Best Years Of Your Life: Not

[poliphilo]

My old school sends me a glossy magazine at intervals. I'm sure they'd like me to send them money by return, but I don't.

We drove past it a few weeks back. Ailz asked if I wanted to call in. I said, "No."

Lots of people can't resist though. There's proof in the glossy mag: pages and pages of full colour pictures of prosperous-looking grey haired blokes hob-nobbing.  One of them is Sir Tim Rice. He can't stay away. Every time the mag arrives he's all over it. In this issue he's reported to have given a speech in which he talks about the longevity of friendships made at school. I'm not friends with anyone I knew at school. Not a soul.

I was reading an article t'other day in which this trick cyclist was arguing that people who've been at boarding school are the worst people to entrust with power. No emotional intelligence, see.

 Wicked places. Socially divisive too. I'd close them all down.

Comments

[halfmoon-mollie.livejournal.com]

Then...is that the school where Sir Time/Sir Andrew wrote Joe and the Coat?

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

No, it isn't. I think they were both young teachers at some other school.

ALW wasn't a pupil at Lancing. (Whoops, I've named it)

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

'I'm not friends with anyone I knew at school. Not a soul.'

That's two of us then.

School days are the best years of one's life'?

Hah!

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I'm puzzled by people who keep going back to their old schools.

Though I wouldn't say it to their faces I think they're a bit sad.

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

Mind you, if you consider my particular life experience it could be, shall we say, entertaining! :o)

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I was going to say, "I double dare you"- but that would have been childish. :)

[lblanchard.livejournal.com]

They keep going back because school days really were the best days of their lives. Which is a sad commentary on their intervening decades, isn't it? (Of course, for some wealthy alumni/ae, there's a payoff in the adulation received from the obsequious fund-raising staff.)

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Yes, it is a little sad.

I didn't hate my school days; there was good and bad in them- but I was very happy to leave them behind.

[matrixmann]

Sentences like this only come out of the mouths of those whose life later turned into stress.
School, job - what's the difference?
In school you need to bring money up, in a job you also get money for what you do.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

School exists to break us in for a life of work.

[matrixmann]

Seems no other than that.

[kinderheldin.livejournal.com]

That's great.

[veronica-milvus.livejournal.com]

Was there no fagging, or systematic buggery of small boys? Obviously not a school with a great tradition, then.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

We had a mild form of fagging. I remember having to fetch bread and buns for older boys.

There was a lot of furtive sexual adventuring- some of which may have been abusive.