Penny, the Pylon, and Me

At my secondary school, which I attended all the way through from year seven to sixth form, at the beginning of every school year you’d be issued with a school diary. I expect many if not most other schools of the time had something similar – an A5-sized, spiral-bound thing probably about half an inch thick, mainly made up of weekly planner pages for recording homework, etc, but also with your timetable, staff list, school rules, a map of the school site and where each classroom was, and all that kind of thing. Almost everyone would heavily-customise these – i.e. scribble all over them – but many of us would also stick various things onto the clear plastic ‘covers’ which protected the front and back pages. I would usually add various pictures cut out of newspapers and magazines – Formula One cars, Daleks, and other bits and pieces reflecting my interests. In my final year at school, the last year of sixth form, one of the pictures I had stuck to the front of my diary was a print-out…