CCCS celebrates Red Nose Day
It was Red Nose Day today! I managed to arrive at School sporting a blue shirt and yellow tie having forgotten temporarily about the importance of the day. But help was at hand! The front office popped a plastic nose onto my everyday one and Mr Berry quickly appeared with a red top hat which he seemed to have lurking around in his classroom. Is there any occasion for which a Reception teacher does not have a prop? There were any number of red clothes in evidence today including a beautiful Chinese silk top emblazoned with two glorious dragons and some red trousers covered in big black spots. When I complimented the wearer of the spotted trousers, he pulled his anonymous jacket back to reveal a shining red top with a glorious ladybird on the front. The trousers now made perfect sense! The most original piece of red impedimenta was the pair of red glasses being worn by a boy who arrived dramatically on his bicycle. “I’ve had a very interesting journey. My red glasses transformed the colours of the traffic lights. The red looked brown, the yellow looked green and the green looked blank!” I was relieved, I have to say, that he had arrived at school with everything, including his glasses, fully in tact.
Last night, some parents, the gappers and I had a wonderful evening wine tasting in the Buttery at the top of the Great Staircase at Christ Church. The Buttery is a most beautiful room, an old fashioned college bar with walls covered in old oars decorated with the names of triumphant Christ Church rowers. The Buttery manager, the wonderful Shaqir, gave us a splendid tasting of some delicious wines, one of which had been stored 8 metres under the sea off the coast of Spain. The bottle was still encrusted with marine life.
Perhaps it was my imagination but the wine tasted fresh and very slightly salty…. We all had a splendid evening and I would thoroughly recommend signing up for future events of this sort. We are so lucky to be able to take advantage of all that Christ Church has to offer.
One of the pleasures of this term has been watching matches on our playing fields. The new Pavilion has provided a perfect place for tea and it has been so nice to see more parents coming to support their sons. You never know quite how a building is going to work until it is up and running and the Pavilion has so far proved even more effective than we hoped it would. I also have seen some tremendous football this term! I lost count of the number of goals I saw being scored against the Dragon on Wednesday!
So many of you have kindly asked me how the Florence trip was. It was tremendous and the pupils so mature, brilliant and entertaining. I thoroughly recommend looking at the short video which Miss Biddell has tagged in her article in this newsletter. The resonance of the great Duomo in which the choristers were singing, rendered Tallis’s exquisite anthem “If ye Love me!” magical. The way in which the echoing harmonies interact with one another, given the length of the acoustic is utterly bewitching.
This weekend is one of my favourite weekends of the year. During its course I will see the School play twice over. Yet again, Mr Richards has written the play for us himself and with our own boys in mind. It promises to be a very colourful and entertaining production. I really hope that you will find the time to come and watch it. There can be few schools who do not perform ready-made plays!
I was just wondering how to end this letter when there was a knock at my door. I opened the door to find a smiling pupil holding some beautiful daffodils. “This is a present for you, sir, to say thank you!” “Oh that’s so kind,” I responded. I should have stopped there but it was the end of the week and …. I didn’t “They are beautiful! Where did you get them from?” The boy looked a bit sheepish “Er I’m not sure because my mother got them! You see,” he continued, gaining inspiration, “the flowers are from my mother, the thanks are from me. That’s what I call teamwork!”
