Written for Normal Happening’s Daily Inkling – Prompt: Longest Handshake
This blog post is a bit different, and I don’t normally do things like this – but since I read the prompt, I couldn’t stop thinking about what I was going to write.
There are moments when time stands still, where minutes feel like hours. The longest handshake I have ever been forced to endure probably only lasted thirty seconds. But when I think about it now, it feels like it lasted several minutes.
My time at secondary school was dogged by bullying. I was, and still am, extremely quiet. This happened on a careers day when I was around 14 or 15 and the school had got two female careers advisors in for a day and one of the workshops centred around interviews. They inevitably asked for a volunteer to demonstrate a handshake. My classmates all decided as one that it would be me.
I stood up, and did as my peers wished me to. The lady whose hand I shook described my handshake as being like a wet fish and told the whole class. The whole class jeered and laughed at me. And to this day, whenever I go for an interview, my subconscious thoughtfully brings this memory to the forefront.
To tie this post into the overall theme of the blog, Doctor Who really helped me through secondary school. Around the same time, I saw Blink for the first time and it blew me away. Despite having dipped my toes in around the end of Series 2, it was the build-up to the finale of Series 3 that got me hooked and in this respect, I never looked back. It was probably the way that the Doctor stood up to bullies and for the underdog that I found encouraging then and continue to now.
And now writing about Doctor Who, I’m probably the happiest I’ve ever been.
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