Who? Androgynous looking Roman statue of indeterminate origin.
Why? Every year, for five years, I’ve been attended night school classes at the local university, in a bid to keep the educational part of my student years alive. A few years ago, I left my choice of courses to the very last minute, a week after most had already begun, exactly. Looking through the booklet I found one series about ‘King Lear’. I hate ‘King Lear’ – or rather I hate the fact I can’t understand it. Once the old duffer gets onto the moor, the rain comes in and my mind clouds. I decided I’d get this sorted out once and for all. Sadly, after sitting in the class room where it should have been held fro half an hour I found out it wasn’t running. In a panic, I dashed for the next available class, a history of ‘Popular Music’. Two things made me leave this at the interval; the scary middle-age woman who kept winking at me as she took an Elvis pencil, from an Elvis pencil case to write in an Elvis exercise book; and the lecturer who took to placing his hands on my shoulders and spent his time talking about rationing and not playing any bloody records.
So there I was in the break looking at a course board looking for something at least a bit interesting that didn’t seem to require any prior knowledge. Within a few moments, from nowhere I still think, a beautiful young woman, the sort I’d always seen in foreign films, stood next to me. I asked which course she was doing. She pointed at the board:
“Art, Beauty and Philosophy.” Her accent was French.
“Any good?”
“Oui.”
And I followed her into the class, for nine weeks of Socrates, Aristotle and Freud. Hence the statue. This was one of the most significant moments of my life. Did I end up dating her?. No, got to know her a little bit, but she was very high maintenance judging by the business trips she would disappear on with her boyfriend. Did I fall for anyone else on the course? That’s a long story, but ultimately no, although the experience added someone important to my life. The reason that this moment still makes me shake, was that for once I said something, in the pregnant pause when in the past I would have just smiled nervously and gone home, I asked the right question, and did the thing I would have been kicking myself for not doing the rest of my life. I made up for all the times this has happened which I still wince over. Like the time a similar French girl asked me up to her room on the first night of college and I declined … but that’s another story.
first appeared November 2001; finally
