While Shepherds Washed My Socks

by Dillie Dorian

While Shepherds Washed My Socks

  As Kitty fascinated over the Christmas lights, I couldn’t help realising something which should’ve been plainly obvious all along. At the age of thirteen, we’d already forgotten how amazing everything is through the eyes of a little kid. We’d been none the wiser when our presents came from charity shops, and yet we were allowing trends and technology to tell us what the minimum standard was – not our own specific sister.

  While Shepherds Washed My Socks

  Dillie Dorian

  Copyright 2006-2013 Dillie Dorian

  Oops! Did I Forget I Don’t Know You?

  Double Dates (& Single Raisins)

  A Bended Family

  Coming soon:

  Sitting Down Star Jumps

  Now, Maybe, Probably…

  Was He The Queen?!

  Not Zebedee!

  And many more…

  https://www.dilliedorian.co.uk

  Contents:

  #0 Preambling Note To Shells

  #1 Understatement Of The Century

  #2 Jesus Is Coming – Look Busy!

  #3 Nurture Over Nature

  #4 Chalk & Cheese

  #5 Rockstar Sunglasses & Fictitious Widdles

  #6 Wings…

  #7 Charlie & His Famous Grumbles

  #8 An Equal Opportunities Offender

  #9 Superstarring Charlie/Zak/Kitty

  #10 A Mouse & A Mishap…

  #11 Spangly, Bangly Tortoises

  #12 Warning: Made In China

  #13 While Shepherds Washed My Socks By Night

  #14 Dog Pee & Zoflora

  #15 Less Miserable

  #16 My Very Own Almost-Secret Santa Mission

  #17 Long-Suffering Sibs, More Tortoises, & 50% More Free!

  #18 Aloha! & Welcome To Limbo-Land!

  #0 Preambling Note To Shells

  Dear Shelley + Assorted Prying Aussies

  I wonder what Christmas is like in Australia… do you sit around the tree in your modern flat, or all go down the beach for a barbecue regardless of the date?

  Christmas in England? Pah, nothing’s changed. The weather’s still hopeless, with not a hint of snow – though admittedly we still have a higher chance of a white Christmas than you. It’s got bitterly, nonsensically cold, considering.

  School’s been trying to make it “winter celebrations” instead (y’know, the whole inclusivity thing), but it’s astonishing that they bothered when our town is still probably 99% white and ignorant. Plus, who’d pass up the excuse to get out of lessons to cut out paper snowflakes, or the two weeks of lovely holiday to do whatever they want? Anybody would vote Pro-Crimbo for that value.

  At least we could properly afford Christmas this year, which is nothing short of a Harry-shaped miracle (even though the “rich” thing that he and Aimee radiated when we met them was utterly the product of being a two-person family – his wage just about scrapes it for seven people and a bump).

  Sit down, prop your feet up on a kangaroo, and read the real McCoy – if you’re not too busy enjoying your fried sausages and Christmas trees* … it wasn’t supposed to read like that.

  FYI (i.e. For Your Information) it’s a good’un

  Harley – 13, going on (and on, and on…)

  *Not that I meant to rule out that you could be frying Christmas trees. I’d hate to come over all racist and insensitive to whatever sunny Australian traditions you’ve got going, especially after standing up for British Christmas.

  #1 Understatement Of The Century…

  It was Monday the 11th of December. Jollyish teachers were already hanging festive decorations all over school; slave-driving teachers were working the Year 7s hard on the paper-chain front; usually-strict teachers were pulling out their “Season’s Bleatings” sheepy ties in anticipation of two weeks’ rest; young teachers were off buying booze for their New Year celebeertions (it’s nice to see that our school hasn’t broken Mr Wordsworth’s spirit at least); old teachers were insisting we have traditional Crimby food in the canteen (sadly this just means mince pies instead of choccy cake and faux-banana custard), you get the idea…

  Mrs Stone type teachers were just putting on their scowls and wrenching out the textbooks for another ordinary week of school. It’s an understatement to say that she wasn’t getting into the Crimby Spirit, in the same way that it’s an understatement to say that the plantation owners “didn’t respect those Africans very much”.

