Ding Dong!

Tonight was the school prizegiving and Martin Bell was the guest speaker. It was a good evening; the chairman of governors and headmaster gave fairly short (huzzah!) but eloquent speeches and there were a couple of superb musical interludes with, in turn, performances on the saxophone, violin and tuba. There's a wide variety of prizes, which are not all for academic excellence or sport, although of course the majority are.

Martin Bell gave the prizegiving speech I've been quietly rehearsing for many a year now - that is, he focused on the ones who didn't win prizes, who may not toe the school line, who will go off in their own direction or else, perhaps, plough a quietly straight furrow and who might find their strengths after school. He said quite a bit more (in a very few minutes, he kept it brief too), and spoke easily and fluently, with considerable humour, though no jokes, and there was prolonged applause at the end.

You know (unless you are Phil or Zahid) that I mentioned, the other day, the fair hair colour of young English children, which most of them lose as they grow up? I said that I'd noticed that boys, in that class at least, had darkened younger than girls. This evening, most of the prizewinners were aged 17-19, and there was no difference, proportionally, between the sexes for darkness of hair.

I did a useful bit of networking too, with local influential people and came home all cheerful. I'd gone cheerful too, by the way, as Dilly heard that I was pushed to have time to cook dinner, let alone eat it, and said that she had plenty of Bolognese sauce for all of us. Bless her, she had to cook four lots of spaghetti as we had to eat at different times, too.