Well, I dropped out of school proper at around fourteen and went very infrequently from about twelve. I've spent a lot of the intervening years slumming around festivals and squat parties generally having a bit of a laugh. I've worked in kitchens and fancy dress shops and some fast food places. Pretty much your classic high school failure, I am probably that terrible influence you warn your children about. However, I am interested in current affairs, have read the papers religously since I was about ten, get through as many books as I can afford or can borrow, go to lectures and the theatre whenever I can afford to and know all the cast and storylines of Friends. Many of the no-good dropouts I know are similarly motivated to constantly self-educate though I would never describe them as intellectual. I think that it is possibly because I have not been herded into a building five days a week to be force fed information so I can regurgitate it once a year to pass some arbitrary standard of intelligence ,( take a breath) I have never had the natural human desire to learn crushed out of me by some institutionalised ideal of good and bad knowledge. I make no distinction between Friends and Shakespeare, it's all good, it's all valid as culture and it's interesting because it's different to whats in my head. I may enjoy Othello more than a three hour Friends omnibus on most days but what I relish is the choice. I am meandering towards a point eventually but I've got to go now, Eastenders is on.
