Thanks to Jonathan Dodd for this week’s submission. Guest opinion articles do not necessarily reflect the views of the publication. Ed
When I was five years old, back in the myths of time, one of my temporary older foreign siblings, Ulf or Beppo, I can’t remember which, bought a single.
This was an exotic thing, much smaller and thinner than the usual clunky old 78rpm records that my family owned and never played. Ulf and Beppo played this all the time on our monstrous radiogram, and even jiggled around the living room to it.
This was a significant moment for my five-year-old mind. It was the first time I ever really heard some music, the first piece of music that came from someone nearer my own age, rather than from my elders and betters, or the BBC Home Service.
I liked it. It was exciting, and it awoke something new inside me. It was the future. It was my future. It was ‘Amawshaka’.
Dying of embarrassment
Many years later, as a student, I was telling some friends about that moment and they asked me what the music was.
‘Amawshaka!’ I said.
‘Amawshaka? Never heard of it! Who sang it?’
‘Elvis Presley!’
There was a bit of a silence after that. Eventually someone’s brow unfurrowed.
‘Do you mean I’m All Shook Up?’
Young people do actually die of embarrassment. I know. I did.
Drowning lessons
Another thing from my innocent childhood. I cycled to swimming lessons twice a week at my local swimming baths, the King Alfred, which pumped sea water directly into the pools.
The swimming club was called ‘Shivrers’, and the instructors were all ex-Army, in immaculate singlets and long white trousers, with huge chests and large silver whistles.
They barked at us and we obeyed – two widths breast stroke legs only, or four widths front crawl raise those arms or backstroke or even the dreaded butterfly.
Everyone was blue and shaking with fear and cold, but nobody ever dreamed of refusing to enter the water at the sound of the whistle, even if they regularly drowned half-way across. And I became a good swimmer. I still am.
Naming and shaming
The problem was that whenever I told people about how I learned to swim someone always started sniggering and I didn’t know why.
One day I found out, because I was asked what the name of the swimming club was. ‘Shivrers’, I said, and they laughed and laughed.
Then the penny dropped. They called it ‘The Shiverers’. As a child I just accepted that. I didn’t understand what it meant until I was an adult and another adult had to explain it to me.
Wet sea creatures
This thing about children accepting things without explanation comes up in other ways. A person close to me said the other day, ‘It was a bit of a damp squid’.
I thought that was wonderful, and then had to explain why I laughed and that it was really a damp squib and then what a squib was, realising all the time that I preferred the damp squid idea anyway.
It’s rather sweet, really, because it’s funny.
Received wisdom
Then I started to think about all the rubbish that people trot out as opinions that they think they think.
How much of what happens in our minds was put there by someone else before we were able to filter it? How much of it remains there unchanged and unchallenged since we were children?
That was a scary thought.
If you have been, thank you for reading this.
Image: Radiogram by SuperMoving under CC BY 2.0 and swimmer by PawPaw67 under CC BY 2.0 and giant squid by ntnu-vitenskapsmuseet under CC BY 2.0
