I'm looking askew at that time I got 15-year-old giggles at an important school event, together with my best friend. Both of us regarded as excellent representatives of the English department. I had chosen to read aloud, in alternating lines, a serious, race-related poem by a really quite cool older student. The reading started poised, and my friend and I stood shoulder to shoulder, in all ways, facing a full and bright hall. Within a couple of lines, my voice tumbled off into a suck of air, and my friend started up with a nose-squeak, and on it went, as eyes congealed in a silent watch of our floundering performance. It was my first experience of having nowhere to hide, when things crumbled in a very public way. I don't know why, but despite the shame afterwards, it broke up some fallow ground, unceremoniously and straight down the middle. I had let down a fellow student who just happened to be the only black person in a very pale school by undermining their political poem with hiccuping hysterics, when really it was just the weevil-eyed, wimpled gaze of the nuns in the front row that had tipped seriousness into silliness. But from this I realised that you can accidentally do the wrong thing in the eyes of the world, and at fifteen a hall full of peers, parents and teachers is the whole world, and survive it. I didn't die of embarrassment, as I had predicted at the time, and neither did I die when I accidentally knocked over the huge strapping wooden door in the school hallway, wham, straight down, impossibly loose, or me, impossibly strong, or when I sellotaped a large wad of TCP-soaked cotton wool onto a chin spot and had to go to classes with a bright red circular burn, as well as the invincible mega-spot. These three randomly resurfaced, cookie, teen-sized curveball moments that quietly and subtly arced the onward march of days after them. Accidents happen, after all, and so do emotions. Thanks for listening.