The transition to secondary school at the age of eleven seemed like a step in the production line process moulding raw material to be fed through to university. I recall being given a choice at the time, of schools that I could attend, having passed the eleven plus, the assessment for selective education in 1966. I’d selected a state grammar school, the one my brother attended (although I don’t recall asking him about it), and it seemed to be based on something of a cross between Dotheboys Hall and Goodbye Mr Chips – Dead Poets Society wasn’t on the radar then; an aspiring public school model. Teachers delivered the curriculum within the system constraints, even sex education lessons were according to church doctrine. I recall the physics teacher saying there were two ways of studying light, as a particle or a wave – we would only be studying the particle, so wave goodbye to the other. This has become a sort of metaphor; the school dealt with the physical only, but ignored the emotional side and interaction between the two. The system had little flexibility for accommodating individual needs, even the curriculum wouldn’t permit crossover between arts and sciences for A level. Neurodivergent wasn’t a term I was even aware of, not coined until 2000, so the perception seemed to be those outside the normal distribution curve were ‘abnormal’ – special needs, disruptive – and unable to be accommodated in the system. Maybe I was subconsciously aware of this in myself and as a survival strategy I managed to shoehorn myself into the system, mostly by becoming chameleon-like and adapting as best I could without being noticed, keeping within the mid-range. Keeping under the radar worked mostly with a few exceptions. My maths results in the first year under a highly qualified academic teacher were well below average and I failed dismally. In the second year my teacher was a vivacious woman and my results skyrocketed – at the end of the year I was quietly asked if I could explain the difference. Even if I’d known why, I doubt I’d have been able to explain that I’d fallen in love with my maths teacher. I even became a junior member of the school chess team for a few years, achieving some notable success as part of the team in regional competition. I failed my French exams at the age of sixteen, then a young attractive teacher took over and I sailed through with flying colours. In retrospect my best academic results seem to have come from an emotional response to the subject or the teacher, in simple terms I loved what I was doing, or the person teaching it. It would be a long time before I realised that was just another signpost back to Self, a way of seeing who I could be by seeing who I was not, life slowly carving away at the outer me to uncover the me within.