…of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.
Ecclesiastes, chapter 12, verse 12
Nearly everyone has some experience of school. Usually they’ll have been to at least one, maybe two, maybe many. You might have been a parent, fretting hopelessly as your children went to one. You may have worked in a school, maybe you’ve even been or are a teacher. So you know what schools are, what they’re for; you know what they do and why the do it. At least in part. Do you? Do you really?
I’ve spent most of my life in schools — seven years in primary, six in secondary, two as a cleaner and thirty-eight years as a janny. That’s fifty-three for those of you who didn’t pay attention in arithmetic. That’s a long time, and I’m still unsure what schools are or what they’re for. Shall we attempt a bit of Socratic dialogue?
——So Xenophon, you say that you know what schools are for?
——Indeed Plato, it is to prepare the young adult for his fit place in the world.
——Is there something wrong with your voice? You sound a bit odd.
——No, that’s how I always talk.
——Do schools employ soothsayers then? That they can tell what the young adult will become?
——No, of course not. But all adults properly schooled can live worthy lives.
——And what then is a worthy life?
——One where they may use their talents to good ends.
——Doing what?
——Well, they depends upon the person…
——And what if they don’t have any talents? And what do you mean by good ends?
——They may excel in commerce…
——That’s a good end for them then, to make a lot of money.
——Well, yes.
——Doesn’t really help anybody else though. There’s only so much money, if they have more, others have less. Besides I don’t remember a course on how to be a shyster…
——That was a mere example. They may enter politics…
——Again the shyster course would have proved useful.
——They may become artists, or craftsmen…
——Or work in shops, or deliver kebabs. A lot of people do that nowadays.
——They learn mathematics.
——Trigonometry? Who ever used trigonometry outside of school?
——You miss the point, what is learnt at school enriches ones life.
——Yes, a knowledge of Euripides must be of great comfort, you can hum Ion’s strophe as you’re wiping-up tables in the taverna.
——You would not dispute I think, that they teach you to read and write.
——That is at least true. Without that you wouldn’t have been able to write all that stuff sucking up to the Spartans. Can the Spartans read and write? Or is it only brutality on the curriculum there?
We’ll leave it there. The Greeks have rather let us down. I do think that Plato had the best of the argument — it’s surprisingly hard to come up with an answer to what schools are for. At best you’ll get a lot of airy waffle about learning the basics and teaching the skills needed for adult life. What these basics and skills actually are, beyond reading and writing and some basic maths, is never made very clear. The ability to weigh evidence, the sifting of fact from fiction, the importance of a scientific methodology are often mentioned. Teaching people how to think. Yet I still meet people who believe the royal family are Lizards and that the Holocaust was a hoax. Something went wrong there if they were taught how to think.
There are two groups of people who claim to know exactly what schools should be for. Let’s give them names so that we can spot them for the future and so that any mud we throw will stick. We’ll dub then Utilitarians and Moralists. Utilitarians believe that schools should be solely concerned with preparing the young adults for their working lives. So that their future employers won’t have to train them, or pay them decent wages because there’s a glut of them about. Moralists believe that it’s the job of schools to mould the, naturally evil, young adults and teach them wrong from right; they often disagree on the details of this wrong and right. Xenophon, and indeed Plato, above would have approved of both of these — the Moralists way being fit for aristocrats, the Utilitarian scheme being just the job for slaves.
In public we’d all agree that all humans have worth. In private Utilitarians aren’t so sure. If you listen closely to their arguments you’ll notice that the education system they’re talking about isn’t meant for their children, just the common ruck. Their children will have a private education. They’re to become the employers, to produce wealth and not pay their taxes, they will have to know things that they don’t teach in school. But they’ll send their offspring to the best ones anyway.
At the bottom of the Moralists code, you’ll often find some god. Not one of the peace and love kind. Young adults need to be brought to know the truth, with crook and flail. Even if these aren’t necessary. Sparing the rod being a good deal less fun than laying it on. They’re more prone to this type of thing in the USA, or they’re more prone to saying it out loud. In this country it’s more common for them to stress the need to learn of our proud history, to be patriotic, to know grammar and acquire facts. They’re very keen on facts. If god’s involved here he’s the C of E kind, hence he’s British and wears a cardigan.
