Me & Mrs Fisher, Lord Mayor's Walk, York

Coffee House: Me & Mrs Fisher, Lord Mayor's Walk, York

Drink: Latte

Cake: Red Velvet

 

Coffee and cake (v.nice) before my guitar lesson. Trying to get to grips with lead guitar. Always seemed a black art to me. Totally unfathomable. Anyway Joe is trying to shine some light into it all for me, patience of Job 

I hate learning stuff. Don't know why but I always have. There are very few days from school which I remember with fondness, related to academic stuff anyway. Quite liked going out to the pub at lunchtime in the minivan but beyond that it was all so painful. Mind numbingly boring for 13/14 years whatever. Murderers get off with shorter sentences. I could have escaped it when I was 18 but did crap in my A levels (two grade 'E's) and didn't have a clue what to do workwise so stayed on another year to retake them. Same grades again :-) 

So where a more sensible person would have said goodbye to education and moved into the world of work I decided to go to college. My anti-education/establishment bias meant I refused to apply to universities (laughable of course as my grades were so lousy) and applied to, those long forgotten institutions, Polytechnics. Got into Lanchester Poly (now Coventry University) to study (ho ho) BSc Building. To cut a longish story short, went to some of the classes, drank lots of beer, played lots of table football, passed the exams, went on work experience and quit.

Next year applied and got into Chester Teachers Training College (now Chester University) to study Secondary School Maths & Biology. Went to some of the classes, drank lots of beer, played lots of table football, passed the exams, went on work experience and quit.

So education/learning. Wasn't really for me. Certainly at the time. Went back to college (Liverpool Poly now Liverpool John Moores University see a pattern here?) when I was 30 and bored with manual jobs and being on the dole (quite liked driving trucks for a while) Studied BSc Applied Statistics & Computing. Passed on the drinking lots of beer and playing table football this time and did the work. All seemed pretty easy as I detected that the first year at least was geared up to helping a load of people straight from school who were keen on drinking lots of beer etc. and therefore the pace was very gentle. 

Anyway, my point here was the only time that I've sort of liked learning when was I had a need for it (getting a good job) and was good at the subject. Was only later, well into my 'career' as a management bod in IT that someone pointed out that I was actually really smart. I was genuinely surprised. Never considered myself in those terms as I was so crap at jumping the hurdles that the education system puts in front of you. 

So, now I'm attempting to learn the theory and practise of playing lead guitar. Have to say that I'm struggling to get into it even though I would like to be able to do it. I'll hang in there though so I at least have the basics and then I can just blunder along as I have with most things (including my acoustic guitar playing) and make a go of it anyway.

Springsteen comes to mind here "we learned more in a three minute record than we ever learned in school"