Day 101: Don't Know Much About Geography

I have turned to face the gaps (craters) in my geographical education.  Shamefully, if you presented me with a blank map of the world and asked me to identify all the countries, there would be stumbling, laughter and hideous guess work. And not just on the understandably confusing -stans, either.

Not Mr H

I think I know why.  As a child I disliked my geography teacher intensely.  His nesty beard, his stooping frame, but more importantly his scathing and cruel tongue.  There was a boy in my class, Adam F, who was tiny - properly tiny.  I remember Mr H unnecessarily introducing the concept of how mountains form, with the words 'If a strongman, like Adam F, were to lift up a corner of the earth's crust...'.  Cue gales of laughter.  And Adam F?  I saw him shrink in that moment - becoming just that little bit smaller still. 

Never forgot it.  Never forgave Mr H, who targeted someone's vulnerability for a cheap laugh.  I was a fat child - and there's nothing like it for developing your empathy gland.  That day it was Adam F, but it could so easily have been me.  I knew that hot flush of shame and self-loathing, and I strangely never felt any relief when the target wasn't me.  It still made me feel the same - still made me squirm inside. 

Following Adam F-gate, I remember deliberately setting out to learn everything we'd done that term by heart ('When a river splits up into many mouths, the land that is formed between the mouths is called a delta' etc etc).  I did it specifically so I could come top in the end of term exam.  To prove that I could, and to mentally stick two fingers up at Mr H, before turning my back on the subject completely.

With the result that I'm pretty good on deltas, ox-bow lakes, contour maps, Bootle and Australia.   And there it stops. 

A massive own goal.  Nose cut off; face spited.  Geographical ignorance on a monumental scale.  I turned my back on other subjects too.  Sport (thanks, Miss W - you terrifying, gimlet-eyed nightmare).  Physics.  Chemistry. 

I got sport back.  Eventually.  (But on my terms - no hockey with numb hands and being bawled at in the pouring rain.)  And I never felt the lack of physics or chemistry.  But my geographical holes have been an embarrassment for too long.  So I'm in remedial training, with a child's online map quiz.  It's never too late. 

(However, in my head I still hear Mr H's voice.  'If an intellectual giant, like CJS, were to undertake a child's quiz...')