HEADMASTER'S BLOG NUMBER 27 - VORSPRUNG DURCH NIGHTMARE

Happy new year to you all. Only one riff for the first blog of 2013, and don’t tell me some of you didn’t burn the turkey fretting about it.

Clearly the Bromsgrove Headmaster’s new car should have been a diesel Jaguar, shouldn’t it? Eco(ish) British trad, Indian wonga. A slosh of the hi-tech new world order with a twist of wistful yearning for briars and snuff-flecked lips. Elgar goes to Bollywood. In fact, let’s have that up in Latin above the South Gate.

“A little raga with your Finzi, Headmaster?” Don’t mind if I do.

But no. Oh no. You see, I don’t know anything about cars – absolute diddly, honestly - and I made the catastrophic mistake of reading reviews that dealt purely with quality as opposed to image. In other words, I did everything I’d want parents to do when choosing a School. I shunned the dinner party tittle tattle and did some hard core research. I also figured I had no need for a large car and duly looked at the next size down.

And instead of reading “Top Gear Magazine” (which, were it an educational guide, would say: “Oh I’m sure it’s a wonderful School, darling but, strictly entre nous, it’s not quite.. well you know, darling .. not quite .. how shall I say? .. Oh if only one could say “pleb”, darling, but one can’t anymore. More Taittinger, sweetie?”) I read “What Car.”

Never again. “What Car”. If “What Car” reviewed Bromsgrove School I believe it would say; “Brilliant. Go there.” But that honesty is not what one needs in a world where one’s self esteem is based entirely on the approval or otherwise of the chattering classes. I needed an image savvy lifestyle guru (i.e. a Fourth Former) to tell Mr. Laughing Stock point blank that slippered gents who are partial to a little Schubert while pootling down the motorway at 60 mph do NOT BUY...

A BMW 3 Series.

Dummkopf! Forget it’s an omnipresent motoring leitmotif (there are more of them on the roads than Mondeos, I’m told) that does 60 miles to the gallon. Forget too it’s a stolid, conservative staple back home in Munich. Forget even that it gets top marks in perishing “What Car” for just about everything. Remember only that in the UK it’s apparently been hijacked as the car of choice for every non-indicating, boy-racing, taste-bereft aspirational moron in the country. And now I’m one. How did this happen? Did all you BMW 3 series owners know this when you bought one? You thought you were getting Eton but let me tell you, chums, you’ve signed up for Grange Hill. (Apologies to younger readers for the arcane reference).

I discussed the matter with a Sixth Former who agreed the BMW was indeed a cracking car but was perceived in the UK as being the flash alternative for people who can’t afford genuine flash. He confirmed this was a PR catastrophe for a Headmaster on a moral crusade. So what should I do?

Well here’s the thing. Apparently, I wait. That’s right. I wait. Because, it seems, the BMW’s image is changing. The look-at-my-lifestyle aspirants are realising the car’s ubiquity has undermined their reason for buying it in the first place. And I am reliably informed by pupils who know these things that the next brand to be hijacked will be..... Audi. Oh yes. The auto-fashionistas tell me that if I can just hold on for a bit, Audis will start cutting me up on roundabouts and BMW drivers can get back to stopping for old ladies. So, if you’re smugly driving an Audi thinking you are the cuddly David Attenborough of motoring, you can wipe that smile off your face now. Troubled times ahead, my friends.

Anyway, since The Hobbit is on at the flicks, I’ll finish with a word from local lad JRR Tolkien, who said: “I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence.” Shame.

Happy New Year!

HEADMASTER'S BLOG NUMBER 26 - AUDI PARTNER

Last week, after one of my heart-stoppingly awful Sixth Form lectures on Pre-Socratic philosophy, a question emerged that would drive even Xenophanes to the Dog and Duck. To wit: what make of car should the Headmaster of Bromsgrove School own? Consider the dilemma. Too fancy and I’m an over-inflated, preening establishment wannabe with a corrupt value system and a bar tab at the East India Club. Too modest and I’m a self congratulatory hippy whose public efforts to send others on a guilt trip show me up as a squalid little leftie who should know better than to make a crass statement out of his own inadequacy. (You will have gathered this whole business worries me). Now for ten years I drove an old Rover which transcended stereotyping on the grounds nobody quite understood whether I was guilty of avuncular affectation, senility or hipster retro-chic. But it broke. And I’ve had to buy a new car. A lot hangs on this. More next time.