Both types agree on some things. They are fond of proper discipline, the muscular kind. They think that teachers today all hate children and want to indoctrinate them with their left-wing values, by which they mean anything that they disagree with or dislike. And, of course, that things were so much better in the past.
They both share an ignorance as to what schools actually teach nowadays; they’re not alone in this, most people, outside education, don’t seem to know what schools do. You’ll often hear moaning that British history isn’t taught any more. A glance at the curriculum should be enough to falsify this. The young adults are fat, this is the schools’ fault, they don’t do gym any more or teach young adults to cook. Again a look at the curriculum might help. They’re called Physical Education and Health and Food Technology. They’re compulsory, in places technical and academic, and you can get proper get-a-job qualifications in them if that’s your type of thing. These would be the type of qualifications that they’d deem Mickey Mouse.
There’s a conversation to be had about what schools should be teaching, but I don’t see why we should give too much weight to the views of people who have an agenda, or are utterly ignorant of the facts.
boroughmuir — the people
Boroughmuir was a woke school. Almost aggressively so.
boroughmuir — the building
There can be no doubt that the move to the new building changed what we were as a school.
kids weren’t like that in my day
When people say this they usually mean in a negative way — the young adults of today fall short of the behaviour that was expected, when I were a nipper. People throughout history have been complaining about the feckless mendacity of their young, it’s not a new thing. The untranslated Etruscan inscriptions we have left are probably all about the waywardness of youth and how this is going to lead to disaster. Chimps likely grunt similar complaints as they’re picking bugs off one another. If the young adults of today behave differently that’s because they’ve been brought up in different circumstances. We complain that they’re always on their computers or phones, well we didn’t have those. I do remember much moaning about the amount of time we spent watching the telly.
I doubt that the inner life of a teenager has changed much over the centuries. Think about your teenage years, would this sum it up?
Impressing my mates – finding a partner – my stupid parents – all these new feelings – am I normal? – finding a partner – spots and acne – exams – finding a partner – am I attractive? – am I abnormal? – finding a partner – what’s going on in my underpants? – greasy hair – finding a partner – do I smell? – finding a partner…
With a few variations and some sex-specific bodily woes I think that’s pretty close. Humans, wherever and whenever they’re born suffer much the same teenage hells. We tend to forget that we had them and don’t imagine them for the teenagers that we know. Not that we can really help, they wouldn’t thank us for talking about these things — adults are soooo gross! No, to be a teenager is to be alone.
So how are our young adults? How do they compare with those saints of yesteryear? When people find out I’m a janny they seem to make the assumption that I must hate children. So when I say that I think that the young adults of today are better than those of the past they’re surprised. Now I’d probably say they were better even if I didn’t thinks so, just to wind people up, but I do think that they are better. They’re nicer, they’re kinder, they certainly work harder, they behave better in general. They aren’t as violent as we were, they’re more thoughtful, the sexes mix better, until vaping came along there wasn’t much smoking and they don’t drink like we did. Of course that’s in general, you can still find plenty of examples of out-of-control feral youth. Still, on the whole better. Much better I’d say.
How can this be true? The papers are full of stories about assaults on school staff; the statistics are grim — schools are hotbeds of violence. How can I think that the young adults of today are better? Well, both things can be true at the same time. Most of the young adults can be hard working, kind people, perhaps only a few are responsible for all this beating of teachers.
exams
We all hate exams, well most of us, so why do we do them? What other way do we have to measure success? We judge the young adults by them, it’s the main way we judge schools. That they’re a blunt tool, slightly unfair and a poor way of judging what a person really understands is just something we have to put up with.
During covid (remember that?) the exams got disrupted, so we were forced to fall back on other methods — coursework and individual teachers’ assessments of their own pupils. There were problems. As you might expect the main one was chicanery.
There’s a great deal of security around exams, as far as they can be made secure they are made secure. Take for example the exam papers, which I played a part in. They arrived at the school security-sealed, I transferred them to the invigilators’ (who weren’t school staff), and locked in a room to which the head invigilator had the only key. (Exam stationary was treated in the same way, you couldn’t sneak in a pre-done page, it would be on the wrong paper). After an exam the papers were collected by crash-helmeted guards in security vans. The whole process is like that, cheating is nearly impossible.
