Pride goeth before a fall (Proverbs 16:18)
It has been a few weeks since I last posted. A new venture has been taking up a lot of my time, there is just enough time for grazing, chewing the cud and sleeping. I have now had more than enough of each in equal measure, so I have enough time to mull over a number of issues. Sadly, football will NOT be one of them. Sorry.
I do not know about you, but sometimes, I get "Screaming in the Forest Syndrome". This is not about naked men with increasing girths and full guts stand in Epping Forest, shouting to get back in touch with their inner man (who disappeared years before the flab took over).
This is about when you remember an incident and how you reacted (or did not react); and how you wished you could have avoided humiliation by just being a little smarter, or saying the right thing, instead of just looking, well, foolish.
Well, my SITFS moment is thus. I have already mentioned my love for reading and how I voraciously devoured as much written material in the English language as I could manage. I therefore went into secondary school with a reputation for being good at English language and literature. This went to my head so much so that I earned the nickname "Ble" (for the uninitiated, Ble was the short form of Blefo, English). So my reputation grew daily as I attempted to top the class and keep in touch with the elite few whose names I will not mention.
So, a group of lower sixth formers heard about me and asked me to read their huge scholastic tomes in my dulcet tones. Coriolanus, or similar. I had not yet acquired (and perfected) my sexy, baritone lady killer, telephone manner delivery. (By the way, when our children ask, Why do I have to learn this or that? I am never going to need it in future. We should agree with them and say, "My son, my daughter, you are probably right. However, knowledge is power. The more of it that you have, the better equipped you are for life. Like the spare tyre in the boot of my/your car.") This was more a pre-pubescent cross between the croaking teenage frog and the high-pitched screech of youth, but who cares about the delivery when the maestro was at work? Now these sixth-formers were foreigners, in other words, they had attended forms 1 to 5 in some far-away distant establishment (Adiasadel, Achimota, Mfantsipim, Prempeh) and had risen to the heights of scholastic achievements by attending PRESEC. Well, that was our way of thinking in those days. So I read to them. That is when I first came across the word "denouement", pronounced dey-noo-mah. Or something like that. But to my untrained (and arrogant) eye, it looked nothing more than an English word that I would pronounce like, Permanent, Testament. Denouncement. Apartment. You get the idea. These seniors made me repeat the word over and over again without attempting to correct me, whilst they sniggered into their cover cloths, behind their opened books and into their coffee mugs. They never corrected me.
Perhaps, it was their way of saying, "Is this really the best PRESEC have to offer?" Perhaps, this was their show of fists against the snobbish attitudes towards them as "foreigners" who had given their gift teeth to be in the presence of greatness. Perhaps, they were just small-minded people. As we also were, at the time. As they say, youth is wasted on the young.
So what lessons have I learnt from my SITFS moment? Well, now, I always use a dictionary and in the absence of Google, I always ask. Second lesson, I learnt that no matter how wickedly brilliant I am at something, there could be someone out there who might know of the one thing that I do not. Final lesson, even though I say I never look back with regret, there are times when I sure could use wisdom that I could pluck from the future to redeem my present.
So sometimes, when I remember this humiliating incident, I scream silently in my pillow. Loudly, yet silently.
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