SPELL-CHECK Smooties

Clearly this is no E-claris, but is included here for two reasons.

Firstly, I like the sounds of 'smooties.' It's a word we should be using.

Secondly, it reminds me of something that happened in my first year of secondary school.

Towards the end of the year in English class we had to produce a project: mine was WAR! I wrote about the history of war ("from the first time man picked up a stone and threw it at another man, man has been at war"), and the future of war (endless riots, like Brixton.) My project was a pretty slap-dash effort if I'm frank, (missing out, as it did, all wars ever) and even a well drafted V2 rocket on the front failed to impress my teacher. She wasn't even impressed by my lazy-journalist/academic technique of starting and ending in the same place: stone-throwing (cavemen, riots, see what I did there?)

Anyway, a girl in my class (probably one of the umpteen Suzannes) had decided to do her project on fashion. Her title page was a wonder to behold and was the sort of thing that would have taken most of the weekend and all of the felt-tips to complete. She'd written the word 'fashion' in a big angular way, then texturalised this word by writing 'fashion' again and again inside her original 'fashion' using every colour she could find, in the tiniest writing she could manage, until she must have written 'fashion' a couple of hundred times. Girls are so extra aren't they?

Except she'd written fasion and the whole lot went in the bin.

The lesson here to my young mind was never invest too much of your weekend fucking around with felt-tips, especially if it's anything to do with school.