The fallback methods were easier to meddle with — coursework could be, helped with, teachers’ judgements might become skewed. Some dolts got unexpectedly good marks. Most of these cases, where people got caught anyway, seemed to involve fee paying schools. Which suggests two things — if you’re taking money to get good marks there’s more incentive to improve them, or that the teachers at fee-paying schools were just worse at cheating as those in the mainstream. Given time, and thought, ways could be found to cut down on fraud, but you couldn’t eliminate it, as you can with exams.
Another problem was that it took so much time. Teachers could decided on their evaluations fairly quickly, it was the gathering of the evidence to support their judgement that ate up the hours. This was needed for two audiences. One, the exam board, they’d need it so that they could ensure that the marks given were fair and that teachers across the country were using the same standards. And, two, to show to the parents when the inevitable complaints came in.
Pushy parents eh? Not really. Parents can be a hassle but on the whole schools like them to get involved in the education of their young adult. Things that might have been missed can get found out. Never feel that you are, bothering the teachers, good ones like to talk to parents and bad one should get found out. No, it was expected that parents would dispute marks, standing up for their offspring, is their job after all. It took time to assemble the stuff to show them.
This, the extra time, was available during the lockdown, in normal times it isn’t really there. Something else would have to be skipped — homework? teaching time? are we weilling to pay the teachers for the extra hours that they’d need to put in? No, I’m afraid we are stuck with exams.
So, could we make exams fairer? Get them to
paying for it
Around a fifth of Edinburgh’s young adults attend fee paying schools, what do their parents get for the money? Well, for one thing good exam results. They could get those a bit cheaper by hiring private tutors I would have thought, so unless these parents are stupid, it can’t only be that. So what else is there?
At one point in Trainspotting Renton is forced, to keep his dole money, to apply for jobs. For some reason, at an interview, he pretends that he went to Watsons, which was a mistake, because it seems as if he might get the job. Why might he get the job? Because he went to Watsons. Here might be a reason for going to a fee-paying school — people who went to fee-paying schools get the best jobs because the people handing these jobs out went to one too. Whether this is really the case I don’t know, but most people that I know in Edinburgh assume that the best jobs in Edinburgh go to those who went to, the right type of school.
Another reason might be that it is a better experience for the young adult, an experience that will result in a better kind of adult. One that will produce a more rounded, more confident, more focused, blah, blah, … they just mean better, adult at the end. The adverts I see for these schools lay a heavy stress on this, turn out superior adults motif. It’s assumed that their young adults are already morally superior to the common herd anyway. That might be so, but I notice that the Tesco near Watsons still feels the need to throttle entry and have a security guard on the door when they are on their breaks. So, at least, some of them indulge in normal teenage pastimes like shoplifting. So are the products better human beings? I don’t know, I’ve never really met any of them. And there lies my problem with fee-paying schools — right from the start the young adults are divided into two streams, the one with rich parents and the rest of us. We’re not to mix, we’re not to get to know one another.
I first met people who had been to fee-paying schools when I went to university. They were nice, pleasant and sociable, they didn’t flaunt the superiority that they clearly felt, they worked hard, they were organized, they ended up with degrees. I liked them but we didn’t socialize much. They moved in different circles and they were destined for a different type of life. By that stage the barrier between them and us had already come down. The worst thing about this was that we didn’t understand each other.
This ignorance of each other is a problem, one that cuts both ways. It leads to mistakes that shouldn’t be made, people get hurt, not by intention, but because the real situation was unknown.
Take for example, the changes to the inheritance taxes that farmers have to pay. I’ll bet that a lot of people thought, boo hoo when they complained. I myself had a bit of a smile at one picture — a group of farmers, all wearing at least one Barbour jacket, standing with their children, children who were driving around in expensive looking mini-tractors. They didn’t look as if they were short of a few bob. That’s a false view I think. When we think farmers, we tend to think of lord Yaxly with his two billion acres. I’ll bet he’s an outlier, most farmers probably live quite close to the edge, struggling to hold onto a lifestyle they love. Taking away their tax allowance might have felt like the last straw. I imagine that the idea of cutting the allowance was about stopping millionaires buying land to escape their taxes. There were other ways of doing this. We could make laws like the French — if you buy land you must farm it, and you must have a farming qualification. Penalizing farmers wasn’t the intention I assume, it just turned out that way. The whole fiasco wouldn’t have happened if there had been someone who understood farmers, and their problems, involved in drawing up the plans. But they all went to a different type of school.
