« If music be the love of food... »

My music teacher at my first secondary school was the stuff of school legends, alas for all the wrong reasons. She couldn't control the class. Sagelike older students told of her having been locked in the cupboard by some fifth years. One especially good story told of a student suddenly standing up and shouting "I can't take this any more", rushing to the window, opening it and jumping out. Her classroom was on the first floor (North American chums - think "second floor"), so - somewhat understandably - the teacher was said to have shrieked and rushed out to find the head of the department. (He was made of much sterner stuff, and not infrequently was asked to grace our lessons with his glowering presence, in the hope of our knuckling down to actually working for a change.)

I digress from this poor suicidal student, still plummetting to her messy doom, or at least her messy broken bones - this was only the first floor, so her chances were perhaps quite good. In fact her chances were excellent, as immediately outside the classroom window was the rooftop of an adjacent one-storey section of the school building. As the story goes, she quietly climbed back in and studiously resumed her work, acting all baffled when the stoical head of department arrived with the hysterical teacher, now presumably questioning her sanity.

I have grave doubts that this story is true. There was indeed a suitable rooftop just outside the classroom, but I've no idea if the school was so lax as to have windows that could be opened sufficiently to let pupils do anything as reckless as throwing themselves out, or breathing fresh air for that matter.

What was also true is that the teacher couldn't control her classroom, a problem I had with my French teacher too. Both were lovely people, inasmuch as you ever got to know them, but weren't actually able to teach because classroom rowdiness made learning impossible, even for swots like me who were - initially at least - willing to try. In French I passed the time playing "Catchphrase"(1) with the boy who sat next to me - his name was Martin Laws.

In Music class I had no such intellectual distraction. My overriding memory of the class was that each day I had Music I would buy a King Sized Mars Bar and then make it my mission to surreptitiously eat the thing during class. I recall keeping it in the inside left pocket of my blazer, and I would periodically reach a hand in there and delicately claw out a small morsel of the gooey caramelly chocolatey bar, cunningly convey it to my mouth and luxuriate as it melted deliciously.

I'd make my way through the whole sludgy bar this way, turning an often tumultuously chaotic but more often dull music lesson into a haven of thrillingly illicit pleasure. Note that we weren't actually playing any instruments or (as I recall) listening to any music in these lessons, no - we were sat at desks learning (shudder) theory. I doubt I'd have been able to gradually scoff anything whilst actually playing the oboe, or even the deservedly humble triangle.

I prided myself on my clandestine porking skills, I never once got caught sneakily snarfing half-melted Mars, and I concluded that I was being extremely clever and discreet. I suspect, thinking back now, that my poor teacher had bigger things to worry about than the otherwise-attentive fat kid sat quietly eating five rows back, what with all the looming cupboards and fake suicides blighting her dream of harmonious pedagogy.

This has all sprung to mind as I sit on a train eating wine gums in exactly the same secretive way.

In any case, it's a fine way to eat chocolate. Go, now, if you have a copy of "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory", and read the description, fairly early on in the book, of how Charlie would eat his annual (annual!) chocolate bar. This is what I aspire to: to rediscover the joy of food by eating it slowly and by savouring every bite, although not necessarily from the inside pocket of a scratchy blazer under cover of the mayhem of an uncontrolled Music lesson. Though perhaps that's how all meals should be served?

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(1) Catchphrase was an 80s TV show presented by Roy Walker, where a visual puzzle suggesting a well known saying or phrase was lovingly rendered in state of the art (2) computer animation. The picture was revealed a bit at a time to contestants who had to guess what the phrase was, for fantastic prizes. There's a particularly good clip (here) where the partial revealing of the image makes the picture look extraordinarily rude. In French lessons, without any computerised graphics Martin and I would play on paper and, if I remember rightly, just draw a bit of a picture at a time. We probably didn't make noises like 'beeeowng' or 'doodle-oodle-ooodle-oodle-ooh'. Probably.

(2) Where we define "the art" as making pictures with "fuzzy felt"