Diving with great white sharks, speeding round the track at Brands Hatch with the world sidecar racing champion, being eaten alive in an interview with Lou Reed… though I’ve done lots of exciting things in the course of my life as a journalist, none has come even close to matching the visceral thrill of the
Ah, happy memories of the 1990s classroom. The flicker of the CRT screen; the interactive whiteboard; the screeching from the dial-up internet modem; the frantic searching for the Encyclopedia Britannica CD-Rom. These images are now as archaic as the blackboard and the slide rule. Gone are the boxy computers under a dust sheet in the
Have school libraries had their day? The printed book’s previously unassailable supremacy as the medium of learning is rapidly being replaced by other more sophisticated electronic means. Books are still popular among the young, often promoted by social networking, but with the internet and much else, is their future (if they have one) merely recreational?
The handing over of aid money to governments to spend on state schools has often proved disastrous. Thousands of villages in the developing world now have ‘ghost schools’, where buildings are empty or half-built. The teacher is paid but doesn’t turn up. A local official is bribed to confirm that all is well. In a
Letter home from prep-school boy, c. 1949: ‘Dear Mummy and Daddy, last night was the school play. It was Hamlet. A lot of the parents had seen it before, but they laughed all the same.’ Guffaws from the audience at lines that are not supposed to be funny; total absence of laughter at lines that
Some years ago (well, nearly ten if you must know), I gave a dinner to mark my undistinguished half-century. Nothing grand — but a convivial gathering of ten men and ten women in the basement of a restaurant where several of us used to hang out in loon pants in the early 1970s. Looking down
My brother’s Classics teacher Mr Maynard had a pet rock called Lithos (Greek for stone); his teaching methods included ‘subliminal learning’ sessions, during which he’d walk around the room conjugating verbs in a soft voice while everyone else suppressed giggles. He was also fond of a physical demonstration, hurling himself across the room with no
In the summer before university, I rode a minibus to Blandford Forum in Dorset to attend a Greek summer school. Sitting next to me was a boy with Scout badges pinned to his polo shirt. ‘I like your costume,’ he told me, eyeing my blouse. ‘You look just like an air hostess. Or a Barbie
‘Give me a child until he is seven and I’ll give you the man,’ said St Francis Xavier, co-founder of the Jesuit order. Public schools are given children until they’re 18 — it’s no surprise they can control their world view for the rest of their life. And their language, too. When Prince William teased
The traditional edifice of sixth form, university in Britain, and a job for life is still the norm for many, but major cracks are beginning to appear in the infrastructure. As the father of three children, two of whom have been through university and one who is still there, as well as headmaster of a
When I close my eyes and think about school sports, I envisage myself on the hockey pitch, stick in hand, a luminous gumshield locked on to my chops and a bandana across my forehead. (Bandanas were all the rage back then.) Boys are watching. I can also hear the booming voice of Mr Markham, our fierce
The school trip now seems rather quaint. When you can see the whole world on Google Maps, what’s the point of traipsing to the seaside to see longshore drift in action? In an age of austerity, moreover, the school trip might seem an unaffordable indulgence. Yet parents seem to think otherwise: according to a recent
In China you can see replicas of the Eiffel Tower, the Great Pyramid, St Peter’s Square and a large slice of Amsterdam. But more remarkable than any of them in its own way is a red-brick military-academy-style building in the Hongqiao district of Tianjin. It is a replica — or thereabouts — of Wellington College
Every year — according to Fleet Street legend — the Telegraph prints a lovely photograph on its front page after the A-level results are published. It shows happy, bright young ladies clutching important letters and leaping into the air with glee. These lissom blondes are, of course, the students with straight As. ‘Yessss!’, they have
What the hell are you talking about? These 17 chemical elements, with names such as neodymium, dysprosium and europium, are used in the manufacture of objects ranging from lasers, aerospace components and nuclear batteries to camera lenses, energy-efficient light bulbs and self-cleaning ovens. Where do they come from? Today 95 per cent of the world’s
In Competition No. 2749 you were invited to submit a poem, written by a poet laureate from the past, to mark the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. Thirteen out of the 19 former laureates featured in the entry. Unsurprisingly, the most popular were Betjeman and Tennyson, with Wordsworth and Hughes coming a close second. Alfred Austin and
In Competition 2748 you were invited to submit snippets of misleading advice for tourists visiting Britain. For those who are less than enthusiastic about the impending Games and the resulting hordes that will descend on the capital and beyond, this week’s postbag provides a potent arsenal of sadistic misinformation guaranteed to add an interesting twist
In Competition No. 2747 you were invited to encapsulate a well-known poem in four lines. These digests perform a valuable service to the time-starved reader of today, and How to be Well-versed in Poetry, edited by E.O. Parrott, contains some fine examples. Who needs to plough through Chesterton’s ‘Lepanto’ when we have John Stanley Sweetman’s
In Competition No. 2746 you were invited to submit a sonnet using the following rhymes: pig, bat, cat, wig, jig, hat, rat, fig; lie, red, sob, die, bed, rob. This is a rerun of a brute of a competition that was set back in the 1950s, and the daft rhymes are those given as an
In Competition No. 2745 you were invited to submit an extract from a leader’s speech to a party conference, incorporating the titles of as many Beatles songs as possible. In 2007, Gregory Todd, a district court judge in Montana and fan of the Fab Four, managed to incorporate 42 Beatles song titles into his sentencing