When I was sixteen, I went to a petting farm with my two best friends, Elaine and Renee. We enjoyed looking at the rabbits and the guinea pigs, horses, ponies, goats, lambs and sheep and eventually cows. The cows were in a shed. One cow. Actually, I can’t remember if it had horns, obviously if it had horns, it was a bull.
It was all on its own in the shed and there seemed to be a few waist high metal bars between us and the cow/bull, so it was a casual but significant separation. We gathered round as it chewed the cud, or grass. It was chewing furiously and while it chewed, it focused on me.
We were like fans round a pop star, admiring it while it chewed and stared. It continued to fix its gaze on me and gave me an evil look. Next minute, it opened its mouth and projectile vomited what it was chewing, straight at me, from about two metres away.
The copious vile smelling substance landed on my upper chest, with a splat. It had the consistency and smell of liquid poo, but it was worse than that. It wasn’t like any human diarrhoea that I’ve ever smelled. Did I happen to mention I was wearing a thick mohair jumper?
The smell was so foul my friends immediately sprang away from me, as if I was a leper. They thought it was hilariously funny. The faeces that had come from the cows/bulls mouth didn’t drip thankfully. Instead, it adhered to my jumper beautifully. Thank God for small mercies.
My friends acted as if I’d vomited onto my own jumper instead of being the victim of an oral assault from a psycho bovine stranger.
To be fair, I was ‘allowed’ back into my friends car. They couldn’t very well leave me at the petting farm, it was miles from anywhere but it wasn’t a pleasant journey home.
When I got home my mum was non too pleased about the stains from a sociopathic bull on my mohair but she put it in a hot wash all the same. I don’t even think it was the hot wash that ruined it, although I’m sure it didn’t help. The vomit and the heat had a debilitating effect on the delicate fibres. The projectile was like acid and seemed to dissolve the cloth. If the vomit didn’t kill my beautiful jumper then the hot wash certainly did. The jumper was never quite the same after that. It was rather bald and thin and exhausted where it should have been delightfully hairy. It was a traumatised mohair.
I learned to distrust cows and young bulls after that. The only other time, I was attacked by an animal in such a way was when I was at Southport Zoo many years later, passing by the chimpanzee quarters with my mum and my husband. The chimps threw their excrement at us, among indulging in other recreational activities. It still wasn’t anywhere as bad as having liquid poo spat at me, exorcist style, at a petting farm. We managed to dodge the chimp poo very successfully. They didn’t have the element of surprise on their side like the young bull.
Now, where’s the joy in this you might say, well, it’s all in the anecdote. I realised I haven’t thought about it in almost forty years, not once, until just now and it made me smile and I suppose it might be funny to an outsider, in a schadenfreud kind of way.
When I started senior school at the age of eleven, I was so excited. I loved first year. Of course now it’s all different, the school years are counted differently but in my day, the first year of ‘big school’, a rough comprehensive, in an economically depressed area of Merseyside, was senior school and we were called first years. One of the teachers I had in my form and year was a religious education teacher. He was handsome in a classical way. He had black hair and wild brown eyes with unfathomable depths in a pale waxy face. He wore white, beige, silver or brown suits, tight as anything, narrow tie, sharp crease lines down the trousers. It was 1981 after all. He was bang in fashion. He was like a showroom dummy who had come to life all of a sudden, but in a really good way.
Mr. Hanson’s lessons went by in a second. They were as light as a feather. They energised me and made me happy. He was the sun, the moon and the stars in the lessons but they weren’t lessons, they were intangible things, feelings and experiences. it wasn’t school and I wasn’t in a lesson. I was a child of the sky. He didn’t give me mind altering drugs but what he did do was allow me to be part of an experience that I will never forget.
He may have begun this particular lesson very normally, probably talking about the bible, scripture. Students always misbehaved in Religious Education. They didn’t take it seriously at all, not even half as much as any other lesson and they didn’t take those seriously either.
To them, R.E was a permit to mess around in class and especially in the comprehensive school I went to. Mr. Hanson was a lovely man but his patience had limits. He was already on the outskirts of sanity, so cracking up was an easy thing to do and that day he would crack up but in such a sweet and spectacular and entertaining way.
I think Mr. Hanson was so exasperated with the behaviour of the children in his class that he hatched a plan. Although, to be fair to him, he didn’t seem the type of person to hatch anything. The strange light behind his twinkling brown eyes always seemed to be in improvisation mode. In this lesson, I think his creative energies were on fire, or else I think he just didn’t give a toss. It was like he’d joined this thing, this teacher thing, in a working class comprehensive, teaching rebellious, out of control feral teenagers and thought, ‘Oh no, what have I got myself into? Okay, well, I’ll have move the goal posts. I’ll have to move them to survive.’
