Luke 8:18 "Therefore consider carefully how you listen."

I'm sitting in a classroom, and my hands are dangling over the edge of the old-fashioned wooden desk. From somewhere outside the noise comes of laughter, cheers, a thudding ball. Sports time.
At the front of the class our teacher, small nose, glasses, slightly furrowed forehead. I think of him as old, but he's probably quite young. The chalk squawks slightly as he demonstrates a quadratic equation on the chalk board.
He tells us once how he wasn't always a teacher, how when he left university he went to work for a few years on an oil rig. It's good work for boys, not for girls, he tells us. You get paid for the whole month, but only work two weeks. It's hard, long shifts and no outside time, alcohol is forbidden. But people pay off their houses in a few years that way. Work's not as easy to come by as it used to be, he adds. When I was up there in Aberdeen they were crying out for young men.

Funny. I never excelled at maths. I was in his class for two or three years, but of all the serious lessons I listened to, that is the one that I remember most vividly. The idea that this dull, respectable, prematurely elderly young man could once have been so daring as to work on an oil rig. And that women couldn't do it. That stung.

Perhaps he wasn't all that dull after all, I remember thinking. Now I look back, and wonder if I confused the dullness of the subject with the man. Whether he was probably quite fun, quite dry and witty. And I wonder too what my oil rig is, what when I look back and tell tales to my children will be the wildest, craziest story of my youth. It will probably be something quite mundane. Like bothering to continue with the walk to ordination.