One of the Furies from Marketing was away last week so I thought I’d assert myself and not write the blog. Remind them who was boss. But she came back unexpectedly and checked up on me, asking why no blog had been forthcoming. I stood my ground, put my hand on my hip and went all teen strop:
“I’d really love to have written something earlier but - you know what? - I literally couldn’t be bothered.”
Her response was swift, candid and unnecessarily physical.
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When you are building sports facilities on the scale we are, it is inevitable, understandable and wrong for people to suggest that the Arts have to take a back seat. This term I spent evenings at the Bromsgrove Festival listening to our choir sing the African Sanctus (the Birmingham Post review called Mr. Kingston a “local legend”) and, along with Mr. Bowen, taking pupils to the Bromsgrove Festival Young Musicians final. I have witnessed a stunning Words and Music evening in the Prep, a slick Charity Fashion Show for the shining ones in the Senior School, and a virtuoso Housman Verse Prize performance from the worthy winner, Alistair Aktas. Due to governor duties at another School, I regrettably missed the Chamber Choir performance at St. Swithin’s Worcester, but all should note too that auditions for next term’s Midsummer Night’s Dream have been cracking on apace in a week when numerous RADA certificates were awarded.
So, yes, it is a whopping big sports arena, but let’s all remember: our orchestra plays Mozart Symphonies.
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This week, the diet (thank you for not asking) was given a mauling due to a mighty induction lunch with a new governor. I was wondering why I still felt hungry after so large a meal until, on leaving the table, I realised I had deposited most of my goodies (including the raspberry coulis) over the floor around my chair. (Whoever dreamt up eating coulis with a fork was clearly the same sadist who put an “s” in the world lisp). Sheepishly following the governor out, I inadvertently stepped in the coulis and trailed it down the carpet. It now looks to visitors as if I butcher my guests and drag them into my dining room. The detention queue might look more nervous than usual this week.
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My unpopularity graph is likely to go Alpine because I have just made up the new Senior School monitors. It’s for the most part a democratic process. Staff and pupil votes are counted, and house recommendations assimilated. Yet the plethora of extraordinary young people in the current Lower Sixth (we could make up two or three times as many monitors as we do) means some exceptional pupils do not join the team. I am always touched by the pride and the utter lack of cynicism of our older pupils, manifest especially in their total respect during the solemn signing in ceremony. But that means feelings run high. Accusations that I am biased towards or against a particular gender, race, House, subject, examination system, or even extra-curricular activity have all, in the last six years, been levelled at me by disappointed parents and pupils. At times of such emotion, reason is sometimes as intangible as froth on a daydream. Best to concede and let myths go out into the car park and unto the world.
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I lunched at the Prep School this week with the young people who have volunteered to be “buddies” for other pupils. They told me the biggest problem people face in schools is gossip. Same with adults, I said. At Prep Chapel earlier in the week I had recounted the ancient tale of the mouthy woman who one day, regretting her careless words, went to the village wise woman to ask how she could undo the hurt her gossip had caused. The wise woman told the villager to pluck a chicken and drop the feathers along the road. The villager, thinking this was some kind of magic spell, did as she was told and returned to the wise woman the next day. But all the wise woman said was: “Now go back to the road, collect the feathers and tell me what you find.”
The villager did as she was told. When she returned to the wise woman, the villager said:
“Some feathers were still there, although in different parts of the road, but some had vanished on the wind. I’ll never get them back.”
And then she realised: so it is with words.
