Speak and spell

There are some things you learn at school that stay with you, that enhance your ability to interact with the world.  Off the top of my head, these are:

• Rudimentary understanding of the basics of grammar and punctuation
• Ability to do percentages
• How to order beer in French

Then there are some things that you will literally never need to know.  This list is quite extensive, so I have made it as concise as possible:

• That V=IR.  I guarantee three months after your final Physics class, you will no longer remember what the V, the I, or indeed the R stands for.  I have a vague feeling it's something to do with electricity, but then I thought V was velocity, so who knows?
• How to say, "I am fifteen years old" in German.  To be honest, if you try this after the age of 18 on the internet, you can actually get arrested.
• How to jump over a series of small fences as quickly as possible.  You call it hurdles.  I call it "pretending to be a horse".

Then there are a few things which actually it would have been useful to learn at school, but for whatever reason, weren't deemed part of the curriculum.  My top three are:

• Touch typing.  I actually learned how to do this in an evening class, and it's been far more valuable and time-saving than any other qualification I've ever received.
• How mortgages work.  Why would I care how to calculate the third side of a triangle, whilst having no sodding idea what the difference between a base rate tracker and an offset standard variable is?
• The phonetic alphabet.

Let's take the final one.  The phonetic alphabet.  Over the years, I've made a stab at it, as when you're on the phone giving your postcode and so on, it's useful to be able to distinguish between the phonetically-similar "n" and "m" or "b" and "p" and so on.  But I've never really nailed it.

So here, below, is my working draft of the phonetic alphabet.  Feel free to adopt:

A - Alpha

B - Bravo

C - Camembert

D - Dinosaur

E - Elephant

F - Finger food

G - Grandma

H - Halitosis

I - Ice cream

J - Juliet

K - Ku Klux Klan

L - Lesbian

M - Monty Cat

N - Nigel

O - Ostrich

P - Pimp

Q - Quibble

R - Restraining order

S - Substitute teacher

T - Tongue twister

U - Umbrella

V - Violence

W - Wanker

X - X-ray

Y - Yelp

Z - Zebra

I just hope I get a phone call soon where I get to spell the word "walks".

"Walks.  That's Wanker Alpha Lesbian Ku Klux Klan Substitute Teacher."

Actually, I think we had one of those in our sixth form.