Off at a tangent…

It’s no good crying over spilt milk, that’s what they say isn’t it? Not that I would know, I’ve rarely spilt milk as I don’t drink it and if I did I doubt that it would make me cry anyway. There’s something about milk that I don’t really like. It’s partly the taste, but more importantly I think it’s the texture. It’s too smooth, like drinking beige liquid velvet - and then there’s that warm, cloying, ‘I will turn soon’ smell.

No, I don’t cry over spilt milk, but I did find myself almost crying at Coronation Street the other evening and a few nights earlier at the Pride of Britain Awards. I know, I’m a sentimental fool and I shouldn’t really be watching such rubbish. But life can’t be all highbrow intellectual twaddle can it? Besides, I could put a pretty good argument together that Coronation Street is as relevant as Shakespeare was in its day. After all, it portrays life at its most intense with everything happening all of the time and at the same time, comedy and tragedy intertwined and overlaid and let’s not forget the three witches – Gayle, Rita and Audrey.

There I go, off at one tangent and headlong into another again. I hated maths at school. In infant’s school we were forced to learn our tables by rote and, try as I might, I could never remember them – eight times eight is…blank. And it wasn’t just my eight times, other than the twos, fives, tens and possibly the elevens they were all pretty much a blank in my mind. Later trigonometry, with its sines, cosines and tangents, left me drowning in a sea of numbers which I never did learn to properly swim in.

Funny, I’m not sure what tangents are even to this day; although I’m constantly off on them. Which brings me back to the spilt milk; because my maths was so poor I focussed totally on the more arty subjects - writing, drawing and painting my way through school and dreading maths lessons with a black gloom that hung over my head like black clouds of a very wet day.

It’s an approach that I’ve learnt to live with and I’ve prospered; making my way in life without milk or times tables and seeing pictures and hearing Shakespeare at every turn of my road. As a consequence I found myself this morning taking a hand-painted vase covered in tiny butterflies out of my kiln only to find that it had cracked - and when I picked it up it shattered into pieces.

Damn and bugger!

Well, it’s no use crying over spilt milk… or broken glass. I could have this morning though.