Goodbye Childhood Confidence

My best game of charades got crapped on... This is a grudge, a very old grudge, for this happened when I was 8... Yeah, I don't let go easily.

It was a life lesson, which put the nail on my opinion from experience that as a child adults can be dumb and remain so outside of their own specific fields of interests, and will miss no opportunity to knock a child's confidence.

What was this about?  Well, it came after a string of little things where adults put me down, my mother would not accept that "ambulate" is a word... And before you start to say "why didn't you just google it and show her?... well, there was no google, this was the 1980's.  There wasn't even a dictionary in the house!

She'd also in correctly corrected my mental arithmetic on numerous occasions, which set me on the path of a life not trusting my own number skills for life.

TL;DR; I'd had a load of adults putting me down...

Anyway, the story.... I go to school this day, you know school; where all the teaching staff encourage learning and being clever like.... Well... No.

On this day, we were all given over to full charge of the schools one teaching assistant, because the teacher herself felt very ill, the teaching assistant, who I will call Mrs C, had no idea what to do with us so we played charades.

Each child was asked to think of a TV show they had watched the night before and to come up with a sign or gesture for it without speaking and we each had to guess the show.  Recall there were only 4 TV Channels at this time, and most of us played out right after school or our tea, so pickings were slim.

Eastenders was signed by one girl pointing east and clapping the drum motif.

Coronation Street was signed by a boy making out a crown on his head and walking about a bit.

Things dried up a bit, "The Bill" was two lads walking around slowly flicking their heels a bit, we all thought they meant a dance show.

Then after a lot of silence, and I was a shy child, I decided to give it a go with the last show I was allowed to watch.

I stood and I performed a wave to everyone, waving and blowing a kiss across the room, then bent down and stroked an imaginary dog at my heels... A pet dog.... A wave goodbye and a pet dog.... A goodbye and a pet... 

I thought this quite clever, I remember watching the men in the show in their bunk room, never really paid any mention to the plot nor story, it was something on the TV and I knew that the words were "goodbye" in German and "pet" was added to affect a geordie accent.

And the teaching assistant, clearly knew what I meant and rather than be encouraging, as she had been to the other kids, who worked in pairs or made only strange motions to intimate their thoughts she shat all over mine.

Like proper shat on me from a great height.  "Don't be ridiculous, how was anyone going to get that?"

Was it my fault you lot can't speak English, or work backwards from "petting something" to "pet" to.. Oh the only show on one of the 4 measly channels last night has the word Pet in it, even if you don't know the funny foreign words because you're 8 English and this is the era before the Berlin wall came down and Germany was a distant ignored memory from old war films and Grandad's recollections of their not liking it up them.

I've never let this go... Not even now.