Hugh Reilly: Little lessons all add up to a mountain of experience

MALCOLM X once said: “Education is our passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to the people who prepare for it today.” A profound statement by someone who once misspelt his surname on a driving licence application form.

It has become very fashionable to deride the value of a sound education and heap juvenile insults such as nerd, geek and – my favourite – dweeb on those who enjoy much academic success. However, as I examine pink-fluff-filled navel, I realise that a good education is the reason why I love life.

Thanks to mastering Pythagoras’ theorem, I can calculate the optimum hypotenuse length of ladder needed to enable me to chamois-clean my windows. I feel a certain sadness when, from behind my twitching curtains, I watch exasperated, less well-educated neighbours struggle with extendable ladders to guesstimate the number of rungs required. My ability to juggle numbers in my head helps me solve Sudoku puzzles. In fact, I only fail to complete such a brainteaser when I have received unsolicited “assistance” from my short-sighted female companion. Her penchant for putting the same number in a box twice lends credence to the view that wearing varifocal lenses is a somewhat overstated solution to myopia.

My English teachers encouraged me to acquire a vocabulary that would exceed the 20 words of Glasgow’s east end lexicon. With a mind bursting with anagrams, synonyms and homonyms, I relish the challenge posed by a difficult crossword. However, it is a hollow victory to finish it when there is no-one else to witness one’s smug appearance. To be fair, this desperate emptiness is far preferable to the abject embarrassment felt sitting on a plane and failing to solve any of the obscure clues. The fellow passenger you had hoped to impress with your wordsmith skills cringes as he catches you switching from the cryptic to the coffee-time crossword. After an initial flourish, to your horror, you get stuck on 12 across, causing you to feign boredom and stare out the window at the interesting stratocumulus clouds below.

Science lessons taught me that evidence is everything. Just last week, when I was standing in my mother’s kitchen making a pot of tea, the old dear hirpled in and said: “A watched kettle never boils.” Call me a sceptic, but I decided to put her theory to the test by gawping at the appliance and, lo and behold, despite my best intense gaping, it began to gurgle uncontrollably and spout water vapour. Her belief in the power of watching smashed before her very eyes, mater returned to the living room a broken woman.

As a schoolboy, I only studied French for two years, but I had cause to use the language a few years back when I alighted from a train in Nice with my girlfriend. We had boarded at an unmanned station with a broken automatic ticket machine. Foolishly, we assumed that we would be afforded the opportunity to pay the fare to the sort of smiling conductor one normally encounters on FirstRail. When he did not appear, we intended to pay at the destination. Unfortunately, there had been a terrorist alert and, on stepping down from the train, we were met by paramilitary policemen.

On discovering we were sans tickets, the officer in charge demanded we cough up an extortionate fine or we would be guillotined (I think I may have mistranslated his final word). I frantically scoured my memory banks for some Français of my youth to defuse the situation. “Ecoutez et repetez: Comment allez-vous? J’ai un chat noir.” Perhaps it was my pronunciation, but my utterance only served to heighten the man’s ire. Luckily, my hitherto silent blonde squeeze intervened, saying: “Salut beau gosse! Comment ça va?” It was all Greek to me, but I think he liked her cute accent and soon the babbling about billets and argent was but a memory (although, for the life of me, I still don’t understand why they had to exchange phone numbers).

My one regret is that I didn’t pay enough attention in the geography class. As a keen hillwalker with no map-reading skills, each trek up the munros and corbetts is something of a mystery tour.

If only I had kept a pair of Clarks Wayfinder shoes with a compass in the heel, I wouldn’t be walking in the Scottish Alps with such apprehension.

Aye, you live and learn.