Physics

In my high school Physics lessons, I sat next to a big-haired, day-dreamy girl called Jenny. I also sat next to Jenny in art, where she spent three double lessons drawing the stubble on her portrait of George Michael, hair by hair. It goes without saying that here was a girl who needed a creative outlet. It also goes without saying that, in Physics, a creative outlet was far from forthcoming. We were allowed to draw diagrams, of course, but they had to be rendered in a particularly dry and unexciting way. Mrs. Calderbank did not want to see a n artist’s impression of a wooden toy car being zoomed across a too-short desk to prove the existence of gravity, thrust and friction. She wanted a pictoral resemblance of functionality. To Jenny, this seemed like a cruelly wasted opportunity.

Physics, as far as I could see, was alone in its complete opposition to creative expression. In Chemistry, at the very least, she could make a firework displaying using magnesium ribbon and a lighter borrowed from Joanne Rutter. In language classes, our imaginations were given free reign, particularly when we were asked to translate French into English. PE, if nothing else, gave the opportunity to devise creative ways to avoid having a shower. The most inventive thing to happen in Physics occurred when Alan Christopherson created an electric circuit using his train-track braces to make a bulb light up.

To counteract this monotony, Jenny and I regressed to childhood. We adopted a lamp from the cupboard, and named her Leila. We dressed her in a post-it-note ra-ra skirt and gave her tippex eyes and lips. We pulled threads of silk from our ties and gave her hair. We went slowly, quietly mad. Miraculously, we left with B grades, and an alarming inability to remember a single fact about the physical world that surrounds us.  

P.S. Speed equals distance over time.