Can the school magazine survive the social media age?

After all these years its pages smell distinctly fusty and its rusting staples are hanging on by a thread. But there is something about flicking through an old school magazine that jolts the past back into the present in a way nothing else quite can.

More than four decades on, there they still are: those apparently trivial but meaningful events that punctuated my and my schoolmates’ formative years, faithfully chronicled for all time. The doings of the sixth-form committee that ran weekly tea parties for the elderly are painstakingly recorded. A report of a field trip to Warwick sits alongside details of a junior school production of Antigone.

Long-forgotten faces from my girls’ grammar school swim into view as I turn the pages. Their names are rendered simply as an initial followed by a surname and a year (P. Clarke, 2S, A. Green, LVIR), but suddenly I can recall them all.

Details of O- and A-level results, Associated Board music exams and hockey fixtures jockey for position with the news of a pupil who has become the first woman ever to win an Open Scholarship to a particular Oxford college.