Scribblings - Diary of a young MUD writer (when I was 8)

In fact, with the exception of idle banter in conversation, I appeared to lack any real "stunning" skills. I would have settled for being able to spoon dangle or even shuffle a pack of cards, yet somehow life had decided that I would be stunningly average at just about anything. So stunning was this average ability that I was constantly one of the last to be picked from the line out for football. I was usually put farther forward for the obstacle race at school--after all, that's the event for people who are no good at anything else--but I never got to be first for anything. Yes, my average ability was responsible for me assuming that everyone was gifted at stuff, bar me.

Then a strange thing happened. Now, you will find out that strange things happen to me a lot. I like to think of it as the master plan by whomever watches over me. These strange things appear quite harmless when looked at in isolation, but I managed to mold my entire character and outlook based on these events.

The first real "strange" event I can pin down was at junior school. At the age of eight, I had discovered that my use of crayon was far and away the oddest ever encountered.

My teacher would comment on how my picture of a mouse was a little bit wrong. I would calmly explain how it was, in fact, a frog, and not a mouse at all. This continued through all my artwork: red-haired people came out as bright green punk rockers; small bunnies were done in a hideous shade of yellow or orange; my prized picture of The-Pot-Calling-The-Kettle-Black was shaded to perfection in brown and green.

My teacher (she assumed I had no other crayons) came over one day to watch me at work. A little later on, she dragged me to the nurse, who forced me to look at large circles that almost had numbers in them. I then discovered I was in a predicament only a little worse than being skinned alive--that I was losing my sight and my head was going to explode. Well, that's what it sounded like. I had color blindness. Now, you may think it's quite a mild affliction, but at the age of eight, it sounded quite melodramatic and puzzling.

So it was that we had to do a picture project about Easter. I got out my crayons and started to draw in my best fisted-crayon grip. I chewed on the paper that was wrapped around the crayons and tried real hard to get hold of crayons that were not broken in two (as all eight-year-old boys know, a full crayon carries many kudos). We had been given a simple project. Draw Jesus arriving on a donkey with people waving palm leaves.

Most of the boys managed to slip in a few spaceships and the odd shoot-out in their backgrounds, while the girls added love hearts all over their work. I, on the other hand, had managed to get hold of a length of wall paper from the box of drawing materials. My picture was an epic--eight feet long with the entire biblical street drawn on it. The colors clashed horribly--they had to, because in my opinion they looked quite wonderful. I covered everything I could think of about Easter: chickens, eggs, cards, holidays, cartoons. My effort looked a lot like stickmen and funny dogs (they were donkeys), but I had amassed just about anything you could ask for. I even had a cross in there (well, I had about 40 of them--I was running out of Easter images, ok?).

We handed our Easter pictures in, and the teacher took them away to mark. This was always a scary moment. You see, I was running at "5" as an average mark. Well, in fact, it was my only mark. I didn't even have a star on the star chart. The star chart was there to scare the average plebes like me and to allow the children of farm owners and school governors to lord it over us thick people. You got one star for doing something reasonable. At the time of the drawing, I and two other children hadn't a single star to our names, while others like Joanna Huddleston had like a billion.

When the teacher returned, she had brought five books with her as awards for those who had done really well. She read out the winners, and one-by-one the lucky few went to stand by the teacher's desk (this being the only time they waived the Golden Rule of being in trouble if you stood by the desk).

The last name read out was mine. Somehow, the Average King had secured first place. I wandered up full of pride and hope that indeed my talents had been spotted. I know what you're thinking. "So he won a drawing competition and he realized he had a talent." Well, you're wrong. You see, the lesson hasn't started yet. Oh no. What I was to learn was much more valuable.

My teacher had picked all her usual suspects. We had the class swot, two of the governor's kids, two parish leader's kids and then--just to mess everything else up--there was me. She looked around and explained why she had chosen the winners. Apparently the others had got the nod because they had used a lot of images from Easter. This assessment had left our teacher in a bit of a pickle. My picture was huge and packed full of gibberish. I had everything you could ever want and even something's you didn't want. (Ok, so maybe I went over the top with six wise men looking on, but I always thought it was mad that there were only three wise men in the entire world. I also had a wise woman, but my teacher constantly told me off for that.).

She had no choice but to declare me the winner, so starting with 6th place, the runners-up each went to her desk to choose a book as a prize. It didn't dawn on me then, but the cold, hard fact became apparent. If you finished 6th, you got to pick from all the books; if you finished higher up than that, you had less books to pick from. This leads to me. I had gotten first, the other five had already picked their books, and the teacher had only brought five books in total.

For winning the bloody thing, I got a round of applause. I didn't even get a star.

Life. First it kicks you, then it waits till it can kick you some more.