A Long Slog...

And the ball's finally sailing over the boundary rope. In a few days, we'll have made it into the crowd, where a fat man in an ill-fitting replica shirt will spill his over-priced pint as he fails to catch the ball.*

It's been an excellent opening term to this year, filled with challenges, successes and bon mots. Before I bang on, let's remember that this week is a key week; we have to keep everything shipshape and sea-worthy. That aside, it's been cracking. Your attitudes towards improving further, taking on new challenges and maintaining our already high standards have been superlative.

Each and everyone of you has risen to the demands of the job, especially when the demands of the job have been raised due to Ofsted and rumours of Ofsted, and I thank you for that. I'm sure that all within the department, and many outside, with wider responsibilities are as grateful as I am. You do a special job, with demanding and deserving children. We work with an astounding range of young people, all of whom bring an individual set of demands and needs.

Enjoy the final week, enjoy your holidays and any festive fun you may have. I look forward to seeing you all in January, ready to do it all again. And again.

*The video is a thin man dressed casually, carrying food, making a great catch. Apologies for the false advertising.

This is cliched, but...

Invictus

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

William Ernest Henley

We Shall Not Cease

The title of this week's blog comes from this quote by this man.

And twenty-something minutes later you're back.

Good, wasn't it?

But he was wrong, on one level. April isn't the cruellest month, wonderful poetic conceit though it is. There is no cruellest month, cruellest week, cruellest anything, other than systems and ideas designed by man. And those?

Those, cruel systems as they are, do not matter. At all. They're as real as April, Tuesday and time. None of which are really real.

What's real? What you do is real. And that's that. And that's what's right.

Keep it real. Keep it right.