So we should outlaw private education? Stop people spending their money to give their offspring a head start? Are we going to ban private tutors too? No, you can’t tell people how to spend their money, once you start down that road you’ll end up with stupidities like suggesting that people on benefits can’t spend their money on beer. The good things in life will always be hogged by the wealthy, the only real answer is to make us all rich. For now all we can do is accept that some people think differently from us.
there’s a lack of discipline…
You may, or may not, be familiar with Damien Hirst’s magnum opus The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. Indeed, like myself, you might have formed a view as to it’s artistic merit. But it wasn’t its aesthetic qualities that struck me on first sight. My initial reaction was to ask, how did he make that? and what for? That he sold it for eight million quid may have been one of his reasons for making it. As to the making of it, I doubt he was hands-on involved. He didn’t catch the fish, and I’ll bet that he didn’t make the box. He came up with the concept. I’m fine with that — artists don’t have to be craftspersons, but in this case the disconnect between the artist and the artwork was too in-your-face for me to ignore; the contents of the sausage were out there in plain sight, the taste was affected. I couldn’t see the artwork — I was asking how? and why?
That’s not my normal process for judging a work of art. First I’ll think about what it looks like, how it’s affecting me. Maybe, after a while I’ll look to see how the artist has done it. How they’ve laid down the colours, I’ll examine the brushwork, I’ll think about the layout. I might even ask myself what the artist was trying to achieve, maybe they were saying something? This is exactly backwards from the way that I judge schools — I always want to know how they’ve done stuff first. Then why. Then I’ll ask if it was it successful, in its own terms, or mine. Then I’ll see if I can judge the cost of the outcome, in education success can be bought at too high a price.
So when the Michaela School started making waves in all the medias these were my questions. We’ll take the how first. On first read I was impressed by the sheer technical achievement. I’d assumed that it had been a failing school turned round by a new and bustling head (all new heads bustle). The new ethos was on rigid discipline, always popular with certain people, but quite hard to achieve in practice. How did she sell this to the parents? get the staff onside? cope with the push back from the pupils? When I looked closer I saw that something else going on.
The school was new. The initial intake was small, the staff and pupils were picked, at least somewhat, I assume. There were government ministers on the board of governors so I expect they had some cash. (I wonder if their young adults went there?) In the circumstances creating a strict routine wasn’t that a major task. The school was a creation, set up to prove a point. Interesting, and something to think about, but not a panacea, you can’t build an entire educational system like that. You can try, you’ll have some successes but on the whole you’ll end up with a lot of failing schools filled with unhappy people. I’ll state it again — no one size fits all.
Which leads us to the why — among the best GCSE results in the nation. Can’t argue with that. (I’d be interested in a long-term follow-up to see if this helped the young adults in their lives.) I hope that it was worth it because, from what I read about the discipline, the young adults led brutal lives. Normally you’d have had to have committed some sort of crime or taken a monastic vow to be treated that way. They’re to be silent, to walk about in files, no more than four people can assemble in one place. If an employer required this of their workers?
All schools need discipline, you can’t teach without it, but there’s discipline and discipline. And in most schools it’s varied according to circumstances — you can behave in the playground in the way that you can’t in class. And different schools need different types of discipline — if the playground contraband is knifes and drugs rather than vapes and johnnies it doesn’t do to be too laissez-faire. Good schools will find the right level, poor schools will get it wrong. They’ll over or under react.
how we teach
If you were paying attention you’ll have noted that I started off this bit with two questions — what should we teach? and how do we teach it? And that then I said nothing about teaching methods.
teachers, eh?
That people dislike teachers is natural enough I suppose. We spend our school years locked up all day, being forced to learn a load of useless rubbish, to do homework, and gym teachers are just bastards from hell. A few years of at school tends to give most people a jaundiced view of the profession. Most people never shake off the idea that teachers were in some way punishing them, in particular, with all this learning. Sometimes, when I was in a classroom, the teacher would ask me about some question on the board. Which I would answer.
——How does he know that? Some wide-eyed wee young adult would ask.
——I went to school too. Or did you think that it is just you who has to learn this stuff? They’d continue to think just that.
I’m a janny, I’ve spent my life around teachers, teachers who seemed to be going out of their way to make my life hell. I have no very rosy view about teachers. But they’re treated like shit.
