until I can want to be a teacher or museum curator, I must rule Latin out. Chemistry has jobs that interest me. There’s nothing more to say.

Jan 25 Fri

So much for trying to convince myself that I can cope with a commitment to the chemical industry. I still have this dream of studying Latin at university, and my insight and intellect will span a continent, and I’ll rise through the ranks like Cicero, a quaestor, an aedile, a praetor, a consul, Duncan Sailor, a graduate, a lecturer, a reader, professor.

Such a pleasant dream. They say you should follow your dreams, but everyone knows that’s just pie in the sky. Much like my own pipe-dream. (Or a quiche tossed upwards.)

And with that, I commit myself to Chemistry. Latin’s a time-bomb: it will detonate in a few years time if not defused, spewing me out onto the street with a degree that’s irrelevant to modern life. As a chemical engineer, it’ll be my job to prevent such horrific explosions, in oil process plants. That’s what I should do, what I must do, what I can do. Then I can enjoy the refinery things in life.

2013 Feb

Feb 02 Sat

The drama-group I volunteer at (see the first paragraph of 2012 Sep 22’s article) had a rehearsal today, and, as my sisters are members of the group, Mum asked me to walk with them to the venue. My sisters are thirteen and fifteen years of age. Old enough to be married in many countries (e.g. Ancient Rome). But somehow Mum asked me to ensure they were alright, in an insult to their intelligence and an imposition upon me.
I didn’t point that out when I returned unaccompanied.

There are two words that I want to abandon despite being told to keep with me. Chemical Engineering. What’s my favourite subject? Which subject am I predicted the best grades for? What do I want to do when I don’t want to do homework, research universities, or write for a blog? Ain’t Chemistry.

I realise now what I’ve known since September. I only planned a career in Chemistry due to a vague interest in the subject, my strong GCSE grades in science, and the prospect of earning a tonne of money. I realise now that this is like wanting to be a teacher for the holidays, or a banker for the bonuses, or a footballer for the wives. It won’t work; I won’t work for that sort of motive. I’ve been led into a marriage of convenience with Chemistry, and I demand divorce.

I’ve been so caught up with thinking about the future that I’ve neglected the present. The present. The gift. Of being skilled at Latin, and skilled at writing in general. I have long made decisions based on the assumption that sciences are more “for me” than humanities, as if numeracy was more “for me” than literacy. It continues to amaze me how long it took for me to profess that this isn’t so. It continues to amaze me how long I’ve been my own alter ego, with my analysis-based subjects (Chemistry, Physics, Maths) and my creativity-based hobbies (Drama, Photography, Blogging). And I realise now that I cannot continue to be a jack of all trades if I want to master one. Just as bigamy weakens a marriage, leading two lives simultaneously does not lead to the fulfillment of either. So YOLO: you only live once; your life cannot be double. And I love to live my life with Latin.

Feb 03 Sun

My friend Andy had invited me and Will (another classmate) over to his house today, for a school project, collaborating on a presentation regarding Pythagoreanism. Amazing what the ancients have posited. Did you know that a Pythagorean would never attribute his discoveries to himself, but let them be communal to the whole Pythagorean world, much like how Andy, Will, and I will present our presentation without ever saying “I thought of that”?

I was engrossed, and the three of us soon had done enough work for us to say we had completed a very good piece of work. So soon in fact that we had a lot of free time. So how did we spend the next hour?

Andy’s house is a very posh house. I’m from Chester, so my idea of “very posh” is very posh indeed. They in Salford think Manchester’s posh; they in Manchester think Liverpool’s posh; they in Liverpool think Chester’s posh; they in Chester think Hoole’s posh; they in Hoole think Andy’s house is posh. They in this house say, “Oh posh! We only have one outdoor pool!”

What a pool they have. But the pool per se is unimportant: what you do in it is the important bit. We had a hilarious game of water-polo, with four people. (Andy’s eleven-year-old brother joined in too; he was on Will’s team.) Gosh I enjoy swimming: the water feels so good! It’s unsurprising that I have a reputation for being a water lover; sometimes people at school call me Duncan Sailfish.

People actually think I’m a Pisces when they’re reading out horoscopes from magazines. People think I get extra time in exams, because I find it difficult to write with fins. People think it’s weird that I compose this without a snorkel.

I don’t care what people think. I should think for myself, and follow my own thoughts, my own beliefs, my own reasoning. I think I should re-think that desire expressed in Jan 06’s article to ditch Swimming.

Andy and I won the water-polo game, 2-1.

Feb 04 Mon

Oh Duncan. Your naivety is worthy of inclusion in the Beano, it’s that comic. There is no place in this world for a Latin scholar. You know that. Stop living in lies.

There are abundant and advantageous places for a chemical engineer. You know that you know that. Why do you doubt yourself? You can do this. Have strength. If you can scientifically demonstrate that chemistry really isn’t for you, with a decade or two of evidence, then you can drop out. You can re-train. Re-plan, re-think, reconsider. Whatever. But don’t give up now without trying.

Your mind’s in turmoil at present, like an insurgent in Mali, and in your case you can’t decide who’s al-Qaeda and who’s allied to western civilisation, but it doesn’t matter. No-one’s getting grievously wounded, except your ego. You will find a plentiful land ahead of you, if only you make that trek across the Sahara and the sea. And no, that plentiful land is not Roman any more.

