This the first of a monthly newsletter from St Albion’s School. It’s intended to be an amusing aside to the main blog posts. Hope you enjoy it.
Well, what a month it’s been at St Albion’s School. We started the month with our over-hyped football team heading off to play in the Inter-Schools Tournament in France and, as usual, we had over-inflated hopes of their chances. We also started the month as a member of the Confederation of Schools, of which we are a pretty big cheese despite our size and school numbers.
We ended the month no longer in the tournament, or the Confederation, with much blame and recrimination swirling around the school corridors, some of it turning quite nasty, and involving some out-of-school protests. The Head Boy has resigned and is going to spend more time on his farm; the school bully has gone home in tears after being snitched on by the mother of his weaselly sidekick; the school council is falling apart and the teacher who ran the football team has skulked away, taking a load of school cash with him. For a while, there was so much back-stabbing going on that we needed a knife amnesty to get all the cutlery back in the dining hall. Meanwhile, the school sneak is telling anyone who will listen to calm down, after spending the last couple of years trying to get us all to panic.
The footy was embarrassing as we scraped through one of the easiest groups in second place and then lost to a tiny Icelandic school which has a population smaller than our sixth form. The teacher in charge, Wonky Woy, immediately resigned with a pre-prepared speech saying; “These things happen”. Only to us, apparently. An apology for his woeful decisions would have been nice. Decisions like having our top goal scorer and one of the tallest lads in the year, Bendy Kane, taking the free kicks so Sobber Sterling, one of the shortest kids in the school who is currently having a crisis of confidence due to a bout of cyber-bullying, could try to get on the end of it. Madness! So now the talk is of who will succeed Wonky. There is a strong rumour we could go for the Iceland manager, but with most of the games on a Saturday, he’s concerned he wouldn’t be able to leave the store long enough on what is his busiest day of the week. More next month.
That debacle would have been bad enough, but there was more turmoil. In fact, the football team are thanking their lucky stars that the school newspaper, The Mouldy Murdoch, has been full of the month’s other news, or they would have taken a much bigger battering given the amount of school cash that has gone into facilities for them.
The other embarrassment for the school surrounds the school vote on whether we should stay part of the Confederation of Schools. Always dodgy to ask school kids for their opinions and expect them to be sensible. I remember when we asked them to name our new science lab and we got The Boom Bar, Frankenstein’s Lab and the Kim Jong Un Centre for Nuclear Research as the top choices. But if you can’t be immature at school, where can you be immature?
Anyway, we have had years of everyone criticising the Confederation of Schools, some of it justified, most of it lies and distortions concocted by the Mouldy Murdoch like we can’t sell straight bananas in our tuck shop anymore. The trouble is none of us defended the good things about the Confederation and so when we came to test school opinion, we shouldn’t really have been surprised when a majority of the school apparently believed the lies. Add to that, the school bully, Barmy Boris and his weaselly sidekick Gormless Gove, who spent the whole month making up stuff and accusing anyone who disagreed with them of being a scaredy cat. Nobody should have been surprised that Barmy Boris would lie, given that he has twice been expelled for lying – once for making up quotes in the Mouldy Murdoch, and the second time when he denied shagging Petroleum Watts behind the bike sheds. His biggest whopper was that he doubled the amount of money we give to the Confederation of Schools, then said we would continue to support all the school activities that are currently being funded by the Confederation, while at the same time spending the entire imaginary sum on bringing our medical centre up to scratch. Why the majority of the school swallowed that flawed calculation, is one for the head of maths to explain.
Anyway, we ended up voting 52-48 to leave (if you are into Jane Austen, you could say that’s 48% Sense and Sensibility and 52% Prime and Prejudice) But interestingly, those are exactly the same statistics the school sneak Nasty Nigel had claimed would merit a second vote as it would be too close to act upon. Of course, he was talking about it being 52-48 in favour of staying. He hasn’t mentioned that since and has now gone home early demanding we leave the Confederation immediately.
Unfortunately the Head Boy, Piggy Cameron, has also walked away with his mum Ham Cam, who is still reeling from the realisation that her mother’s advice of ‘never putting anything in your mouth if you don’t know where it’s been’, does not come close to covering the horror of how much worse it is when you do know where it’s been. Gormless Gove’s mother, Lady MacGove, has ‘leaked’ a letter to the head saying Barmy Boris is a liar and can’t be trusted as Head Boy, so having caused chaos, he’s run home crying and is currently looking for another jolly jape to keep himself occupied and in the limelight. That leaves a load of candidates – including the weasel-in-chief – who most people in the school have never heard of, now asking to be Head Boy or Head Girl. The only one most of us have heard of is Mumsy May, an uptight prefect who is respected, if not particularly well liked. Well, I say most of the school know her but my survey to check that is a little inconclusive. When I asked: “Do you know Mumsy May?” Most people replied with words to the effect: “Great, thanks for the tip”, which again highlights my point about immaturity. Still, it looks like it’s her’s for the taking – but then with a school council who eat their young without a second thought, who knows?
Meanwhile, as something of a sideshow, the Alternative School Council is in chaos too. Commie Corbie is clinging on to what passes for power when he should really be kicking seven shades of shit out of the ruling group who are in marginally less disarray than his mob. And Kranky Kipper is running around trying to find a way for her, and her friends, to stay part of the Confederation, even though she’s clearly not a school. Having said that, if her section of the School Council votes to reject the school vote, we wouldn’t be able to say our entire school constitution supported it, and that’s what the Confederation of Schools requires for us to give notice we’re leaving. So don’t discount Kipper, she’s a slippery fish.
Anyway, it all adds up to nobody really wanting to pull the trigger and officially tell the Confederation of Schools that we’re leaving. If we’re looking for someone to get us out quickly I can’t think of anybody better that Wonky Woy. He had us out in 90 minutes – no messing – and he didn’t have a plan either, so it can be done.
As term draws to a close, the chaos looks set to continue through the summer holidays and into next term. How do I see it playing out? ‘No idea’ is probably the most honest answer. But if I have to speculate I would say that IF Mumsy May becomes Head Girl, she will slow everything down to a crawl. She will go for a woman-to-woman chat with Matron Merkel and together they will carve out a deal which might just about be acceptable enough for the school to swallow – apart from Nasty Nigel who will be back to terrorising the foreign kids, calling them all sex pests and trying to build a wall around the sixth form block. Mumsy will then put the ‘new deal’ to the school council who might then find it acceptable enough to ignore ‘the will of the school’ while keeping faith with ‘their obligation to govern’, and accept it. They might have the bottle to just vote to stay on the new terms, or they might call for a new vote sometime next summer term. By then, those who confused ‘in’ with ‘out’ will have sorted out which direction is which; those who did it to piss off the teachers will realise that shooting yourself in the foot actually hurts, and those who thought it would mean all the Black and Asian kids would be expelled will realise they are not here because of the Confederation of Schools. Or it will be clear that a significant majority of the school now think leaving is the right way to go and that we can run our own school, with or without an admissions policy like the Australians, which involves shipping off anyone they don’t like to Nauru and leaving them there until they decide they should go to another school. Wonder where they got that idea?
On a brighter note, our rugger buggers have been kicking ass, as our American cousins would say, but that’s been pretty much passed over because we don’t really do success at St Albion’s.
Hope July is a little quieter – but I doubt it.
The Common Room Commentator.
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Thanks.
