Old School

 I've got the third edition of the QEGS Alumni Newsletter, which I must have signed up for at some point in the distant past. Actually, I got it a couple of days ago, but it ended up in my spam folder until I fished it out. Possibly the previous two editions suffered the same fate. But this one has a picture of "our outgoing Year 13 prefects in the 6th Form Garden," and they look quite unspeakably young. I'm sure when I was a sixth-former (I wasn't a prefect; I was cool) we essentially looked like grown-ups. These so-called prefects don't look more than twelve! I really don't know what the world's coming to.

And then it also says "Since the start of this academic year, we have celebrated the dedication to the school of five members of staff: Pam Sutton (40 years), Anne Devereux (30 years), Jane Hastings (30 years), Rachel Peek (20 years) and David Ambrose (20 years). Each received their long-service awards from Paul Brewster, Chair of Governors."

Now, I left that school just slightly less than thirty years ago, and I never saw anyone there called Sutton, Devereux or Hastings. And I've got a GOOD memory for names. So I followed the link to the website to see if there was any more information, and there don't seem to be any teachers left from my day. That's a bit sad, isn't it? Last time I checked up on the old place, a fair few familiar faces were still prowling the halls. I wonder where they've all gone? On the other hand, Mr Ford can still be found hanging around Horncastle - my brother met him there recently - and he retired when I was in the sixth form! So I'm sure the old crowd are still doing well, one way or another.

And there's an article about Robert Webb's latest doings in the newsletter. Why aren't they documenting what I'm up to? I'm at least 33% as cool and famous as Robert Webb, I'm almost a big celebrity by Horncastle standards, I should be in there too!

Well, maybe it's more like 25%, but the point still stands. I do see that there's a link on the website inviting alumni to get in touch, and it's at least possible I could get them to let me make a speech or something, but it's firmly against my principles to ask for that kind of thing. When you're 10% as cool and famous as Robert Webb, it clearly should be THEM who ask YOU to do things for them! Besides, if I ask, they'd probably say no thanks, and I'd feel humiliated.

But still, it's nice to see they still do the Talking Newspaper. That started when I was there, long long ago. I started out as a reader, then moved into the cushy job of quality control - as long as you knew how tricky words were pronounced when stupid readers didn't know, it was a job that consisted essentially of sitting there and doing very little, instead of going to lessons.

There were two quality controllers, and the idea was that you'd each spend half the recording day doing the job, and the other half going to your more important lessons. What actually happened would be that I'd swap weeks with someone so that I'd be on the same week as Noddy, and the two of us would spend the whole day in the recording studio, quality controlling and chatting. It was great. It's just a shame a lot of other civic-minded pupils volunteered for the job too, so we'd only get to do it once or twice a year.

See, this is the kind of anecdote I could bring to QEGS today. Of course, we did it on cassette tapes in my day, there was none of this USB stick nonsense. I'm 5% as cool and famous as Robert Webb, they should be beating down my door to secure my services!