These days all knowledge based professional are suspect. Doctors, in hoc to big pharma, shill pills for imaginary diseases and treat symptoms and not the whole man; scientists, in hoc to big wind, have made up global warming, so that you have to re-cycle and drive electric cars; lawyers, of course, have always been crooks. Still, at least it’s accepted that they do have some expertise and that they personally profit from their evil deeds. Teachers know squat about teaching and their malice gets them nothing, they ruin young lives for no rational cause.
Why, if you disliked young adults, you’d take up teaching has always been a bit of a mystery to me.
what covid wrought
What harms have the young adults suffered for being locked up for the best part of two years?
feeling safe
When I was at primary it wasn’t uncommon for us, singly or in groups, to wander off about the neighbourhood at breaks and lunchtimes. There was nobody to stop us, as long as we were back by the bell nobody cared. When I started as a janny at Bruntsfield this wasn’t allowed anymore. You were still on your own in the playground.
they’ve removed god from schools
When I was in primary we said the lord’s prayer each morning and every few weeks a short fat minister, who looked like he’d escaped from a cartoon, would appear at assembly, smelling of sherry, to rebuke us for something, citing some tale from his book. I think he was the minister at St.Oswald’s, which was a real church then, before it became part of Boroughmuir. I can still recite the lord’s prayer, but then I can still remember my mum’s co-op divi number too. So there wasn’t much god to be taken out of my school.
At the moment this, urge to re-insert god (of the right kind) back into the classroom, is mostly an American thing. But I expect that it’s on its way here — we’ve imported all the other tenets of right-wing nutterism, why not go the whole hog and ship their kind of god in as well?
Religion has its place in life — so it should have its place in schools. I don’t mean those special mono-belief schools, where education comes a poor second to learning about how to worship the right god, in the right way. We have some of those in Scotland, catholic schools. I’ve worked in them, my mum taught in one, they’re not too bad, apart from the crosses and the strange pictures, the religious element isn’t huge. I still wish that they didn’t exist. Bigotry is still a thing in Scotland, siloing the young adults only ensures that we can misunderstand each other better because we’ve never mixed.
What, then, do I think is the place of religion in schools? Again we must thank the Michaela School for providing us with an example of bad practice that I can use. (It’s almost as if the powers that were set up the school to provide me with things to deplore.) They made the news by banning prayer rituals in the playground, people sued, the ban was upheld. Why didn’t they just give the young adults a classroom to pray in? That’s what we did at Boroughmuir. It would, undermining inclusion and social cohesion between pupils. Remember that this is a school that doesn’t allow groups larger than four. If it was undermining cohesion that was because you made a big fuss. I saw a lot of religion in Boroughmuir, nobody seemed to get miffed.
There were a lot of different gods in Boroughmuir. Classrooms were provided for prayer during ramadan; eid was a whole school thing; there were chalk mandalas and wee candles at the main door for diwali; there was always a non-denominational christian scripture group. We’d have made much more of easter if it hadn’t been a holiday; the sixth years all went to church at christmas. All of them, christian, muslim, hindu, atheist, sikh or jew. You could opt out if you wanted, as far as I know nobody ever did. Religion was there, it was a shared thing; we could enjoy other peoples’ beliefs and cultures, there was no risk to our own. I think that we had it about right.
So gods are still in some schools at least. But that’s not what they mean by, bringing back god is it? Sure they want a god there, their one, but that’s only part of their agenda. They plan to import satan as well. Satan with his dangerous heresies like rational thinking, tolerance and understanding. And you know what happens if you listen to satan? That’s right, you go to hell. Young adults must learn that believing the wrong things isn’t just a mistake, it’s evil, you’ll burn forever down below. Imagine terrorizing your children so that they won’t grow up to think differently from you. I’m not sure that even the god they claim to worship would go along with that. But maybe I’m wrong.
something must be done about this!
As I write this there’s a big push to ban the young adults from taking their phones to school. I have a suspicion that this is an example of the government doing something because, something must be done! I assume that the problem being dealt with is that the young adults are always on their phones. Which is somehow interfering with their education, and stymieing the development of important social skills. So, there’s a problem.
I’ll agree that there’s a problem if the young adults are using their phones in class. But that’s a discipline thing. At Boroughmuir, if you got caught using your phone in class, it was taken off you, and sent to one of the heads, where you could pick it up at the end of the day. If you were lucky. The head wasn’t going to hang around waiting for you. I was often asked to open up an office so, I can get my phone back. Which wouldn’t happen and you’d get a lecture about consequences for your trouble. True, this might be difficult for some schools, but a blanket ban from bringing phones to school? It’s a bit steam-hammer to shell peanuts. And there are actual dangers.
