I have also had a number of interesting conversations during the course of these interviews about literature and there is clearly a great deal of involved reading going on despite the fact that the number of boys who read books is declining nationally. CCCS is a reading-friendly zone with boys desperate to bury themselves in a book. Boys are also telling me about the poems they are learning by heart in preparation for the poetry recitation at the end of this half of term. I hope very much that you will be able to come to this wonderful event. There is little more moving than hearing people recite poetry that they have made their own by committing it to memory. Part of the magic of poetry is that, once committed to the mind, it rarely leaves us and having become part of us it changes us for the better. This almost certainly sounds sentimental but I am certain it is true. Remembered poetry increases our sensitivity and shapes the way we see the world. So often it gives us a heightened sense of the world’s value and of the importance of our fellow human beings.

It was a great pleasure to be able to discuss Persian poetry with Miss Hajar earlier this week. She teaches in a small and seemingly inconsequential room at the top of the Walton Centre, but as in all our rooms, great and inspiring work is done. Miss Hajar would like to name the room – all our other teaching rooms have names – and she has asked if it could be named after one of the Persian poets. We talked through the poets together and we have agreed to make a decision after the weekend. One of the poets we discussed was Saadi from the city of Shiraz, a place known for being the origin of one the most popular of all grape varieties. He wrote some words which are often placed above hospital and school doors in Iran and which seem to be, even in the rather halting English translation below, words of great profundity:

“Human beings are members of a whole,
Of creation of one essence and soul
If one member is afflicted with pain
Other members will uneasy remain
If you have no sympathy for human pain,
The name of human you cannot retain.”

I suspect my Easter reading will include some of these great poems.

I suspect that few of you, fortunately, remember one of the most inelegant feats of British engineering, the Morris Marina, a car which it is impossible to believe was the product of human design, so uninspiring was it in every way. The fact that it had been produced in 1970 to replace one of the greatest cars ever to grace the road, the Morris Minor – I still have a Morris Minor steering wheel in my study at school as a tribute to that great car- makes the Marina’s appearance even more dispiriting. It was with a mixture of amusement and horror then that I heard Coleridge’s great epic Poem, one of the gems of early 19 century Romantic poems, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” described by a pupil who had talked brilliantly about its profound effect on him, as “the Rime of the Ancient Marina. ” Conversations with pupils often bring new perspectives upon things you thought you fully understood!