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Last Tuesday’s annual Bromsgrove School Foundation Lecture at the RAF Club in London was delivered quite superbly by a parent who also happens to be an Air Marshall and Deputy Chief of the Defence Staff. Indeed, it was while reading out the resumé of the Air Marshall (which includes a CBE, a DFC and a US Bronze Star Medal) that I realised I still have my A level results on my CV. Floundering in a dreary sea of middle aged worthlessness, I got home late and subsequently dreamt that I was standing up proudly in Routh Hall and giving the School a holiday because I’d passed my Cycling Proficiency Test.

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The following evening, standing shoulder to haircut with Dr. Thompson, I addressed parents in Routh Hall as to the relative merits of IB and A level. Both have their place and we are blessed with parents who understand that. But there’s no doubt from my in tray that some people still think that those studying the IB find trees threatening and the sun too loud. Such pupils also walk in geometric circles, translate Mr. Bowen’s newsletter into Latin at parties, and wear antennae on their heads thinking they are water molecules. My reply has remained constant ..... What’s not to like?

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This week’s Nadine Dorries Award for shunning the limelight goes to The Executive Suite. “The what?” you cry as one. The Executive Suite. A misnomer that promises wooden panels and sumptuous leather armchairs, but delivers an aesthetic experience better suited to hosting a Llanelli 4ths post match punch-up. I am currently in the process of meeting different pupil constituencies (Prep School monitors, new boarders, House monitors etc.) over a series of ask-the-Head-anything lunches, and despite the superhuman efforts of our catering staff, there’s zip one can do to brighten up my repeated meals in this ninth circle of hell. Now I have vowed to do to the Executive Suite what the Romans did to Carthage, but that’s some way off. So please don’t fall for it. Our facilities are sensational, but if you ever receive an invitation to an event in the “Executive Suite” just say you’ve been kidnapped by ninjas.

HEADMASTER'S BLOG NUMBER 25 - AM I DOUBLE PARKED BY THE CURBSTONE OF YOUR HEART?

Well it’s finally happened. I had a conversation this morning with a new teacher in the mistaken belief they were a pupil. But then I’ve known for a long time that age is nibbling my synapses. Among other things, I’ve started crying to country music lyrics (and surely we’ve all taken a moment over If my Nose were full of Nickels, I’d Blow it all on You), but I was minded of Kurt Vonnegut’s Line: True terror is to wake up one morning to discover your high School class is running the country. Not funny, Kurt: at Oxford I was an exact contemporary of David, Boris and George. No, I didn’t know them and again, no, they never invited me to that club. So, was I left with an inferiority complex? Yes, but not a very good one.

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Page House was opened last week. Now just in case people not involved in Prep boarding think this is merely the final raisin on Bromsgrove’s buccellato, think again. It’s the Waldorf Astoria in there. If it weren’t for the giveaway that most of the besuited people within are under five foot tall, you could be forgiven for ordering Singapore Slings from the Common Room. And I hope you all approve the large stone colonnade on the west side of the building. This Athenian Agora touch is designed to imbue the Prep pupils with Socratic wisdom and Periclean aspirations. It also protects the windows from rugby balls.

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I had a strange encounter on Conway Road a few evenings ago. A passing gentleman berated me for parking my car with two of its wheels on the pavement. Quite right too. Except it wasn’t my car. I just happened to be standing next to it. I told him this but he wouldn’t have it. Curiosity and masochism compelled me to stick around and take the rest of the tirade like a man. At the end the stranger threatened to have the police tow the car away. I said what a good idea. He told me not to get clever. I said I’d never dream of it and repeated that it wasn’t my car. But he wouldn’t have that and off he went again, threatening the car with this, that and the other. I said it wasn’t my car. We were there for a while.

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Following the inspirational, solemn ceremonies of our Remembrance Sunday (at which the CCF were quite superb), the Pre-Prep Remembrance Service took place the next day. Imaginative, moving and respectful though the event was, the lingering memory for many in the audience will be the home footage of a six year old interviewer. After – inevitably - asking his great granddad how one went to the loo on a wartime bomber, the little chap became a hysterical wreck when he learnt his hero poured poo over the enemy from a great height. When you’re six, it just doesn’t get any better than that.

