Ordinary Life 4

I have been in some doubt about how much I can write here.Just brief notes, the book will of course reveal all!

Some time late in 1973, at a school christmas disco, Christine and I tried to figure out how best to shuffle all the extra noses and teeth. We weren’t kissing with confidence but it was a start.
A few months later, Susan the professor ( though she was only 14 at the time you understand) gave me generous access to her vest and its mysteries.
Then, just after my fifteenth birthday, I was again dropped into another new world.
I took part in a school exchange with a student from a small village near Bordeaux. For a glorious month, I lived the life of a French boy. Shared his family, his cigarettes, his friends, his moped, a new world of food. I learned a language, driven by necessity beyond the ‘plume de ma tante’. I made a friend for life. I learned a passion for a country and a language that overtook my interest in astronomy.
While I was there, his elder sisters friend Chantal, took me aside one drunken evening, and I lost my innocence with no regrets.

Archbishop Makarios had a spot of bother in Cyprus, and Lord Lucan dissapeared. I took, and passed, a mathematics O’level a year early and then a year later passed ten more subjects, the one in which I had made a dramatic improvement, beyond expectation, being French.