Having read Ms Kennedy’s WimLearn article on civil discourse (which is really rather good – click here to read it), and with this week marking the launch of the civil discourse programme at WHS, I thought I’d quiz our headteacher on what ‘authentic encounters between enquiring hearts and minds’ really means. We touch on teachers at WHS, culture wars, feminism, ad hominin, the state of the British press and of course, the infamous “school of woke” comment, courtesy of Giles Coren. What struck me throughout our conversation was this concept of a ‘dialogue’; that the problem is really us jumping at each other’s throats when we disagree or feel offended at something. It is this that obstructs constructive, useful and mutually respectful conversations. ‘There’s more that connects us than divides us’, as Jo Cox, head of co-curricular at WHS, reminds us at the end of this interview.

In April of this year, I sat down to interview Edward Chancellor, who offered me his view on the response to COVID-19 as a financial historian, which challenged more mainstream ideas around lockdown. As I sat at my desk to discuss the topic (the interview was conducted via Zoom, of course), Chancellor’s ideas around the influence of behavioural psychology on the global reaction, stood out to me. In drawing parallels between the disease cycle and financial cycle, Chancellor touches on crowd behaviour and cognitive dissonance to explain the reaction to COVID-19, and why extrapolation errors are so dangerous. We also discussed Johnson’s government’s imitative behaviour, and the importance of truth-seeking.

Rosemary Horton is perhaps one of the most interesting people I have met, and yet spent most of her life not moving far from our borough, Merton. She’s lived here for 60 years, and in Wimbledon Village for three decades, where she is now living in an idyllic cottage. Rosemary was a teacher her whole life, mostly around Wimbledon working at schools like Bishop Gilpin, Wimbledon Park and even running her own nursery for years in Spencer Hill. Some months ago, in the depth of Autumn lockdown last year, I asked Rosemary, now in her 80s, if I could interview her to talk about the COVID crisis and so went in her garden to ask a few questions while standing a few metres away.

An informal interview with the outgoing head girl

The unabridged version of the interview published in the 2021 print edition of Unconquered Peaks