folio

While decluttering the house this morning, I come across an orange folder filled with my old school reports, spanning ten years from junior school to college.

Common themes emerge. I was very a very quiet and timid boy, commended for being helpful and pleasant. That a frequent refrain.

But there the partial praise ends. The remainder of comments speak of slow progress, disappointing exam results, and this oft-repeated rejoinder, “does not find the subject easy.”

It seems the only subjects I had any talent for were art and nature studies, back in junior school. Indeed, the latter earned me an excellent and first place in my form, aged ten.

But, alas, there would be no nature studies after that, and so it was all downhill from there. Latin, French and Maths a disaster. In English, taken to task for writing the bare minimum.

My final school report nearly a sigh of desperation from all of my teachers. If I revised well, they suggested, I might just scrape through my GCSEs with a pass. Still, they already knew I would not be back in September.

Academically, I must have seemed a lost cause to all who knew me then. If only they — and I — had known why that might be. Hindsight is a wonderful thing.

I’ll put the folder back where I found it. Back to the task at hand.