Feb 05 Tue

I spoke to the Head of Sixth Form today about my worries regarding the epic battle in my brain between Engineering and Classics. My head says Engineering; my heart says Classics; my head says listen to your heart; my heart says what does it know it’s just a blood-pumping organ that has been forced to work faster because of my head; my head says oh it’s my fault now is it? it is! it is!; my heart says it didn’t mean that; my head says learn to use punctuation properly; my heart says beat to your own rhythm, or you’ll be forever out of sync.

The Head of Sixth Form says I’ve made progress.

He says it’s not just teaching and museum curating that involve classicky skills. He says archiving, journal editing, and copywriting are areas easily accessible to a Classics graduate. He says it’s fine for me to not participate in Chemistry Club or the Physics Society, and he says it’s fine for me to change my enrichment option from Engineering Extension to Ancient Greek.

And I say... I say, I was too overcome overwhelmed and overjoyed to say anything.

Feb 06 Wed

Feb 07 Thu

A-levels have turned my world upside down. Take Latin. I found the language papers at GCSE really easy. I didn’t lose more than one mark across both papers. How could I when the questions were like, “Brutus est in Britannia - Where is Brutus? [2 marks]”, where the only difficult bit is remembering to write “in Britain”, not simply “Britain”, for the second mark. But the literature analysis was really difficult: I just didn’t get it.

Now I get it, and my essays are at university-level (according to my teachers), but the language is a lot harder. You have to think deeply about the cases nouns are in, and come up with a translation that both matches the individual words plausibly and continues the story logically.

Take Maths. I could not understand trigonometry when I was fourteen, but I do now. And I used to be brilliant at factorising quadratics, but I’ll have to re-learn how.

Take Science. Due to the boredom of knowing all the answers I did not enjoy Physics. We had a teacher who kept misplacing his marker-pens, and that was slightly amusing; and learning about the stars was quite interesting, but I was still dissatisfied. Nowadays I’m studying the interactions of strange quarks and quirky leptons. It’s difficult, and therefore no trifle.

The opposite is, of course, true for Chemistry. I suppose I quite enjoyed it at GCSE, despite the prospect of impaling my palm on a piece of pipette or bleaching my blazer with whatever chlorine compound I had created (I’m pretty sure it wasn’t ethanol). Today I find I’m seized by a compulsion to avoid the whole subject as much as I can. Chemistry makes me physically shudder: electron-repulsion and emulsions give me convulsions of revulsion...

A-levels have not turned my world upside-down. They’ve righted it. For GCSEs are designed for children; it’s an adult that I want to and must become. GCSEs are designed to mirror the world outside the primary school, I admit that; but in doing so, they flip the world for our perception.

Yes, I got top grades in sciences but I was wrong to conclude therefrom that I will become a top scientist. I got poor grades in humanities but I was wrong to conclude therefrom that I couldn’t work in a humanities-derived profession. I made the wrong conclusions, and will have to live with them until the end of my Chemistry AS.

If I had heeded my English teacher’s advice when it was given, and revised properly for the humanities exams, I would have done terrifically in the exams for English Literature, Latin, and possibly even Geography. I would have thought myself more of a Classicist than a scientist when I was choosing A-levels, and I therefore would have probably chosen English Language instead of Chemistry.

I should probably stop pitying myself. Hindsight is useful only for providing foresight. Remembering the past is only useful for anticipating the future. Self-pity is useful only for jump-starting self-improvement. I can start by probing whether things I’ve agreed to (such as Chemistry was) are actually what I want. That will slowly lead to self-improvement, and adaptation to the environments and responsibilities time assigns me. That is growing-up.

Feb 08 Fri

Tonight was the final performance from Jigsaw, the drama-group I help out at, the drama-group that you may have thought I’d neglected, from recent articles. That isn’t true.

As assistant director, I’m really pleased that it paid off, my gamble in making one of the characters a casino-frequenter; and it induced loud guffaws, my joke about putting on a poker face in case of going gaga for a lady. As a lyricist, I can relate that it was well received, my assortment of singable words, and well arranged and sung too!

As for my poster advertisement, it’s been complimented, and complemented by the programme, which I also designed, without creating its text, logos, and two company photos.

One elderly lady remarked that it was the first programme she could read without glasses.
Now I feel all warm inside, like a vein’s burst.

As an aside, the type-face of Trebuchet MS and the text-size of 14pt is also what I use for most of Duncan’s Childhood Blog. That might not be true now. Not that I’m expecting this to be read by any elderly lady other than my mother. But on with the show.

Another viewer said it was the most professional-looking programme Jigsaw had yet produced. Jigsaw quite rightly prides itself on its professionalism despite the youth of its members, and it’s such professionalism (along with a willingness to let me write the lyrics, design the poster, direct the cast!) that makes me glad that I am able and willing to be a part of this family, a component of this community, a piece of Jigsaw.

It’s too late to see “Ghosts of the City”, but Jigsaw and I will be back next year with another enthralling narrative, after participating in the equally enthralling Chester Mystery Plays. Do come!

Note from March 2014 - I wasn’t actually in the Mysteries’ 2013 cycle as I wanted to nail my AS exams. Jigsaw members however were: I saw the plays twice and was very impressed, as I was this year with Jigsaw’s very own piece “The Firebird” (see my “Words and ‘The Firebird’” series on this blog). And I will be acting myself in April 2014, as part of Jigsaw’s sister group Quartz, producing “Masque”, the last play I’m physically in until uni. Before uni though, after Easter, I have another Jigsaw project which I’ll be AD-ing and lyricising, for possibly the last time ever. And I have A-levels to complete and something else to complete and my entire secondary school experience to complete... What could possibly go wrong? A lot, but little will. I’m now confident I can do this, with a little will.