  Stone had been drumming this kind of information into us harder than a mallet hitting a thumb instead of a tent peg. It was as if she had something to be personally sore about. You’d think that her primary motive over the Crimby season was to guilt-trip us to death about how people historically didn’t have the happiest of Yules. I mean, honestly, if she’d come in with an assortment of charity boxes most of us would’ve been happy to give a little something – all Mrs Stone was doing today was treating our class as if amongst us was the next Hitler, deserving of a rant about human rights. Alright, it’s pretty fair to say that around 60% of our Year had violent potential; I just didn’t personally feel like sitting through this barely-educational tirade when I had more current issues to worry about.

  At Christmas, the most depressing thing you expect to have to think about is Home Alone. It doesn’t go to say that you aren’t sympathetic hearing about natural disasters or starving children, but that was the problem – Mrs Stone failed to sound like she actually cared about slavery or the Holocaust; it sounded like she was on a one-woman mission to put every member of our class on a month-long downer.

  Even Mr Wallis in Geography who had been doing an eight-week module on Less Economically Developed Countries (with a case study on the Boxing Day tsunami) accepted that our class was already three weeks ahead of the lesson plan and didn’t need to hear about it any more than we needed to be watching Fawlty Towers.

  Various members of the class were coming out with some very low comparisons between Secondary school and Auschwitz. Seriously. If they think five times six hours a week of burnt pasta or soggy sandwiches and substandard teaching is much to complain about, they obviously haven’t lived. I speak as a girl who shares a teeny, cramped attic with four other young people – two brothers, kid sister and wicked stepsister – all without an excessive amount of complaining. The same goes for school; where is the camaraderie?

  The wheeling in of the television drew me out of my trance. Mrs Stone was putting on a video. Not literally, like she might her blouse or knickers or whatnot; she was shoving it into the video player. What was this, 1997? Clearly the upgrades at home had already got to me.

  Uh-oh. A clip flashed up on the screen of a crowd of African captives. T’was but the second full week of December and I was beginning to regret my movie-lesson yearnings. But then she fast-forwarded it through to an episode of The Simpsons. It seemed unreal – was she actually exhibiting her long-lost sense of humour?

  It was unreal. She found her spot on a politics-themed scene from Forrest Gump. I’d seen that film about fifty times, just like everything else in our battered 80s/90s video collection. Whatever she’d been trying to illustrate was lost on my inoculated mind.

  I switched off again and slid happily into some sort of daydream, recounting the various films we’d already been allowed to watch (God bless our endless flow of disposable supply teachers): the latest Harry Potter (meddled only by Señor Campbell’s Spanish subtitles), The Simpsons Christmas Special 2 DVD (in Art, and in the background, and only until the DVD player crashed), The Lion King (instead of a practical RM lesson, and this was enough to have Charlie volunteering to help Mr Beel unpack new hacksaws for next term rather than have to sit through eye-welling father/son trauma), an
d Moulin Rouge (Mr Wordsworth’s choice, which after half an hour of gentle spluttering, Andy proclaimed was “nothing but diluted porn!”).

  But I wasn’t daydreaming for long – Mrs Stone ambled over and dumped a pile of worksheets from on high, with a thump to the desk I was zizzing on, and a papercut to my nose. (That hacked me off for a whole week – every time I changed my top, blew my nose or washed my face, it stung like hell.)

  It’s always the small cuts that hurt the most – if you break a leg or something, you get a few weeks to lie in bed with TV, music, magazines and hot chocolate; but if you get a papercut, you just have to bumble merrily along with your life, irritating it as you go (apparently a papercut isn’t even worth a plaster – but who wants one on their face anyway?), and in the end you get so narked with it that you nibble the edge off it (which you can’t do if it’s on your nose), making it bigger, and it goes on and on like that until something else horrible distracts you from it, and a few days later –hey presto!- it’s gone, but if you’re me, then your face breaks out in spots or you get the flu, and this is probably the longest sentence I’ve ever written.

  The “bell” went for break. It wasn’t that our school had suddenly thought to standardise breaktimes – the staff still have perfect liberty to choose when that “time” is. This bell was Charlie’s “reminder” ringtone, set to annoy all the teachers into letting us go to break, minus the homework they’re busy locating a pen to write up on the board.

