Innocence

Do you ever get the feeling that everyone else was given a handbook to life and you were missed out? Or that you ever stepped out of the room at the exact moment all the important information was given out and it completely passed you by. I used to get it a lot at school. Our chemistry lessons were conducted by a woman with a very strong Chinese accent (she was Chinese – it wasn’t too surprising), she used to read from the text book in a flat, droning monotone pausing occasionally to look up and say “Do you understand?”. Pause. “Laura, do you understand?”. I didn’t but I didn’t like to submit anyone to anymore droning about catalysts (hey, I did learn something!) so I generally said I did and the lesson moved on. I was moved nearly to tears by maths lessons sometimes. When we did graphs our teacher used to say “So if x is 3 and y is minus 1 what does the graph look like” and everyone would draw huge bendy lines all over the place and I would have a neatly placed cross where the axi met. In the end I was advised to just miss that bit out in the exams as I was clearly never going to get it. I never have and I’ve never used it. So I think we can ultimately conclude that I am the winner.

But it’s not just school, I could live with that, it’s day to day things. I was astonished one day in to university that everyone seemed to know exactly what they had to do and their way everywhere. I followed them. I prefer to think of it as a sweet innocence rather than shades of autism (which a previous boss once suggested – I could name the day a date fell on rather too quickly and he asked if I’d ever been tested). This innocence led me to not realising that “Papa Don’t Preach” was about teenage pregnancy until Kelly Osbourne released it in 2002 (I was 22). I simply thought it was a tragic tale of someone’s dad not liking their boyfriend. “Hey Papa, don’t preach, I’ve made up my mind, I’m keeping my baby”. Easily misconstrued.

Occasionally this innocence and belief in the goodness of people (or having issues) has got me in to trouble and led to public, you could say national, embarrassment. Many years ago I was talked in to doing a fashion shoot for More magazine (I worked at Just 17 on the same floor and they were a person short, I was also a lot thinner and more willing to be photographed). The concept was “What I wear on a night out”. We wore what we would wear on a night out and then fashion experts would tell us what they thought. I took along a pair of black trousers and a black top. They asked if I would mind wearing one of their tops as too many people were in black. I agreed and was put in a lurex pink vest top with a feather boa. My hair was scragged in to a croydon facelift ponytail and my face was covered in pink eyeshadow and glitter. When it appeared in the magazine (and I had told people when it was coming out) it was accompanied by “me” (them) saying “oooh yeah, in this top I really tickle boys fancies and shake my tail feather”. I also looked insane. To add insult to injury I was given 1/10 by the fashion experts and told “Laura needs to tone it down a bit”. I was even beaten in the fashion stakes by a girl in a tracksuit. It was on the shelves for a fortnight. I seriously considered fire-bombing the news agents. All because I was nice!


If I ever do have kids (don’t worry I understand how that happens, I’m not that innocent) I shall equip them with plenty of knowledge for facing the world. Don’t worry about graphs, no one uses them. Chemistry is pointless. Never, ever get talked in to wearing feathers and pink eye shadow and remember that ultimately no one knows what they’re doing in life, some just hide it better than others.