High Ham and Somerset – Page 3 – For the fainthearted . . .

The late member for Yeovil

He came to open the school fete one summer. There was an excitement about his visit.

English members of parliament had large constituencies of eighty thousand or more voters. The expectations of their constituents were that members of parliament were to do their work in parliament. If one had a problem with which it was thought they might be able to offer help or advice, then the thing to do was to write a letter and they would respond on paper embossed with the distinctive House of Commons portcullis.

There …

Classic!

The school religious education syllabus next year is going to include a unit on classical philosophy. It will be an interesting prospect, to ask questions rather than repeat propositions. It will strengthen the skills of oracy, argument and reason, it will allow students to learn in a way they might have done at our Somerset primary school in the 1960s.

Perhaps it was the economic stringencies of the times, but books did not seem to play a significant part of the learning process in those primary school days. There were …

Bridgwater Fair

It is billed by this week’s Bridgwater Mercury as the biggest travelling funfair in the south-west. In a town known for its spectacular Guy Fawkes’ Carnival, it is not hard to imagine that the annual fair at Saint Matthew’s Field is also a large scale operation.

The Showman’s Guild who run the fair have said it will be “Covid safe.” When shops are filled with customers, people are gathered in pubs, and sports stadiums are filled to capacity, an open air funfair would seem one of the safer places to …

Feeling fortunate that England faces the right way

The chief memory from primary school geography is the time when I turned the country around.

In those times when making photocopies was a rare phenomenon confined to large institutions where Xerox machines could reproduce cloudy images, tracing paper was the way to transfer an image from one place to another.

The class was given the task of reproducing a map of Britain in their exercise books. This required placing a sheet of tracing paper on the relevant page of a school atlas and holding it firmly in place while …

The dreaded eve

It is a delight to have an sixth year tutor group in an Irish secondary school, a cohort of an age comparable with Year 13 in England. Conversations with seventeen and eighteen year olds are more interesting than those with eleven and twelve year olds.

Checking with students before their return to school, it was surprising how sanguine they were about returning to the classrooms. Even the most diffident of the boys said, “I suppose it won’t be too bad.”

Perhaps it is just a case of being more positive …

The end of the Romans

It was on this day in the year 410 that the city of Rome fell to the invading Visigoths. The end of the Roman occupation of Britain had begun twenty years earlier, the last Roman magistrates were expelled from Britain around the time that Rome fell.

Yet in those closing years of the history of the Empire, there was still a confidence about the future. Sixty years before the fall of Rome, around 350 AD, it must have been fairly peaceful around Low Ham. A large Roman villa was built, …