Dreaming out the window close, and onto the frosty misty oval, with the emply flagpole post,  at my desk, always a mess inside, and with a burly teacher on a chalkboard neat writing, and information being offered in lines of text verbose for us all to take note.

Perhaps we could escape from class, after, and go up to the yabbie dam to yabbie with string and meat. The muddy water glistening in the sun, with at the shallow end, a glimpse  of a yabbie crawling up to catch a bit and then yanked out by the claws and jaws, with yabbie on string and into the bucket in the mud. Cries of joy of course, having caught a Yabbie, dang the cold, the ice and the wet.

But yesterday Jacko wanted to build a raft, with a couple of logs, and rope, to float out on the icy Yabbie Dam.  So we dug out some sucky logs and slimy bits all over, went slip sliding along the muddy bank in school clothes already grey, and now wet and a mess, with our jumpers all slimed up from the algal on the logs, so slippery.  But still we made the logs fast together with a rope, but not stable to stand on.  Our limited engineering, although environmentally sound, was not for the faint hearted.  We managed to drag it around, and if you lay on the slippery slimer logs, you could paddle across the frigid dam in the cold rain from above, and look down through the green into the Yabbie kingdom below.

Still, we enjoyed the secret break from school, with enough risk to exercise our imaginations, and cunning.  How to avoid being caught by prefect-ures and dominating curly teachers, who would whip a cane out as soon as look sideways at the bedraggled students coming in, just fresh from the Yabbie dam, with a bucket of Yabbies, we might get the chef to cook on the side, so they turned all red like a poor students lobster.

Now back to history, the history of the civil war, the anthropology of mesopotamia, and still we wonder on it, with the chalk and writing, and having to copy it all to learn it.  No one ever wrote nothing about how to Yabbie, and how to build rafts from logs and twine, and how to catch them with meat on a string.  You just knew, and without ever having written it down, I could do it all again tomorrow, without a refresher course.