TEELINE - THE SILENT KILLER

Teeline.

           

            Sounds innocent enough, doesn’t it?

           

            The genteel tinkling of china cups on the poop deck of the Queen Mary?       

            Cucumber sandwiches served by deferential colonial waiters as we sit in wicker chairs and watch the Polo?

           

            And would sir care for some shorthand with his Earl Grey? No, sir would not; sir would prefer shortbread, thank you. In fact sir would prefer almost anything at all.

            If Carlsberg is probably the best thing in the world then shorthand is probably the worst.

            Ensconced in room GR250 we await the first formal assessment of the week. The preceding four days have advanced my knowledge of shorthand to the point where – given sufficient time – I can construct a couple of rudimentary words. But then given sufficient time, I can even write them out in longhand - legibly. 

            To pass the NCTJ Diploma requires entrants to demonstrate a speed of 100 words per minute. Now, I could only get anywhere near that if I wrote the same word, and it would have to be something like “a”…or “be” or “to” one hundred times. If I’m interviewing someone who repeatedly informs me that he wants “…to be a…” something unspecified, and he has a stammer, so that he repeats this 33 and a bit times, then this may perhaps be quite useful.

I know this isn’t the point; we’ve only had one week of the wretched thing. However, the prospect repeating this a further 25 times, added to the requisite two hours of nightly homework, fills me with a deeper dread than ever troubled Steve McQueen on his way to the Cooler.

A friend of mine is depressed. He claims to suffer from depression and his doctor has got fed up and finally put him on medication. This has only made him worse. I’d like to tell him to pull himself together; I’d like to tell him that there are plenty of people much worse off than himself; I’d like to tell him that if he wants to really find out what depression is, he should take a course on Teeline Shorthand. I’d like to, but of course I won’t.

And so we sit and wait for our austere school ma’am instructress to hand round the test sheets. Twenty minutes later, I’ve finished. I’m exhausted; wilting beneath her desultory glare as her frown confirms how little I’ve managed to get right. I feel like an eight year-old again. It’s not that I don’t want to learn, it’s just that I can’t, at least not in this pre-1944 Education Act, payment by results environment. There may not be a cane in sight but that’s all that’s missing to complete my complete humiliation and dejection.  In fact, it might even improve it.

I ask myself how much I need this. Will it change my life if somehow I manage to live nothing else but Teeline for the next six months and somehow scrape a pass?

This wasn’t what I enrolled on the MA in Magazine Journalism to do at the expense of everything. And so, perhaps regrettably, I can only reach one decision.

As Steve McQueen might well have said, bouncing his ball against the ball against the Cooler wall.

Teeline? Fuck it - I’m going over the fence!