Thursday 2nd April 2020

It helps if you went to boarding school – although then you knew when the end of term was going to be. Nearly 9 days ago we were summoned by the Headmaster at 8.30pm (incredibly inconvenient at the dinner hour but I suppose they were thinking of those that dine at tea-time) for a massive rocket. More in sorrow than anger, too many had been lolling in parks at the weekend. So, no choice, you’ve been given your chance, no choice but incarceration. For your own good; then the pep talk phase.

Always dubious to blame the whole class for the miscreant actions of a few. In my actual school days I suffered a crippling anxiety to be good. Although foully behaved at home, at school I had a terror of ‘being in trouble’. Only in the final days, in November 1976, I did tell the Housemaster he was a ghastly little man and to get out of the room. Which he did. Amazing. I can see his awful spongy brown blazer with brass buttons as if it were yesterday. Unfortunately some months later, after I had left, he dropped dead on the football field, despite being small and quite young and springy. Not a just punishment, but his Roman History lessons were excruciating. Matron at Prep – how I’d love to go back and give her a piece of my mind. She was a toxic mass of ignorance, bent like Sycorax, Caliban’s mother, by bogus notions of daintiness and social superiority into a hoop of disapproval and suspicion. Why she was ever allowed anywhere near children I cannot imagine.

Anyway, massive whoops and banana skin when, only a few days after the rocket, the headmaster goes down with it himself, bringing all the senior boffin beaks and the other crucial master teaching coughs and temperatures with him. What have they all been up to? Not washing their hands after touching the door knob? Now they’re pretending to be ‘working from home’ while trays of food are left outside their rooms and nobody will go near them without a can of DDT on tap.

So this time I’m thinking of, how shall we say, not exactly being bad, but standing up to them, just a bit. Apart from anything else, I don’t always use up my ration of daily exercise. But I don’t suppose the prefects will believe that if encountered. ‘What are you doing out of lessons?’ they’ll say. I’m allowed to pedal, though. What if I should just happen, while pedalling, to meet a friend? Gatherings of two, at social distance, confusingly are allowed. Meeting up with friends not allowed. So with whom does one gather? Any old toxic refugee from a home without a bleach-spray routine? People who spit? If the prefects enquire I can just say,’I don’t know this person. It’s a random encounter with a view to sexual congress once current restrictions are lifted.’ They can hardly object. In fact they have no choice but to hugely approve. Unlike the old days, when that sort of thing was clamped down upon. Now they’ll have to be all for it.

The Milk situation will have to wait until tomorrow. You see – there’s so much going on.

My Carboy of Milk: Use by 10th April