It’s hard to pick out highlights from this term because I will inevitably make people feel disgruntled if I don’t mention them – an absolute nightmare when you consider how much happens day to day in this crazy and wonderful school. BUT I do think it’s ok to say just a couple of moments when I personally as a human being, as well as your Head, felt complete joy and wonder at what was happening in front of me.
One of them was watching the Mechanicals from Midsummer Night’s Dream, both during the play itself and at Comedy Night. Their skill and comic timing, combined with the collaboration and just heart of it all really shone through and I loved it. I also loved the Danzon by the orchestra last week at St John’s Smith Square – it fizzed with energy and fun and I enjoy the swung rhythms so much – thank you, so much, everyone. I’ve had a lovely time umpiring some U13 netball this term and have been really impressed by their competitive ferocity and sense of commitment. I also really enjoyed the STEAM+ Expo and I thought Olivia’s talk on eco-feminism was incredible. It was fabulous to get riverside and cheer on our amazing Boat Club – honestly, go if you can, they’re so incredibly focused and impressive – and I’ve absolutely loved teaching Civil Discourse to Year 7 with their heady mixture of strong opinions and open-mindedness. You lot are brilliant. Most of all though, I’ve loved it when you are kind to each other, when you reach across year groups and barriers to help each other out, when you commit to making the lives of others better, as our amazing SHINE mentors showed for ten Saturdays this term, supporting and nurturing their Year 4 mentees and gaining so much in the process.
This love for others, this desire to be compassionate, for me is born of understanding that we all have our own perspectives and our own 360 experiences and not assuming too much that our own narrative or viewpoint is the right one – which after all is what Civil Discourse is about too. And if you’ve had a term where you’ve struggled with this a bit, where your friendships have been difficult or you’ve messed up perhaps and been unkind to someone, or stood by and did nothing when someone else was unkind – well, I’m going to leave you with a story which always helps me when I try and think about relationships and my responsibility to remember that the way I see things isn’t always the way things actually are.
Some of you may be familiar with the brilliant writer Douglas Adams; here’s a story he tells in a book called The Salmon of Doubt:
This actually did happen to a real person, and the real person was me. I had gone to catch a train. This was April 1976, in Cambridge, U.K. I was a bit early for the train. I’d gotten the time of the train wrong.
I went to get myself a newspaper to do the crossword, and a cup of coffee and a packet of cookies. I went and sat at a table.
I want you to picture the scene. It’s very important that you get this very clear in your mind.
Here’s the table, newspaper, cup of coffee, packet of cookies. There’s a guy sitting opposite me, perfectly ordinary-looking guy wearing a business suit, carrying a briefcase.
It didn’t look like he was going to do anything weird. What he did was this: he suddenly leaned across, picked up the packet of cookies, tore it open, took one out, and ate it.
Now this, I have to say, is the sort of thing the British are very bad at dealing with. There’s nothing in our background, upbringing, or education that teaches you how to deal with someone who in broad daylight has just stolen your cookies.
You know what would happen if this had been South Central Los Angeles. There would have very quickly been gunfire, helicopters coming in, CNN, you know. . . But in the end, I did what any red-blooded Englishman would do: I ignored it. And I stared at the newspaper, took a sip of coffee, tried to do a clue in the newspaper, couldn’t do anything, and thought, what am I going to do?
In the end I thought, nothing for it, I’ll just have to go for it, and I tried very hard not to notice the fact that the packet was already mysteriously opened. I took out a cookie for myself. I thought, that settled him. But it hadn’t because a moment or two later he did it again. He took another cookie.
Having not mentioned it the first time, it was somehow even harder to raise the subject the second time around. “Excuse me, I couldn’t help but notice . . .” I mean, it doesn’t really work.
We went through the whole packet like this. When I say the whole packet, I mean there were only about eight cookies, but it felt like a lifetime. He took one, I took one, he took one, I took one. Finally, when we got to the end, he stood up and walked away.
Well, we exchanged meaningful looks, then he walked away, and I breathed a sigh of relief and sat back. A moment or two later the train was coming in, so I tossed back the rest of my coffee, stood up, picked up the newspaper, and underneath the newspaper were my cookies.
The thing I like particularly about this story is the sensation that somewhere in England there has been wandering around for the last quarter-century a perfectly ordinary guy who’s had the exact same story, only he doesn’t have the punch line.
Yes, this is a funny story, no doubt. But it’s also always spoken to me about the perils of self-righteousness, about misreading situations and assuming you are being wronged, about how perhaps – just perhaps – the other person in a situation sees YOU as the transgressor, whilst all the while you are sure it is they who’ve transgressed. Remember: it may be that someone is eating your cookies. But, just as easily, you could be eating theirs. We can’t always see a picture in full – and perhaps next term we can think about that some more.