[Tech1] Lines was: 'We claimed £70,000 in grants'

Thu Nov 4 06:02:59 CDT 2021

And another, by way of light relief for a moment from carbon emissions:
If I can, on a Thursday morning such as this, I like to go to the village farmers’ market. No single use plastics there, and if you ask, it’s easy to minimise airmiles on your fruit and veg. Strawberries in November from Peru? I don’t think so, thanks!

Grant, a very nice local farmer, has a stall selling eggs and meat products from his farm.
I have this childish habit when he asks: “Would you like to choose your eggs?” (apparently, some people do), of replying: “No, just give me six of the best please!”. And if I don’t say that first, he’ll pre-empt it by saying: “Ah, have you come for your six of the best?”. And so, the silly banter goes on from there.
His daughter is often there helping, and even after many months of this mysterious behaviour, she still can’t understand why the phrase “six of the best” leaves us, and any bystanders of a certain age, cackling with laughter.
“See you next week” he always says, and he surely will.
But it doesn’t end there. There’s another egg stall that I have to walk past to get to the car (if I haven’t gone to market on foot). The lady on that stall asks me why I don’t buy her eggs for a change. I say: “Because he gives me six of the best”. She doesn’t get the joke, and probably rightly, thinks I’m a weirdo.
Cheers,
N.
Nick Ware - Sent from my iPad mini 5

On 4 Nov 2021, at 09:56, patheigham <pat.heigham at amps.net> wrote:

Nick and Dave’s experiences were very similar to my school. There, the lined stationery was known as ‘a blue paper’ for it was that colour and issued by one’s housemaster. I was ‘awarded’ one for talking in class. Housemaster wanted to know what I was chattering about. It concerned electronic circuits, so I was set to copy out a circuit diagram from a radio magazine. This took far longer than writing lines, but it fixed it in my mind, so the punishment was constructive.
Nick’s tale of toilet seats reminds me of a cameraman that we both used to work with. His downstairs loo had a card on the wall which read: “If you sprinkle when you tinkle – please be sweet and wipe the seat!”.
I got the cane a couple of times at boarding prep school. Yes, it hurt, but was quickly over and it made one calculate the chances of being caught rather more accurately! The worst thing was if the known punishment was deliberately delayed for a few days, as it preyed on the mind. After that, I think that we would have been able to survive Gestapo psychological torture!

Pat

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From: David Newbitt via Tech1<mailto:tech1 at tech-ops.co.uk>
Sent: 04 November 2021 09:09
To: Nick Ware<mailto:waresound at msn.com>; tech1 at tech-ops.co.uk<mailto:tech1 at tech-ops.co.uk>
Cc: dnewbitt at fireflyuk.net<mailto:dnewbitt at fireflyuk.net>
Subject: Re: [Tech1]We claimed £70,000 in grants for heat pump, but it saved us NOTHING | Daily Mail Online

At my school lines didn’t take the form of “ I must not.......” repeated x times. Oh no, they had to be written out in Latin.

Any lad issued lines by a master (always in multiples of 20) would have to go to his housemaster, relate the circumstances and request issue of the requisite number of pages of ‘Line paper’. This was double sided, 20 rows per side and lined horizontally with three lines for each row of text. Lower case letters had to touch the bottom and middle lines, upper case the bottom and top lines. The words could be anything copied in Latin from a text book. This was a pretty laborious process, both the copying and the requirement to keep to the lines. If after handing in your lines they were deemed below par you would have to do them again.

Imagine the courage then of the lad who inserted somewhere in the boring Latin prose the decidedly English “Jumbo is a c...”, Jumbo being the nickname of the master in question (who was actually a thoroughly decent guy). The gamble was whether the master would laboriously read through every written word. He got away with it!

Dave Newbitt.

From: Nick Ware via Tech1
Sent: Thursday, November 4, 2021 8:38 AM
To: tech1 at tech-ops.co.uk
Subject: Re: [Tech1] We claimed £70,000 in grants for heat pump, but it saved us NOTHING | Daily Mail Online

On 4 Nov 2021, at 00:01, M E GILES via Tech1 <tech1 at tech-ops.co.uk> wrote:
[snip]

I don’t think that schools dish out lines as punishment  nowadays ~ all activity, even in detention, should be constructive. (I do agree with that philosophy, btw.)

Mike G

Ah yes, detention and lines!
My most memorable was on an occasion when our whole ‘house’ of around thirty boys were being interrogated because someone had left a toilet seat down. No-one owned up to this cardinal crime, so we were all made to spend the evening prep period writing the following out 100 times:
“Mr Tarbat happened to mean what he said about seats left down after you use the lavatory”.
In my handrwiting the line break came after the word “the”.
It gave me great amusement to write
Mr Tarbat….
lavatory.
(In ink, the rest of the line in pencil)
When hauled out in front of the other boys I tried to explain that my pen ran out.
“What, a hundred times, boy? Bend over and touch your toes”
That got me four whacks on the bare bottom by his bare hand. Pervert: that could earn him a jail sentence nowadays!

As it happens, leaving the seat up was a good rule, because boys being boys, if left down it would just get peed on by the next person.
Plus ca change…..!
Nick.
Nick Ware - Sent from my iPad mini 5

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