Salvete. Welcome to the first Headmaster’s blog of academic year 2012/3. It’s not The Brothers Karamazov, I’ll grant you, (where Dostoyevsky took two years, I’ve been known to whack this baby out over break time) but there are fierce creatures in rooms above me who insist all good schools need a blog. (Or was it all schools need a good blog? In which case I’m toast). Anyway, they come over shirty if I don’t hit the qwerty, so tippy-tap is the order of the hour. What’s in it for me? you ask. Oodles. My loyal readers have before now won champers, relived the Wurzels golden moments (sic), and voted in that crucial Halle Orchestra versus Sugarbabes debate . I venture to hope that everything you never wanted to know about Bromsgrove is here. Who says great Schools need to wear starch every day? Welcome one and all.
************************
Every year, at the end of August, just before term proper begins, I journey to Oxford with a handful of staff, all the new international pupils and those feral Antipodeans upon whom we have taken pity by employing them as gappies. It’s a trip that opens minds and hearts. Not really. Once we’ve parked up, Mammon’s hapless slaves (the majority) actually go shopping while a dissenting cadre of keen beans and future monitors comes with me around my old college. Upon breathing the rarefied air of my alma mater, I adopted hushed tones and told one innocent looking new girl that the quadrangle on which I had lived was 700 years old. Her immediately asking if I’d witnessed its construction nearly led to an unseemly punch up.
************************
Last week, during my opening Prep School Chapel talk – an event I like to think makes the Gettysburg address sound like a Teletubby monologue – I began to motivate the seven year olds by telling them that on my first day of School, aged five, I was locked out of the classroom and duly started crying. I went on to discuss why I had nothing to offer the ancient Romans, how the Yugoslavs had conquered Australia and why it didn’t get any easier as you got older. As the youngsters filed out in bewildered silence, staring at me with suspicious eyes as they passed through the Chapel porch, I could see I had made an early connection. Establishing bonds like this is very important when running a large School.
************************
As the molar fears the drill, so I dread the School gym. Last week I clambered aboard a cross-trainer (this is a machine, not an angry Mr. Mullan) and saw on the television screen in front of me a fearsome, hunky dude yelling at me to work harder. I looked at him and thought, “Yes, darn it - with a little more work, I too could have a body like that.” Anyway, it transpired a few seconds later that what I had been looking at was the “before” model. For those who don’t know, that’s the tubby guy prior to embarking on his training programme. Suddenly the “after” model appeared: a block of human granite with a trilobite stuck to his midriff. I got off the machine forlornly and went down to the cafe for a bun.