One of the more unpleasant experiences of my janitorial life has been the lost young adult. It happened regularly. About five o’ clock some poor parent would appear, their offspring hadn’t come home. There wasn’t much I could do to help. I’d lead them through some options, let them use the phone. Sometimes, when I knew the young adult, I could make suggestions about where they might be. At best I could calm them down a bit. Now, in the end the young adult was always found, but that was a couple of hours that the parent could have done without, and even the most well-balanced parent was going to give in to frothing fear-rage when the poor wee mite got home. Once phones were a thing this didn’t happen any more.
It’s unusual for teachers and jannies to be actual friends. Not round your house for dinner type friends anyway. Like the mother superior said of addicts, they aren’t friends, they’re acquaintances. There’s an unspoken class divide. On one side there’s the teachers and classroom assistants, on the other, the jannies, the cleaners, the dining room staff. You can see it in how the staffroom get used. In a primary school the staffroom is strictly for the teachers, I was never invited to share the Friday cake. In a secondary I could go in there, but it wasn’t comfortable. Nothing was said, there were no rules about it. Still I never used the staffroom.
I’ve had plenty of good teacher friends, just no truly close ones. I wouldn’t have the personal conversations with teachers in the same way I would have done with a janny, or a cleaner. Teachers were work mates, we went our separate ways when we went out the door.
So I haven’t really got any stories about teachers. Except for this one, for I did have one real teacher friend. I wrote this some years ago…
David
Back when I worked in the primary school, whose playground I still live in, there were only ever two men on the staff. One of whom was me. Most of these, other, men were much younger than me, just starting out as teachers. That made things a wee bit tricky. I was their father’s age but I was only a janny and they were a teacher. What kind of relationship should we have?
Primary schools are like families. You take on specific roles vis-a-vis the other staff — mother, father, brother, aunt. To the kids I was always the slightly-deranged older brother. I ran a toy soldier club, I had the best collection of Pokemon cards. I tried to look after them and if they had troubles they could come to me. But I wasn’t their friend. I was still an adult and when I used the voice and pointed then the thing that they had been doing stopped.
My relationships with female staff were based on our respective ages, I was old in janny terms even then. Some were my aunts, some my sisters, some my wee sisters — wee sisters who I spoiled.
David was my brother, we liked the look of each other at first sight. We were around the same age and shared a warped sense of humour. To annoy the female staff we formed the school male support group, Our Bodies Ourselves, dedicated to maintain the masculine, in the face of this monstrous regiment of women. We had a catchphrase, aw o' them?. Which related to a story that David had. He'd been a taxi driver and some other driver had said, "aw women are f—— mad", to which some other taxi driver had replied, "what? aw o' them Rab?" Actually it wasn’t really a catchphrase, it was more of a way of us signaling to each other that we thought that what was being suggested lacked sense. Or a way of trying to get the other to laugh inappropriately.
I remember one particular Christmas (a huge thing in a primary school!). It was a tradition that the entire staff put up the decorations one evening; so that the kids came into a joy the next morning. We were decorating the dining room. I was at the top of a ladder trying to arrange a string of kid-made stars such that mother, the head, was satisfied. David was at the bottom of the ladder feeding me the needful. Julie, I think it was, came over and asked us to do something. I forget what. The following conversation occurred…
——Me: I don't think that's my job.
——David: Nor mine.
——Julie: Why not? Tetchy, very tetchy.
——David & Me (together): Because that's women's work.
There was general shouting and laughter from all corners of the hall. David and I were pelted with whatever was to hand, which we returned in kind.
David always biked to and from work. I have a fixed mental-image of him doing it; when I saw him I always started thinking about how we could wind people up. Tonight as I was walking back from the shops dwarmingly realizing that I’d made a stupid mistake in my topology TMA I saw him cycling out of the school. I may have smiled. Then I remembered. It was just someone who looked like him. David was gone.
David died of some aggressive cancer a couple of years ago. By the time I found out he was so ill he was refusing visitors, he was in such humiliating pain. I wish I could have visited, perhaps it was for the best, all my memories of us are all ones of laughter.
