A bad spell

The child is the father of the man. Largely, it's an absent father but when things get though, it steps back in. Which is annoying. The one time you usually don't want to find yourself reverting to your eight year old self is when you are put under pressure. But today this is what happened to me and it was all thanks to spelling.

Spelling is not something I was ever particularly good at as a boy. Not terrible, just consistently a little bit wrong. At primary school I was once asked to write a diary of my weekend. I wrote a very happy account of my trip to Bugger King.

The time came (somewhere in the teenage years) when I decided that since my spelling was never going to match the cerebral heights of the rest of my academic attributes, I would renounce it. I saw strong spellers as sycophantic consensus seekers and moved on with my stellar life.

This largely worked. I relaxed about the whole thing and in time even became quite a good speller, thanks to years of education. I'm also an decent proofreader when I put my mind to it. Indeed, I think that my earlier battles with spelling helped me out in this regard by making me more suspicious than most; I know that spelling mistakes could lurk in the simplest of words.

Today though all my defences where breached and my childhood anxieties came flooding back. It turned out that something I was working on had been sent to the printer's with a host of shocking spelling errors left in it. The reason they were there was due to my disorganization, not my bad spelling. I had accidentally sent some uncorrected text off to the typesetter and never spotted my mistake. I was horrified and ashamed at the thought that this had been printed on my watch. With sinking heart I braced myself to become the guy who doesn't know the difference between 'desert' and 'dessert'.

Then the trouble really began. I was told there was still time to fix the errors before printing, but not long. Suddenly, I had to proofread the guilty patch of text quickly and under severe pressure. I was already shaken and at this my confidence crumbled. Something switched in my brain and I didn't know how to spell anything. I looked at desert and dessert and didn't know which one was which. Shakespearian was wrong, someone said. Right, I said but had no idea how to fix it. Shaksperian would have been my first guess, the Shakesperean. I began to sweat with fear at shelfish and found myself having to get a dictionary out to check words like, 'Canterbury', 'edible' and even 'occasion'!

It all ended happily, I think, and I'm fairly sure I caught all the mistakes in this last minute read. The trouble is  I'm that eight year old boy again, dreading the next spelling test. Will I start righting about beefbuggers? Will Wenesday again become a word that flumoxes me? I feel britlle. Demorralized. Hideously certain that I am going to coke up again soon.