There are a lot of things we were taught in school that I now find to be untrue. The maths is still good, but its application, its importance, is lacking. “You won’t always have a calculator to hand, will you?” my teacher would ask, and we wouldn’t know that the answer was yes, we will, actually.
We learned about rivers and tributaries and lakes and their geographies. And that, too, has changed. We were taught that abortion is murder – when I asked, in secondary school, if we could have someone who was pro-choice come and talk to us about abortion, as we’d had someone who was pro-life, I was told no, no, we could not – and that, too, feels, now, like a falsehood (although I accept that, unlike maths, the morality of abortion is subjective).
We learned about time and its passage. One second, two, 60 of those in a minute, 60 of those in an hour, 24 in a day, 365 – a year. Then another and another, all following the same predictable cycle. One second, two seconds, three. Tick, tick, tick.
As a child, I felt each and every one of those seconds. My mum used to say I spent my time wishing my life away. Once Christmas had passed, I would begin the countdown to my birthday in February; after that, Easter; the summer holidays; la rentrée. Tick, tick, tick.
I’m not sure when, exactly, it happened, but time no longer follows that predictable rhythm. Some days it is a turtle, plodding, inexorably, towards some undetermined destination. Other days it is an eel, slippery and limbless, but menacing, too. Always, it is a squirrel, slow and strategic as it plans for the winter, then jerking, racing away, a blurry shape you catch right as it exits your field of vision.
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