Since leaving The Oval Office, Barack Obama has observed that as POTUS he had all the technical expertise he could have wished for at his disposal and he could have hired anybody at all to work for him; but that, for all this, most of the problems that crossed his desk could not be solved by technical solutions and most had no clear solution at all
We humans are such contrary creatures. So often, we expect the very best, we expect the highest standards, particularly if we are paying well for the outcome we seek.
I was talking to a parent in the Yard the other day about what Lieutenant George from Blackadder Goes Forth might call ‘coming a cropper’, or the process of going ‘goose over stumps’… Namely, boys in a solo performance situation who hit considerable difficulties, make a series of errors, fluff their notes or who even have to stop, and then have to pick themselves back up to complete the piece.
This particular time is a season in which death rises to prominence. Without wishing to take it in too macabre a direction, this was my starting point with the boys in Monday’s assembly. ‘A cheery way to start the new half of term, Mr Butcher!’ I imagine you thinking. But perhaps I can be indulged for a short moment...
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Words: That words matter is a truism. Words matter in terms of our labelling and deciphering of the world. (To what extent something actually exists to us, if there is no word for it, is an interesting point of reflection with which to challenge the thinking of some of our older boys.)
Victories come in different forms. Montgomery at El Alamein; Obama over McCain; Kanneh-Mason in Young Musician of the Year; finding that rogue Malteser when you thought the bag was empty…
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As I sit down to write my piece for this week’s newsletter, I find my situation acting as a microcosm of what happens in the national press on a daily, sometimes hourly basis; holding a mirror to two things which are at the root of so many problems within the national discourse.
There’s one way you can tell that you’re the very first of the early runners to jog the paths of the water meadows of a morning: it is that you’re the one breaching the spider web threads spanning from one side to the other, gathering across your face like so many Lilliputian ropes cast around Gulliver.
Optimism. A sometimes maligned word, thanks to the fact that some folk endow it with overtones of naïveté and whispy scents of a goggle-eyed refusal to look hard facts in the face.
It is a real pleasure to write my first piece for The Pilgrims’ Way and if I have yet to get a chance to meet you in person, I do hope that I can do soon.