  “Bell’s gone!” announced Justin. “Time fer break!”

  “We don’t have a school bell,” Mrs Stone replied, matter-of-factly.

  Charlie’s phone rang out again, this time louder – he’d accidentally leant on the volume. He’s still learning how to use it, and at that point Harry’d only bought him the thing about two days ago, the same day he presented me with a NOW CD and Scarlett by Cathy Cassidy. Give my social situation, I would really rather have had the phone, but I knew Harry was trying to ply my brothers who still weren’t sold on him.

  “Charlie, put the phone away now!” she snapped, pointing at the row of A4 coloured cards on the badly-painted brick wall. “Orange Rule!”

  He blushed, but complied: “Mobile phones switched off or silent, Miss.”

  “And that’s a perfect example of why.” She tutted, scowling at him. “What if somebody had thought it was the fire alarm?”

  “Then they’d be very stupid,” sniggered Andy, who was sat beside Charlie.

  “Andy, speak up,” she yapped.

  “He said, ‘Mrs Stone is very stupid’,” snorted Justin.

  “Did not!”

  “Did too!”

  “Silence!” she spat. “I’m not having you boys distracting the rest of my class!” (From what?)

  Justin took that as an opportunity to unnecessarily burst into “I Predict A Riot”, to which Andy joined in, because generally if you’re a boy, backing up Justin means no-one’s going to turn on you.

  “I predict thirty-two thirteen year olds being late for break,” Mrs Stone replied, probably thinking she was incredibly witty.

  “We’re just thirteen, Miss; not thirty-two thirteen,” said Andy, boredly.

  “Fourteen, some of us,” added Justin.

  “Do you even know what thirty-two times thirteen is?” Mrs Stone frowned. “If one of you can answer that, then you can all-”

  “Wacky Macky’s job now, Miss,” grumbled Charlie, who’d been as disappointed as anyone that the Number One Worst PSHE Supply Teacher And Librarian had been promoted to Number One Worst PSHE And Maths Supply Teacher And Librarian thanks to the staff shortage.

  “Who?”

  “Miss MacDonald, Miss.”

  “I’m not having you talking like that about one my colleagues, Charlie.”

  “It’s two minutes ’til next lesson, Miss!” Andy moaned.

  “I’m going to sue her!” hissed Kay, unwisely, considering that we sat at the front.

  “Fort it was break?” came a groan from the back of the room.

  “It was, until we got kept in for all twenty minutes of it, you twit!” snapped Andy, although he’d been half the problem.

  “Mr Smithson’s going to kill us…” I muttered, realising something far, far worse had happened. It wasn’t supposed to have been break. It was supposed to have been Maths, and we were about to be half an hour late.

  Kay caught on and snaffled total credit for the discovery. “Miss! I just realised. It’s not even break. We’re supposed to be in Maths right now!”

  The change in Mrs Stone’s face was absolutely priceless. I was nearly convinced that she had never been so embarrassed in her entire career. “…Oh. Well in that case, you had all better go.”

  #2 Jesus Is Coming – Look Busy!

  “Jesus Christ!”

  “Somebody called?” Charlie popped his head down through the bathroom floor to the living room. The horrified look of a second’s worry about slipping destroyed any possible comedic value in this comment.

  “Not funny,” said Aimee, obviously in a mood about something as per usual.

  “What?”

  “Making jokes about Jesus.”

  “But Christmas is Christ – with a ‘mas’ on the end. We’re supposed to be celebrating Jesus, so why not have as much fun about him as we possibly can?”

  “Then what’re we meant’ah do at Easter?” asked Zak.

  “Eat chocolate,” Charlie joked. “Easter is the celebration of chocolate, right?”

  “Why do we celebrate Jesus dying?” asked Kitty, who until then had been lying on the floor with her feet in the air, innocently drawing Mary, Joseph and the little baby Jesus with Tipp-Ex on the back of the Radio Times.

  “We celebrate the resurrection,” corrected Harry. “And I thought you didn’t believe in God, Aimee.”

