Old School

They (?) are tearing down Dunfermline High School (probably the Mark II building) and replacing it with some glass PFI centre of educational excellence and mediocrity. I drove by it the other day then stopped to reflect and possibly mourn it's sad passing.The lyrics of the old Steely Dan song came back to me:

Well I did not think the girl 
Could be so cruel 
And I'm never going back 
To my old school 

Quite irrelevant really, I don't recall the girls being cruel, it was the teachers and they were just doing their job and it was 1969 when beating up kids was still ok. All the young student teachers with their Triumph Spitfires are now grey and retired and the Headmaster whom I despised with my best home made revolutionary left wing vigour is long dead. When I departed after three years of soft drugs, sports avoidance, smoking, alcohol, discovering art and progressive rock, chronic under achievement and various cultural misunderstandings -  I left it behind quietly and without fuss. It was 1972 and I didn't look back, I didn't know how to. A full blown teenage life and the confusion and corruption of some kind of a potential adult life to follow was calling like a Siren on a reef. I thought of myself as being like Peter Gabriel leaving Genesis, "feeling part of the scenery, walking out of the machinery etc." even if that didn't happen until 1974, I'd always prided myself on being ahead of the times. I really did not have a clue about anything.

Anyway this palace of pain, educational ruin and hypocrisy is about to be turned to dust, recycling materials and architectural salvage, shielded from the public eye by safety fences and bollards. At least I have a few snaps of the dear old place (sniff).