Bulgaria with Noodles

Just before the start of the Second World War, the famous debate at the Oxford Union, “This House will not fight for King and Country”, became a national (and maybe international) legend. The story goes that when Adolf Hitler heard of the debate, it convinced him that Britain would not fight and so he made up his mind to invade Poland. So what are we to make of the more recent Oxford Union debate, “This House believes that the West is right to be suspicious of Islam”? As I have mentioned before, it was about thirty years ago that David Pawson started preaching about the dangers of Islam. Back in the 1960s, there was only one mosque in the whole of Britain. It was in Woking and you can see it from the train. Now there are something like 2,000 mosques in the UK and perhaps there will be a few more by the time you read this. Meanwhile, churches are closing at the rate of one a week (or maybe one a fortnight) and “Mohammed” is the most popular name for new baby boys.   The Presid...

The rather impressive front entrance of Windlesham   After finishing my PGCE course at La Sainte College, I arrived at Windlesham House School in September, 1987.  A “windle” is an old English word, probably Saxon in origin, that means a basket, maybe woven out of twigs. A “sham”, of course, is something that is fake, not real, a pretence. At Windlesham House School, however, there were some real little baskets, children who displayed an appalling mixture of laziness, rudeness and entitlement. Yes, there were (thank goodness) some lovely, sweet and polite children as well, but unfortunately it is the junior scumbags at WHS that stick in my memory. In particular, Master Mark Coutts stands out, as he came up with the most offensive and obscene sentence I have ever heard: “F*** your dead mother’s a***!” For a ten-year-old, I think that deserves the gold medal in the Profanity Olympics, for squeezing so much verbal foulness into only five words. Mr Charles   The principal...

I have always thought that someone ought to change the lyrics of that well-known hymn: O hear us when we cry to Thee For those in peril on TP. My first view of Mr Smith's classroom    Teaching Practice, aka TP, is (or was) an important element of the Postgraduate Certificate in Education. As a PGCE student, you do not get any choice about what you are going to teach, where or when. And you do not get much choice about which teaching resources you were supposed to use because usually there weren’t any. You had to buy them or make them yourself. On one occasion, I did ask the school secretary if she would mind if I used the school photocopier to produce some worksheets and she looked at me as if I had slapped her. When I suggested to the deputy head that the school should refund the cost of making the teaching resources I had been using, he replied that they were now my resources and I could keep them, so why should the school pay for them? The good news was that La Sain...

My PGCE year was pretty horrible, on the whole: long, tiring, stressful and a lot of hard work for not very much achieved. I do not have many happy memories of this period of my life and thank goodness it only lasted a year. On the other hand, there were some pleasant bits too. I had not been back to Oxford for a few years, so of course I wanted to go up for my degree ceremony. In most sensible universities, a Bachelor of Arts degree comes first and then you study for another year or two and get your Masters. At Oxford, they don’t. It is all rolled into one: do the BA and get the MA thrown in free.    The Sheldonian Theatre is a rather splendid and eccentric place and that is where the degree ceremonies are always held. My mother came to see me get my degree, but my stepfather didn’t. While we are on the subject of things theatrical, an amusing event at LSU was having a role in a rather silly comedy. I played a very crusty military type, maybe a retired colonel or something ...

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” Well, if you know the beginning of A Tale of Two Cities , I will not bore you with all of the rather long opening sentence. My PGCE year certainly had its ups and downs. It was not a holiday, alternating between pretending to be a student (not too difficult), writing three long extended illustrated essays and Teaching Practice, aka the dreaded TP. However, it all started rather well. Rufus was a lovely Red Setter/ Labrador cross. Well, that is what my parents seemed to think he was and they adored him. Rufus appeared in our lives quite by chance. I was walking home to our house in Alma Road and noticed a reddish coloured dog without a collar. He was very friendly and we all liked him immediately. We decided to adopt him or maybe it was the other way round. In 1986, I still had my old Morris Traveller that I had acquired while I was at Perrott Hill, so Rufus and I could go for some more interesting walkies a bit further afield. ...

After I left Perrott Hill, I returned to Southampton. That city is one that I have been coming back to for a long time: from boarding school, university, Perrott Hill and then teacher training college. In the Autumn of 1986 I started my one-year Postgraduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) at La Sainte Union College of Higher Education (LSU). My room in a rather grotty Victorian house on Archers Road was not luxurious, but LSU itself was okay.  It was a Catholic foundation, so there were still a few nuns wandering about the place. All of the buildings have now been either demolished or repurposed, as LSU was closed down in 1997.   In some ways it was fun to pretend to be a student once again. Most of the LSU students were two or three years younger than I was and no one else on the PGCE had actually done four years of teaching. In some ways this was a big advantage, as I could compare and contrast what I learned on my PGCE course with my experiences at Perrott Hill. Of course,...