Not a brown labrador in sight...... (pearost)
I must have been 10ish (the time Sean Connery likes to go to Wimbledon). I detested school with a vengeance. Hard to believe now, but I was The School Swot, always coming top in my year group, if not the school for French, English & science, winning prizes left right & Chelsea in the process.

Not only was I an uber-swot, I came from The Posh Estate. Meaning it was the only private estate in teh pit village (it was a Leech house). The rest consisted of council estates and pit houses. Nothing wrong with that; however, my peers' other prerequisite was the total lack of the ability to breathe nasally.

Therefore, Young Tourettes was ostracised at best, ruthlessly bullied at worst. The only relevance of which was my constant insatiable search for excuses to stay off school. Tonsillitis was good; glandular fever was even better (that got me out of P.E. for 6 months to boot!). Genuine childhood ailments, followed by a long spell of good health. Meh!

Then I played a blinder. Literally.....

From whence the inspiration came, I have no idea. I was forever daydreaming, allowing my eyes to drift off out of focus; leaving the Real World far behind and choosing to spend the majority of time in my own Special World. I was doing this one morning as I descended the stairs. Half way down, a half-baked plan came to me. Leave the eyes out of focus and pretend to be blind!

Fuck me all ways, my folks fell for it. I scored 4 or 5 months off school! (Wouldn’t happen nowadays, oh no, I’d be packed off with Extra Visual Support. But this was the 70’s.) My mother helped me to dress, cut my food up (chips at 3 o’clock, Spam at 8 o’clock, fried egg at 12. “Where’s the Ketchup, Mam?”
“Eeh, sorry pet, it’s at 6 o’clock”).


I was duly taken to *see* the GP, who referred me to an eye specialist in Newcastle. Of course, he couldn’t find anything amiss and suggested I visit an optician. Throughout the exam, I kept up my Oscar-winning performance. However, when the optician started putting different lenses in the frames, a potential problem hit me. If I came away with fuck-off jam jar specs that really would cattle my eyes. So in my 10-year-old wisdom, I decided to say the “weaker” lenses helped. 15 minutes later, I thought I’d been rumbled. The optician told my mother all the lenses he’d inserted had been clear glass! Stinky Poo! How was I going to wriggle out of this? He turned to my mother in all seriousness and said, “Your daughter has nothing physical wrong with her sight. Her blindness is psychosomatic. Can you think of any possible triggers or causes?”
She thought for a moment then proclaimed, “Yes! She read that Shiela Hocken book, “Emma and I” – she was really moved by the story and empathised hugely with the blind lady!”
“That’d do it”, replied the nice optician.

And lo, I had another few weeks off school, while my eyesight *gradually returned*…….

Little fuck-sock that I was.
( Tourette's ( . )( . ) has a monkey hair in her fried egg, Tue 13 Sep 2011, 19:11, 2 replies)

If this is true,
your parents were the real mouth-breathing thickos.
( monster munch person, man, woman... camera... TV?, Wed 14 Sep 2011, 13:50, closed)

Alas, it is true.
And yeah, they were a bit crap! Although my dad must have has his suspicions, as he used to feel the back of the telly when he came home from work to see if it was warm :)
( Tourette's ( . )( . ) has a monkey hair in her fried egg, Wed 14 Sep 2011, 21:38, closed)