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Cure 4 Cancer
Dec. 4th, 2009 08:29 pmNot very long ago at all, I said that there was something accidentally terrible I did in primary school that I couldn't bring to mind, and that if I thought about it too hard I would remember and it would be awful. I've remembered. It's awful.
As far as I remember, our project task one day was to draw out an advert for a new medicine. I can't remember why we were doing this - it might have been something that came off being taught about the plague of 1665 as part of the Tudors and Stuarts. However it happened, we had to stretch our imaginations to think up some sort of magic new product to benefit society and draw a poster for it.
I had been playing Civilization in a very experimental I'm-in-primary-school sort of way quite a lot around that time (which had also led to me being the only one in the class the same year who knew what a trireme was), and one of the Wonders that you can get towards the end of that game is "Cure for Cancer". I didn't know what it was, but it had a terrifying Civilopedia entry which started "Of the diseases that continue to plague humankind, cancer remains one of the most feared and deadly. Despite huge efforts to find a cure for this malady, it continues to reap its toll each year." So all I knew about it was that it was this awful disease for which nobody had discovered a cure.
So cancer became my chosen medicine's target - bottle it up, give it a catchy name like "Cure 4 Cancer" or, as it was labelled, "C4C" (because I was still at the under-10 stage where you were allowed to name things with numbers in the middle un-ironically) and there you go. This is probably already the most tasteless thing that someone could have done in the situation, but you don't realize things like that when you're that age.
What I didn't know then, and only realized in retrospect because of the sudden disappearance of all her hair, was that my teacher was undergoing treatment for leukaemia at the time.
This event doesn't quite match the surrealist elegance of my brother, who when the class was asked to draw "what they thought God might look like" during an RE lesson with the local Catholic minister Father Moran, couldn't think of anything and handed in a drawing of a wedge of Swiss cheese instead. On taking it off the top of the pile of hand-ins, the minister hurriedly tried to think up something about God being powerful and the cheese having a powerful smell, but I think that the damage to the lesson had already been done.
As far as I remember, our project task one day was to draw out an advert for a new medicine. I can't remember why we were doing this - it might have been something that came off being taught about the plague of 1665 as part of the Tudors and Stuarts. However it happened, we had to stretch our imaginations to think up some sort of magic new product to benefit society and draw a poster for it.
I had been playing Civilization in a very experimental I'm-in-primary-school sort of way quite a lot around that time (which had also led to me being the only one in the class the same year who knew what a trireme was), and one of the Wonders that you can get towards the end of that game is "Cure for Cancer". I didn't know what it was, but it had a terrifying Civilopedia entry which started "Of the diseases that continue to plague humankind, cancer remains one of the most feared and deadly. Despite huge efforts to find a cure for this malady, it continues to reap its toll each year." So all I knew about it was that it was this awful disease for which nobody had discovered a cure.
So cancer became my chosen medicine's target - bottle it up, give it a catchy name like "Cure 4 Cancer" or, as it was labelled, "C4C" (because I was still at the under-10 stage where you were allowed to name things with numbers in the middle un-ironically) and there you go. This is probably already the most tasteless thing that someone could have done in the situation, but you don't realize things like that when you're that age.
What I didn't know then, and only realized in retrospect because of the sudden disappearance of all her hair, was that my teacher was undergoing treatment for leukaemia at the time.
This event doesn't quite match the surrealist elegance of my brother, who when the class was asked to draw "what they thought God might look like" during an RE lesson with the local Catholic minister Father Moran, couldn't think of anything and handed in a drawing of a wedge of Swiss cheese instead. On taking it off the top of the pile of hand-ins, the minister hurriedly tried to think up something about God being powerful and the cheese having a powerful smell, but I think that the damage to the lesson had already been done.
