De-blog

I was shockingly bad at geography at school, not just for a top set student either. In tests and exams I was always positioned way below the rest of my class, which has allowed me the illustration that I am so awful at the subject that I came thirty-third in a class of thirty-two. That's probably an overly generous interpretation of my achievement, although in my defence the vast majority of what we studied was to do with reading maps and locating countries on an atlas or involved so many new terms that I just didn't get it. The latter of these difficulties is related to the way I learned to read - something I could do when I was three years old. I followed the print as it was narrated to me and memorised it, then matched sounds to shapes of words, not to letters. Thus I have always found pronunciation and meaning without context or example virtually impossible. I also remain pretty inept when it comes way-finding, be that reading maps, giving directions, plotting co-ordinates,...

Daytime telly. What are they thinking, other than "we get paid slightly more than the night-time telly schedulers to do this, so we best make a reasonable fist of it". Or something along those lines. Not that I'm complaining really - I remember being off school once or twice (as a pupil) in the days when there were only just four channels, some of the time, and the best that daytime TV had to offer was 'The Sullivans' and 'Crown Court'. However, I've had my fill of Time Team, Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) and romcoms and due to a clash in the sleep / TV schedule, I missed the only screening of Columbo I could find all week. Then there's the guilt complex. I just phoned my line manager to see if there was even the slightest possibility of some support in getting off lightly tomorrow at work. Of course it's not that I don't appreciate the three and a half months of sick pay they have already generously paid me; nor am I trying to shirk my re...