LukesEnglishPodcast - 68. Childhood / Growing Up / School Days - Phrasal Verbs and Expressions | Текст песни

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• LukesEnglishPodcast
• 68. Childhood / Growing Up / School Days - Phrasal Verbs and Expressions

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This is a transcription of the first part of the episode, in which I describe my childhood. There is also a list of vocabulary below.

[1:40 – Childhood / Growing Up / School Days story]
Let’s get started. So, childhood, my childhood.

Well, I was born in 1977 and in fact my mum gave birth to me on a Sunday in 1977. My parents decided to name me Luke. They decided to call me Luke. Now, I wasn’t named after Luke Skywalker even though I was born in 1977. I wasn’t named after Luke Skywalker from Star Wars. Although I am a big Star Wars fan. I’ve always loved Star Wars, but I wasn’t named after him. I wasn’t named after Cool Hand Luke, the Paul Newman movie either. Instead I was actually named after my great-great-grandfather, who was also called Luke. And my mum in particular really looked up to him, because he was like very successful person in our family. So basically my mum really looked up to him. So they decided to kind of… I think they liked the name Luke anyway, but they also partly wanted to name me after my great-great-grandfather.

So I grew up in West London. That’s where we lived in a place called Ealing in West London. So that’s where I grew up initially. In fact, I grew pretty quickly, my parents used to measure me on the wall. So I’d stand on the wall and they’d use a pencil to mark a line on a wall and then every few months or something they’d measure me again and we can see how much I’d grown. I grew pretty quickly like most kids grow pretty fast. I was brought up by my parents, of course. My parents brought me up, I think, to be quite a good lad.

My parents were quite strict sometimes but not too strict. I don’t think I was spoilt as a child either. I mean there were plenty of things we weren’t allowed. For example we weren’t allowed to watch James Bond movies or The A Team. I wasn’t allowed to have a TV in my bedroom for example. I wasn’t allowed to eat too many sweets, things like that, but they weren’t too strict either.

My parents were comfortable with money, but not really well off or rich or wealthy, but they were just comfortable. So I wasn’t really born with a silver spoon in my mouth or anything like that. I’m just from a normal family. My parents and family used to say that I looked.. I took after my Dad. They said that I really took after my Dad because I looked like him and I was quite sporty and good at music, like him.

So, also I could be a bit naughty and badly behaved at times and my parents would sometimes tell me off and send me to my room but it was never that serious. Actually, I went through quite a kind of naughty phase, I was quite stubborn for a few years. I remember like my mum having trouble kind of like… she took me to the shops when we walked back if was kind of like annoyed or something, I’d just stop walking and say: “I’m not moving”. So, I was quite naughty and a bit stubborn, but I grew out of it. Actually I grew out of that phase.

I have an older brother so I would get a lot of his old clothes. So I’d wear his hand-me-down clothes. And we also used to play with toys that had been handed down by my dad and my uncle. So we had all these old toys that we used to play, that had been handed down by my father.

I kind of went through a sort of lying phase for a little while, when I was a kid. I think, that’s quite normal for children and my parents would sort of suspect that I was lying about something. You know, they would know that I was telling fibs or telling tall tales and they’d make me own up to it. But I got over my lying phase. I grew out of it. I was quite a hyperactive as a kid. I always had too much energy, I was always full of beans. My parents would wonder where I’d get my energy from. It turns out, the orange squash that I used to drink, when I was a kid, was just full of e-numbers, so full of chemicals that made me hyperactive. Sometimes by brother and I would stay up late listening to the radio or playing with our Star Wars figures. Obviously we had to be very quiet, because we weren’t allowed to stay up past a certain time.

I used to look up to my older brother quite a lot. He’s only two years older than me, but that’s quite a lot when you are a kid. So you know, I used to look up to him. He had cool friends, I’d sort of enjoy having out with him and kind of watching him do his art work. He used to do lots of artwork and I kind of sit there watching him doing his art work. So, I kind of looked up to him. To be honest, I was probably quite an annoying little brother and sometimes he would just tell me to get lost and things like that.

Birthdays and Christmas were always really great days. I’d look forward to them so much that I’d be literally counting down the days before my birthday and I wouldn’t be able to sleep the night before. When you’re a kid, teeth, your teeth are quite important, because really your first set of teeth, your baby teeth or your milk teeth, they kind of would fall out sometimes and that was always quite a big event when a tooth came out. And you’d try to keep the tooth and then put it under your pillow for the tooth fairy who’d come in the night and replace it with a coin. This is like one of those things that you believe when you are a child. The only thing is that I was actually scared of the tooth fairy, I was afraid of it, frightened of the tooth fairy and so I would actually put my pillow outside my room, in the hallway with the tooth under it. And then, that way the tooth fairy didn’t have to come into my bedroom, because I was scared of it. It’s kind of pathetic, I know.

I also found out when I was a child that Father Christmas, Santa Claus wasn’t real. When one night I couldn’t sleep because I was too excited and sometime during the night someone entered the room and started filling my stocking with presents. I thought it was Father Christmas, so I pretended to be asleep but secretly watched him. It was my Dad. He wasn’t even dressed as Santa. So obviously, then I realised that Santa didn’t really exist.

I went to a nursery school, which is a kind of preschool. When you’re about sort of 3 or 4 years old. All I remember doing there was just playing games. Then I went to a normal comprehensive state school. In the UK here, in Britain, the names of our schools can be a bit confusing, because basically, first off all, you have comprehensive schools and those are ones which are paid for by the government. So they are like state schools, free schools let’s say, comprehensive school or states schools. Then you got private schools which are… you have to pay to go to one of those schools, you have to pay. And most of them have a kind of entry level exams. You have to be a certain level of student to get into a private school then your parents have to pay, okay. But then you’ve got level schools and those strangely are called public schools. Now, public schools are actually just private schools. They’re very exclusive, private schools. And what we would call a public school would be a comprehensive school. Right? Actually, in England a public school is like a very very… difficult to get into and very expensive, very high-level. These are schools like Eton and Harrow. Prince William went to Eton, I think. Just kind of give an example of what kind of school that is.

So I just went to comprehensive school. And the first school you go to is your primary school. That’s from age about 5 to 11. And then from primary school you move on to Secondary School. Secondary school would be kind of 11 to 15 or 16 years old. And then if you can… You can leave school then and get a job, if you want but if you choose to you can go on to study more and you would do.. you’d probably go to college like a sixth form college. When you’re 15 or 16 you take exams called GCSEs and most people take about 9 subjects. Things like: English language, English literature, history, geography, physics, biology, chemistry, stuff like you know maths, maybe French, drama, music, things like that. And after that you go on to do A levels which is the next level of qualification. You take your A levels when you’re about 18 years old. And most of people take about three A levels or maybe about 6 As levels. And once you get your A level, you can then sort of apply to go to university and you need a certain number of A levels to get into good universities.

In the universities here, you’ve got basically like… probably like 3 types of university here. The most famous ones are obviously Oxford and Cambridge. They’re very well established, very famous universities. And those two universities together are called “Oxbrigde”. So if you went to an Oxbridge university it means you go to a very good university. Then the next level of university and these are also excellent places, these the next level down, would be the red brick universities.

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