HEADMASTER’S BLOG NUMBER 24 – Platoonic Love

Methuselah was nibbling Farley’s Rusks the last time I blogged. Anyway ... Our new Officer Commanding of the Combined Cadet Force asked me to announce in Routh Hall assembly that after a live firing exercise, Bromsgrove cadets went on to excel themselves in the administration of First Aid.

Should I be worried?

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At the height of Northern Ireland’s troubles, I recall somebody saying something like: “Anybody who claims to know what’s going on here doesn’t understand what’s happening.” A few weeks ago I felt much the same way at the HMC Heads’ annual conference in Belfast. This event is where the Fu Manchus of Britain’s finest independent schools gather, each eager to assure the world that leading an HMC School was a moral notch above drug peddling or gun running. And yet ... we were housed in a building proudly marketed by the locals as “Europe’s most bombed hotel” (take that, Holiday Inn Sarajevo); we had our annual dinner in the Titanic Centre, billed as the home of “The world’s most famous disaster”; and I had my hair cut by a Mr. Blast.  

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A few weeks ago I received a letter of complaint saying the School was high handed because it didn’t listen to the parents. Now that would be fine had these parents complained to me before. But they hadn’t. This was the first time I’d ever heard from them. So, their first and only complaint to me, at any rate, was “you don’t listen to complaints.” Hmmm. It reminded me of a response I received to a survey I sent out in my first year here to gauge how I was performing in the eyes of the staff. Teachers had to answer a number of questions, and I was intrigued to receive this from a legendary grumpster (who left many years ago):

Do you find the Headmaster approachable:                                   No

Have you tried to approach him with an issue:                              No

If the answer to the previous question was “No”, why not?      No point.

Gotta love it.

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Monday 17^th September. First day of my annual trip to the Far East. I had been awake for thirty three hours when I reached the lobby of my hotel. My mobile phone rang. Extreme tiredness had affected my brain and so somehow I answered the phone without cutting off the caller in the process. This has never happened before. To my horror and amazement I heard somebody speaking. I felt like Alexander Graham Bell. I was close to collapse, the lobby was noisy and I could smell fish balls. The voice on the end of the phone said it was the BBC, and would I offer a view on Michael Gove’s pronouncement regarding the abolition of GCSEs. I was intending to say that now wasn’t a great moment but I realised the voice on the phone was saying “You are live in ten ... nine .. eight ...”. I’m not entirely sure what happened next. There was an interview of sorts I know, but I sensed increasing bemusement on the part of the interrogator as chronic fatigue syndrome plus my increasingly vocal attempts to wrestle my overnight bag back from a fearsomely zealous porter intruded upon the conversation. I fear at one point I might have asked the nation to leave their things in my bedroom. Anyway, it was all over pretty quickly and I’m not entirely sure they’ll be using me again.

HEADMASTER'S TWENTY-THIRD BLOG - AHHH, GYM LAD

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

HEADMASTER'S TWENTY-SECOND BLOG - WORKING OVER-THYME

Civilisations have risen and toppled back into oblivion since my last blog. I’m cool with that: there’s a School to run. Alas, the marketing Furies upstairs have a rather more contemporary, not to say aggressive, take on the significance of blogging. Indeed, those little incisors that were grazing my heels last week have now become gaping maws, closing around my stumbling legs, and threatening me with torments that would have Hieronymus Bosch turning queasy. So, since I value my knee caps, let us take the M5 to the Three Counties Showground and the Malvern Spring Gardening Show.

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Q) “What do you get if you divide the circumference of an apple by its diameter?”

A) “Apple Pi.

With dextrous wit and urbane sophistication I entertained visitors at Bromsgrove School’s award winning garden. And not just any award: this was a first prize in a show visited by tens of thousands of people. I was in awe of the exhibit, because last time I mowed my lawn I found a wheelbarrow. Two female members of staff and pupils from all three sections of the School should be feeling immensely proud of themselves. The theme was sustainability and bees, so some of our smallest dressed up for the occasion in bee outfits. My suggestion that I too would look mighty fine as a bumble bee excited people less than I had hoped.

