Long standing readers will recall the summer of torment when I inexplicably rubbed Factor 50 suncream into my eyes rather than adopting social norms and applying it to my skin. Well, I went one better last half term and damaged my ligaments in a curious cycling accident. Curious because the cycle in question was nailed to a gymnasium floor. Let me explain. Dismounting with butch gusto, I forgot to extricate my right foot from the strap. I duly fell into the lady cyclist next to me (my right foot still attached to my own bike). Since this unfortunate lady was listening to her I-Pod and in a state of blissful detachment, the sudden appearance of my head in her lap was unsurprisingly followed by a panic-induced flurry of blows to my face. As I was still strapped in to the next door bike and therefore unable to move, I had no option but to lie there and take the beating like a man.
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I’m not sure I have ever been as proud of the School as I was on Remembrance Sunday, and not simply because of the levels of respect, smartness and discipline on display from our pupils. More because those pupils represented over thirty nations who had spent periods of the twentieth century engaged in the most terrible conflict with one another. After our services, I watched British, Russians, Germans, Chinese, South Africans and a host of other nationalities walk away together into the crisp, bright morning. Sometimes, life really can be obviously and upliftingly symbolic.
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On Wednesday evening, the third annual Bromsgrove Foundation Lecture was held in the Lansdowne Club, off Berkeley Square in London. The superb Dame Julia Cleverdon gave the collective conscience and intellect of a one hundred and fifteen strong invited audience a thorough shaking. Dame Julia (one of the Fifty Most Important Women in Britain according to The Times) has herself a list of achievements as impressive as Smokin’ Joe Frazier’s uppercuts, but readers of a noble vintage will extend serious respect when I tell them that she once worked in .....wait for it ... Industrial Relations at British Leyland in 1972. While the import of this position may be lost on younger readers, venerable observers will surely acknowledge that Damehood is poor reward for what has to be industry’s equivalent of climbing Mount Everest in leotard and flippers while carrying a Yak.
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I should add that when the gym staff pulled me off the terrified lady and the situation was explained to her, she apologised. Despite feeling and looking like a pizza (puffy and bulbous at the extremities but fine in the middle), I apologised in turn for entering her life so abruptly and without proper introduction. As the staff applied ice to an ankle growing quick as bamboo, I struck up polite conversation with my onetime assailant and discovered that the lady had young children and was thinking about appropriate schooling. Ever the trooper, I suggested, through my tears, that she take a look at Bromsgrove. She said she would. She hasn’t.
