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No time like the present
22/06/2007 09:00 - (SA)
Colleen Figg
When I was small it took me years to learn to tell the time off the clock on the wall, with my sister putting in serious effort to aid the process.
This wasn't because I was dense; rather, because I failed to see the point and wasn't interested in time. I was eventually forced to learn when the whole family started asking me the time every time they saw me.
I'd be pottering along thinking about the latest Enid Blyton book, new and immaculate, waiting for me on my bed when one of them would leap out and say "Coll," (with great urgency!) "What's the time?"
Then I'd be forced to consult the clock and produce the correct answer. I think to this day that's why I hate performing seals or monkeys. Or clockwork soldiers. Or, hell, in for a penny and all that, those little girls that are stuffed into precocious looking clothes, slathered in make up and forced to prance and preen up and down the catwalks. In a suggestive looking manner.
It was the same with getting change at the shop - this hinges onto the nightmare involving me and mathematics which we will not go into now; maybe not ever.
Essentially I did not like or understand figures; I was a simple child, lost in a world of words and the best thing that happened to me regularly was the trip to the local library. Never was I happier than when I had procured an armful of books and to this day that sense of anticipation and sheer joy has never left me whenever I emerge from a bookshop or library now.
You can't count on it
But my mother clearly felt it incumbent upon her to force the rudiments of arithmetic upon her vague youngest daughter, so I was interrogated before departing to the shop about how much change I could expect to receive, having made my purchases.
This seemed completely irrelevant to me, I mean, I hadn't even got there yet, or parted with any money and now I was expected to make seemingly impossible calculations based on principles of maths I was barely on nodding terms with.
Quite ruined the trip, I found. I couldn't enjoy my Pickled Onion Simba chips (in light green packet) on the way home as I wrestled with pluses, minuses and cents, which were the worst of all. If I could have dealt in round notes and not bothered with cents I might have been okay. As it was, the entire thing was an horrendous affair with the leering cents and broken notes taking on menacing qualities and haunting my every step home.
Now that I look back on those days I am quite glad my mother and indeed, entire family, took the time to acquaint me with the necessities for practical living otherwise I might have been relegated to the stuffy back rooms of libraries forever buried in literature.
Mind you, that doesn't sound such a bad existence, now does it?
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