Tuesday 27 July 2010

The Orange Horse & His Pink Chair.

My lack of doing schoolwork was becoming a real issue.

At GCSE level you can pretty much bluff and guess your way through all the exams - common sense had got me through them.

This was bizarre in itself, considering that my powers of common sense are no better than my powers of levitation - but somehow I had got through them.

At A-Level you cannot use common sense. You need knowledge. Hard facts and real information.


I didn’t actually mind too much the act of sitting in a classroom listening to someone talking about Politics or History or whatever, in some instances it was even entertaining.


Indeed, we had one particular teacher who was a very intriguing figure.


A fossil from the late 60’s/early 70’s, he had leathery brown/orange skin that had witnessed the blazing hot sun in all its glory once too many times, and a large rectangular face, which looked as if it had been carved out of wood.

He wore garish velvet suits, garish velvet ties, and had wild, unruly hair - similar to that of Ludwig Van Beethoven.


First and foremost he was a politics and history teacher, but was also, inexplicably, a rugby coach.

Oddly, but not entirely out of character, he always wore a pair of white felt gloves whilst coaching (akin to those of a snooker referee) and even in the bleakest, coldest, wettest of winters, these gloves never saw a single speck of dirt on them.


He was known as ‘The Orange Horse’, and he had a study on the top floor.


His study was tiny.

Smaller than Danny De Vito, but perhaps slightly bigger than Ronnie Corbett in size, it had a scruffy, puffy, pink armchair which took up the majority of the space. This was positioned underneath the window by the radiator, surrounded by shelf upon shelf upon shelf, holding books on the history of politics, politics and history.

Over the years rebellious students had written various cunning remarks on the pink chair - small excerpts of graffiti that had cropped up over decades of sneaky fun-poking, covered the arms:


*"The Orange Horse = clever wizard of victory in madness."*

*"Horse Power to the people".*

*"Is the Orange man magic? Of Horse he is!"*



One day, the Orange Horse stopped mid-conversation, and stared at a section of scribbling on the left armrest.


He just stared.


And read some of the comments.





He then stared at the right armrest.






Before we knew it he proceeded to draw on his own chair, with a red biro.




We had to spend the rest of the lesson wondering what he could’ve possibly been writing. Then, when he left the room at the end of the lesson, we hurriedly peered over the chair to try and see what he had written:




“Please stop writing on my chair”, it said.

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