  “I don’t; I just know where this is going. Charlie’s gonna spend the whole next year answering only to the name Jesus, and we’ll all be expected to call him that, in public.”

  “Hey, great idea!” Charlie was beaming. “I was only trying out the joke some guy said on TV, but that might work…”

  “You’ve gone and given him ideas now.” I smirked, knowing that Jesus/Charlie was destined to annoy her a million times more than any of the rest of our (certifiably nutso) family.

  “Who’s ‘he’, the cat’s mother?” gurned Charlie.

  “It’s the cat’s father if it’s a he,” Zak corrected.

  “Which cat?” asked Kitty, naїvely.

  “Any cat, Kit,” Charlie sighed. “I just meant that you have to call me ‘Jesus’ and not ‘he’ or ‘Charlie’.”

  “Charlie…” I went to say. “Oh, jeez,” I added, under my breath when I immediately got it “wrong”.

  “Kewl. Now it’s ‘Jeez’, not ‘Jesus’!” he gasped, in mock inspiration.

  “If it works suitably when we walk past the church, I fail to care,” I said.

  “Yeah, but what were you gonna say?” he probed. “You just said ‘Charlie – oh, jeez’.”

  “Charlie, O’ Mighty Jeez,” gushed Zak, in faux-worship.

  “I was gonna say don’t burn your address book just yet.”

  “Oh crap – why?”

  “Malice’s number.”

  “Merde,” he mumbled, remembering one word from his old French class – one that his teacher almost certainly hadn’t taught him.

  “Terribly soz, man.” Zak grinned. “’Fraid it’s rubby-bin fishin’ time!”

  “Just ask her for it again,” mumbled Aimee, flicking the TV channel, probably wishing she could switch over from my brothers.

  “Hmm, that might work,” Charlie pretended to ponder, “if she was still talking to me.”

  “Well all know about that,” Zak grunted. “But y’know what they say – fresh mobile, fresh start?”

  That got Charlie laughing – so far as I knew, nobody else had ever muttered those ludicrous words of wisdom before.

  “You’ve got Laura now an
yway,” he joked, remembering the penpal Charlie had got lumbered with the very moment he set foot in our clasé.

  “Laura’s some girl on the other side of the world – what difference would she make?”

  “Spain’s not the other side of the world!” Kitty protested. “Australia is!”

  “Yes, Kit,” I shushed her. You don’t question that kid’s Geography.

  “You should write back to your penpal anyway, Harley,” Charlie teased. “Find out if he knows anything juicy about Laura?”

  “Grr…” I grumbled. I’d only read his letter a few days ago, dog-eared (dog-toothed) as it was. I’d not known what to say back. Gerardo had sent a photo of himself, in which he looked about as nerdy as me, making me feel silly for getting so het up about how I came across:

  Dear Harley,

  Fortunately for you I speak pretty good English. Alfi my friend is very sorry. When he read a letter from his friend Devon, he thought she was joking about something and now she is ingry.

  I will say about me because you told me enthusiastically about you. I have fourteen years, and I have two brothers and one sister. Their names are Isaac who has seventeen and Emma who has eleven and Jorge who has siz. My school is very boring and there is no interesting names like Harley. My favourite band is Kiss and am on the football team at school.

  T.T.F.N., what ever it means – Gerry.

  He’d signed his name with a curly “G”. But what do you say back to somebody who resembles a mole in their photo, yet claims to be a footie-playing glam rock fan? I supposed I could warn him off with the assertation that I rate McFly better and hate all sports (which would be closer to the truth) – I’d have to look at the reply Charlie’d got from Laura for insight into how a Spanish girl would relate to boys:

  Dear Charlie,

  In answer to your question, yes I love Judy Blume books, but you seem to know surprising much about them. In my opinion, the Tomb raider games to write about seem very immature and you are really stuck on the second floor of the new Sonic? My male friend Gerry would be able to help.

  In the picture, I would say that it looks “Cute”. But I can not see your face behind the hair. You should definitely get cut, and perhaps this “Malice” (That is evil? You have weird names) might like better.

  Sorry if I offended you, the love of Laura x