My earliest foray in irony

At school currrently, we have been doing loads of different events that's been eating into instruction time -- kids preparing for the Spring Fayre, "Red Nose Day" (a national fundraiser they do over here), and Easter celebrations. As a teacher, I tend to look down upon these things, which the colleagues that I'm close with always tease me about. She's the miser. Didn't you ever do stuff like this at school? they asked. So then I told this story:

Back when I was in high school, my school was very much into "spirit". Essentially, in every situation, we had bonding activities. We went to camp together, had competition pitting the classes against each other, initiations of the first-year students by the fourth-years -- all sorts of stuff. Actually, it was brilliant, and most kids thought so.

On major holidays, like Christmas and Thanksgiving, we would have a special lunch and each of the four classes in the high school would perform a skit of some sort. The worst thing about those plays was that the accoustics in our gym were rubbish and no-one spoke loudly enough. And I went to school with loads of little Japanese girls and they never spoke loudly enough.

For two years, I was the writer of the plays. I tended to write creatively a lot in those days, plus I was really loud and bolshie and made them do it. I had an great idea of how to combat the accoustic problem: we would pre-record our voices onto tape and while we were acting, our voices would be dubbed. Plus, it would be funny that we were out of time with our voices. It would be like one of those dubbed kung-fu films. Well, for various reasons, but mostly because it was too subtle, no-one got it and we lost. It didn't stop me from doing it the next year and us losing again.

You know, that was you being really ironic, one of my pals said, referring to the dubbing. She continued to say that it was funny and it was just proof that I was meant to come and live here in Britain. Just maybe she's right.