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April 03, 2007
With A Totally Topical Taste
Gosh, look at me in my last but one blog making a topical reference. (See My Day In The Hills). The Polonium on the window, natch.
I don’t do topical, you see.
First, I don’t know enough about current affairs. If you ask me, Panorama is the bit in Sleeping Beauty where the Lilac Fairy shows off her remedial boatmanship.
Second, I was put off topical at secondary school when Mr. Jones, acting head of English, announced in assembly that there were plans to take us to see Roman’s In Britain, but he’d be “buggered if that happened.”
We were thirteen. How inappropriate.
It’s easier to get laughs with topical jokes, though. Here’s Nancy Mitford on adapting Roussin’s play La Petite Hutte in the early fifties.
“I write and rewrite great chunks of the play and then see how the new bits go with an audience. Any finer points there may be in the play pass entirely unobserved - the name of Dr. Kinsey is introduced and they laugh for five minutes”.
Yep…
I have to admit that, going back to the second point above, I had it in for year assemblies. This was because Mrs. Spinoza let out my secret during one of them.
I’d kept secret that I sang in the Southwark Cathedral Choir. I was at an inner-city School (to say the least) and I was determined to have as many not-getting-beaten-up days as I could.
Then one Monday assembly Spinoza stood on the drama hall stage, told the Bible story about hiding your light under a bushel (which Mark White, not very bright, took to mean that she was relaxing the No Smoking rule), and then said:
“Apropos hiding your light beneath a bushel - congratulations are due to Iestyn Edwards in form 2H, who has been chosen to represent Southwark Cathedral choir at the annual Cathedral Choirs Festival being held this year at St. Paul’s”.
Congratulations was not what the other boys in my year thought I should get – boys who had Saturday jobs down the print or East Lane, and fathers with nicknames like Lights Out, One Twist and No Marks. For three months I was allowed to be library monitor and stay indoors during break with the other freaks: two other obvious gays, the Adam Ant obsessive, a girl who suffered from Hutchinson-Gilford Syndrome (premature ageing) aka Manky Odour Granny Face, and Peter Penwarden. He came from somewhere up North.
But funnily enough, I wasn’t getting the aggro because singing at Southwark was effeminate. No, it was because it was posh. And I know this because the year before I’d got away with playing Sandy in the school production of Grease. And this was a mixed school, remember.
Stephen Harper (who played Danny to my Sandy) as he is today. Never got over me, obviously...
Aged twelve, you see, I was the only pupil in the place that had both the high notes for Hopelessly Devoted To You and the cleavage for You’re The One That I Want.
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