Mr. Hanson had weighed up his options, had drawn up a plan of battle tactics and came up with several modes of attack, whether he was aware of it or not:
The element of surprise
Distraction
Unpredictability
Confusion of the enemy through unprecendented behaviour, unbecoming for a teacher
He was talking about evolution versus creationism and the class were being particularly disruptive. Class harmony was compounded by the fact that his class didn’t have tables that four or five people could gather around. Instead, he had two person desks, widely spaced, all in single file in three rows. I quite liked the set up but groups of children couldn’t hang out together and fan the flames of rebellious adolescence, like naughty knights around a round table. It would impede them on many levels. It caused consternation, indignation and frustration, all the ‘tions’ that would lead to trouble for poor Mr. Hanson.
The cacophony of sound rising in the classroom drowned out the sound of the chalk squeaking along the board. Everytime his back was turned, they would all whoop and holler and throw screwed up pieces of paper at him. He would turn to us, everything would be quiet but the minute he turned to write, chaos would erupt again. Eventually, he stopped writing and turned to talk to us. This wasn’t going to work either. No-one was listening to him. There wasn’t one attentive face. Most kids were talking amongst themselves very loudly. The rest were in varying degrees of commotion and locomotion, the dreaded ‘tions’ again.
At that moment, that almost surreal moment of disorder and anarchy, Mr. hanson did somthing memorable.
He became Charles Darwin’s evolutionary ape.
He calmly threw away the chalk and his tranformation began. He hunkered down. He swung his arms down and out so that they hung lower than his knees. He started to move from side to side. He started making grunting noises, mimicking chimpanzee sounds. The class stopped talking and stared transfixed. His ape impersonation got more ape. He got louder and started screeching and whooping. We looked at him like he was crazy.
He wasn’t done yet, not by a long chalk, unlike the one he’d just thrown away. He jumped up on one of the front desks, in one deft mocement, still deep in character as King Kong. There was a collective intake of breath. Right now, he definately had the element of surprise on his side. He made his way down the desks, expertly jumping from one to the other like a practiced orangutang.
He went all the way down the desks, hooting and howling, pouncing atheletically from each one, right down to the back of the class. The girls at the back began to scream as he jumped on their desks. It didn’t help that he got off the desks for a while and ran around the entire room as an ape. As his drama tutor may have said, he really used the space. He then returned to the desks, gambolling up another row, picking up pencils with puzzlement and chewing on their tips. He nibbled an eraser, looked bewilderedly at a ruler and then hit himself with it. He took off his shoe, smelled the inside of it curiously and then tried to wear it as a hat.
As an ape, Mr. Hanson frightened the girls and rendered the boys speechless. When he jumped on my desk, I moved out of the way just in time. I suppose you could say it was scary but fun. I can’t remember how it all ended. I don’t suppose it really matters when you start so strong.
This is a slim, delicate looking guy in a sharp silver suit, with a face like a porcelain doll, doing a quality method acting performance of a primate. Uncanny valley doesn’t even begin to describe. It was the most exhilarating moment of my life. I’m sure for Mr. Hanson though, there must have been easier ways of making a living.
‘Let every man be quick to listen,slow to speak and slow to anger.’
– James 1:19
But why is it so difficult to be slow to offend?
What open wounds
Exposed to hot knives
Have taken me there?
The bitter taste
of resentment
Still on my tongue
If pushing my buttons were a sport
I would lose every time.
Each imagined slight
Or real live betrayal
Has no sliver of light between them
They merge
And become one
And all the lines blur
It’s all very well
To advise
But when
that button is
so vunerable…
When it feels like everyone finds it
temptingly delicious to push…
I need to take responsibilty
For how I feel.
‘Human anger does not produce the righteousness
that God desires.’ – James 1:20
I need to understand why it feels how it feels.
It feels nasty, disconnected, like I’m outside myself.
Like I’m not there anymore.
‘Anyone who listens to the word but does not do what it says is like someone who looks at his face in the mirror and after looking at himself, goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like.’
-James 1:23 -24
That’s exactly what it feels like!
Feelings of hurt and anger sometimes makes us feel disconnected.
They alienate us from our our basic selves. But wait a minute, I need hope that I can be slow to offend. Can you give me that?
‘Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.’ – James 1:4
I get it. Now there is understanding and hope for change.
But where is the unconditional love, where is the hug that I so desperately need?
‘If any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to you.’
-James 1:5
And suddenly all the heat of the anger melts away and in its place is the warmth of the hug.
Things In My Head 