And Then She Kissed Me

1981 (16 YEARS OLD)1 month ago

1981 - 16 Years Old

When I was at school, the British education system was very different to the one in the U.S. (or even the one in the UK nowadays). We didn’t have a cumulative GPA obsessed over for the four years of high school. Instead, we had 3 options:

1. Leave school at 16 with no exams (for people going into the trades) – 40% of students

2. Take the CSE exam (for those wanting to get into clerical jobs or retail) – 40%

3. Take the ‘O’ Levels (for white collar jobs or to go on to do 2 years of ‘A’ levels as prep for university) – 20%

I took my ‘O’ levels, which were administered by a national board. This meant that the collective of weirdos and oddballs that made up most of my teachers had absolutely no input into my grades.

Thank Christ.

My exams had all finished by early June, which meant there were about three weeks of nothing before the school year ended.

For those not going on to do ‘A’ levels at my school, they adopted the sod-off attitude towards showing up for three more weeks.

While my ‘A’ level in Chemistry would be held at the local college, I would be returning to my school to do my ‘A’s’ in Biology and Physics.

So I had to keep showing up, along with the small group of other students who were in the same situation.

The only saving grace from spending three weeks in a stuffy classroom reading novels that our English teacher, Mr. Ward, had conveniently ‘overlooked’ – such as Nabakov, Kerouac, and Henry Miller – was work experience.

Work experience was designed to give you a two-week hands-on look into your future career. I wanted to be a doctor at the time, so my school had arranged for my stint at the Horton General Hospital.

My two weeks at the Horton wasn’t some Doogie Howser experience, however. I didn’t get to save patients with unique diagnostic insights; I mostly hung out with and helped the nurses. They were, for the most part, a bawdy bunch, so I made them laugh, and we practiced our flirting skills on each other.

That’s what kept me showing up.

And although t wouldn’t be until about a year and a half later that I hit the nurse jackpot, it gave me inspiration.

Just not about becoming a medical doctor.

Besides a cornucopia of nurse flirting, there are two specific incidents stand out from this time. One horrific. The other sublime.

The first was a real medical experience. Horton General hospital only looked after patients with minor issues. All of the complicated illnesses, diseases, and trauma – the interesting cases – were sent to the Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford.

Horton seemed to only get the broken limbs and the heroes who had downed 12 pints of beer and a curry. But the latter group mostly worked their magic on a Friday night, and I didn’t work on a Saturday.

I don’t remember what I did job-wise. It wasn’t that interesting. It just seemed like an awful lot of carrying things around. They didn’t ask me to make beds, so I just assumed they’d talked to my mum. I was crap at that sort of thing.

And once or twice, I followed some doctors around.

The only real medical excitement was the time a patient was having a catheter removed. I didn’t know what one of those were, but a nurse explained it to me.

She did, however, leave out the screaming and the explosion of urine and blood that came along with it. At least in that poor sod’s case.

Apparently, that’s not quite normal, and it looked something like this:

Ok, it wasn’t exactly like this. But it wasn’t far off. Enough that a doctor, two nurses, and a couple of orderlies had to have showers and change. I had bolted out of range as soon as it all started, so I was fine.

Physically, at least.

And while my memory is probably exagerrating the event, it was closer to this than it was to Singhy’s work experience, making cups of tea at a solicitor’s office.

The other big event was a bit better. A new singer, Kim Wilde, had released a new album. She was apparently desperate enough for success that she had agreed to do a signing event at a record shop in Banbury.

My musical tastes were still in flux, and the video I’d seen for her single release “Kids in America” wasn’t really my cup of tea. But she was scrummy. And going to meet her was better that dancing in the blood-urine Trevi Fountain.

So I went.

My plan was to buy her 45 and have her sign it. But by the time I arrived at the record store, all of the 45s were sold out.

Bollocks.

So I decided if I was going to have to drop £3.99 on an album, I was going to get a kiss.

At the time, it seemed rational.

As I stood in the endless line (not much happened in Banbury), I tried to figure out what I was going to say and how I was going to say it. Should I use my normal accent, which was a bit posh, or should I go with some man-of-the-people accent?

I went through them in my head, and I had gotten to about 18 of the 115 accents and dialects that they have in the UK when I found myself standing in front of her.

She asked me who she should sign it to. I said, Tim, please in my normal accent.

Then I added with a confidence that surprised me, Any chance of a kiss, Kim?

She stood up, put her hands on my face and slowly parted my lips with her tongue. The gentle flicking of her tongue became stronger, and her she relaxed in a full-bodied sigh.

Yea, right.

She gave me a peck on the cheek.

But it didn’t matter. I floated home on a cloud, as The Foundations serenaded me in my head.

It probably should have been Chequered Love…

…but I hadn’t listened to the album yet, and I didn’t know that song existed.

The following day, I walked into the Horton like a new man. The nurses all gathered in the break room for a cup of tea and to listen to my story.

There was a lot of wolf whistling and ooh laa laas.

They even broke out the good biscuits.