James Hannah

So, I was think­ing about the small, unso­licited and unin­tended words of inspi­ra­tion that peo­ple have gifted me. See pre­vi­ous let­ter.

Teach­ers, much like par­ents, are in the fir­ing line for every­thing. Any tiny inflec­tion or mis­placed com­ment might stay with a child, and fes­ter away for a life­time to come.

In 1990, my Maths teacher read out the results of the lat­est test – all of the scores aver­ag­ing about 13 out of 16. He came to my name. “James,” he said, paus­ing just for half a beat, “1.” The whole class fell silent. To this day I con­sider myself ter­ri­ble at maths, but in real­ity I’m prob­a­bly only aver­age. Or mean or mode or whatever.

Two years later, my Eng­lish teacher read out the results of our mock ‘A’ Lev­els – all Bs and Cs. “James,” he said, “well, ‘Ele­phant’ begins with it”. The whole class fell silent.

Some of you bra­ni­acs may con­clude from this that I am a stu­pid per­son. I’m afraid I’m too stu­pid to come up with a counter-argument, but I will con­cede that these are merely teach­ers read­ing the results of my labours, rather than author­ing any­thing ‘influ­en­tial’ as such.

One ‘A’ Level his­tory class in par­tic­u­lar was respon­si­ble for adjust­ing my brain so much so that I could actu­ally phys­i­cally feel the world expand­ing around me. I can’t do it jus­tice here, but, in short, the teacher explained that: The Big Bang, evo­lu­tion, and the known his­tory of the uni­verse will be seen as lit­tle more than super­sti­tion, fable and quack­ery – it’s just what we assume based on what we know. The more you know, in short, the more you know you don’t know, and ever will it be the way. To grasp that with my stu­pid head was quite the revelation.

If it’s stu­pid­ity you sus­pect, get a load of this.

In the early 1980s, I was part of a con­ver­sa­tion with a group of lads – we were all about seven years old. We were ask­ing each other how much we could count up to. One lad bragged about hav­ing counted up to a thou­sand, but I con­sid­ered that just bravado. Another lad called the bragger’s bluff: “No way. That’s so stu­pid. Do you know how long it can take you to count up to a hun­dred thou­sand? Sixty years.”

I had no rea­son to ques­tion this claim, and it goes down as one of the most influ­en­tial state­ments of my entire life. To this very day my sense of per­spec­tive about how long a given task is going to take has been affected. It man­i­fests itself as a crip­pling lack of ambi­tion. I’ll look at a book, and see it is 400 pages long, and just think, now way will I ever fin­ish that. So I won’t bother starting.

A quick bit of calculator-aided maths tells me that count­ing to 100,000, at a pace of 1 num­ber per sec­ond (which I think would take into account time spent sleep­ing and not count­ing), would take… Um… wait a sec:

• 100,000 sec­onds divided by…60 (sec­onds in a minute) is 1,667 minutes.
• 1,667 min­utes divided by 60 (min­utes in an hour) is 28 hours.
• 28 hours divided by 24 (hours in a day) is 1.17

So that’s 1.17 days. Not 60 years.

It is in fact 0.005 per cent of 60 years (includ­ing leap years). So my whole life has been cal­i­brated to an accu­racy of 0.005 per cent.

What strikes me about all this con­ver­sa­tional plank­ton is that —truly— no one’s ever going to have remem­bered say­ing any of these things. It’s just as hor­ri­fy­ing how influ­en­tial some throw­away or over­heard com­ment might have been as it is how lit­tle effect the most care­fully con­sid­ered, adjusted and per­formed piece of advice might have had.

j