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Gardens have not been kind to me, as I told the Prep School in Chapel only last week. When I was the same age as our little Pre-Prep bees, I auditioned for The Selfish Giant. There were numerous speaking parts, so imagine my disappointment when I was told I would not be the Giant, nor The North Wind, nor one of the children, but the tree. I rallied a little when I realised that the tree was actually home to the boy Jesus, and that the giant would fall dead at my base, upon which moment I would shower him with blossom. It wasn’t King Lear, I’ll grant you, but I told my teacher it was an honour to be THE TREE. I wouldn’t let her down.

“No, Christopher,” said Miss. “Not ‘the’ tree; ‘a’ tree.”

They’d only gone and created another tree, not in the original story, whose job was to stand in silence for the entire play with his arms out. As my fellow tree dropped coloured paper over the giant’s head, I shed silent tears. It was like auditioning for the Sound of Music and being cast as an Alp.

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Now that I’m a School gym-freak (sic), I’m catching up on contemporary dance music while falling off machines. Sadly, I’m of an age when all I hear is a cracking riff from my jeunesse doree ruined after ten seconds by some wannabe gangsta from da hood rapping over the top. And why is everybody called something like “Slee-Z featuring Dod –G” ? Why can’t they just play the original James Brown? And why am I so old?

THE HEADMASTER'S TWENTY-FIRST BLOG - GRAND DESIGNS

Nearly three years ago, in a small seminar room in Oxford, the scary ladies and I came up with a masterplan for the neglected Worcester Road end of the campus and for Prep School boarding. The scheme lacked humility. Many governing bodies would have thrown it out. Typically, our governing body did not. They asked for details.

Almost done. Sure there’s some touching up required, but every new building of the Worcester Road development is now operational. I’ve just hung out and had a cup of well posh coffee in Café 1553: you’ll love it.  And yesterday I went to the new gym and entertained guests by screaming “Make it stop, oh please make it stop!” a lot. I’ve seen people dancing in the shiny studios; Mary Windsor has been thriving since Christmas: Oakley is a joy; the Hospitality suite last week witnessed its first major event for around 150 people; the arena has already been booked by national sports teams and will host the England Schools hockey finals next year. Page House (possibly the UK’s largest Prep School boarding house) will be finished for September, as will the new extension to the Health Centre.

On it goes. Energy and purposeful change remain our mantra.

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During the Easter holidays I found myself gettin’ down wid da crew in the newly built but as yet uninhabited Oakley House. By this I mean I was helping the Bursar and Director of Estates attach labels to the girls' pigeon holes. Me at my demotic best you might think. Not so. I immediately bagsied the bourgeois job of putting the labels on the pigeon holes, while Bursar and Head of Estates acted as the lumpenproletariat by peeling the labels from their backing and handing them to me in alphabetical order. However I was soon demoted because in the Bursar’s prosaic eyes I wasn’t putting the labels on straight enough. Get her. Anyway, the Bursar now took over and, despite my protestations, I was unceremoniously relegated to peeling labels and handing them to her in sequence. Relations were now frosty. Worse was to come. But let’s pause for a moment.

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Next week the statue arrives. The final aesthetic flourish to the Worcester Road project. Inexplicably, none of the governors seemed interested in a fifty foot statue of me, designed along Stalinist lines, with a square-jawed, flag-carrying Headmaster striding boldly forward, grateful children clutching his bronze boots. As a result we’ve had to go for something else. Herbert Read said that “Art is pattern informed by sensibility”: the only definition of art I have come across that resonates with me. It is evident in the sculpture that is set to appear next Tuesday. Please like it.

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Back to labelgate. As the Bursar neared the end of the job (and there are lots of girls in Oakley), I discovered I had sometime earlier dropped a label and therefore overlooked a name. A name that began with a letter significantly nearer “A” than “Z”. I suddenly remembered what it felt like to kick a football through your mum’s kitchen window. Reverting to the passive tense, as one always does in these situations, I informed the Bursar in a mousy voice that there had been a tinsy-winsy error and that she’d need to peel off the labels and start again. In the following moments I had time and cause to muse on Christopher Morley’s observation that a man who has never made a woman angry is a failure in life. I felt like a king.