Now that the door to December has finally opened it really does feel like we are reaching the end of the year. I spent this last weekend wrestling with various tangled decorations, renewing batteries in sets of lights and rediscovering Christmas materials after a 12 month intermission, including a house move! I am hopeful that the last two weeks of term will be uneventful and relatively isolated from pandemic-related nonsense; it would be most encouraging to be able to concentrate on educational stuff and all of the extra-curricular excitement which has rematerialized now that the infection rates have fallen. Christmas is usually a time where life in school is exciting for all of the right reasons. Let’s hope that 2021 lives up to the festive billing.
Looking back, it has been an ‘interesting’ year to say the least. So much has happened that I find it difficult to keep a grip on it all. The school closure in the spring is a distant memory, though we are still picking up the baggage from that event. The lack of exams in the summer seems, with the benefit of a fair dollop of hindsight, to have been a crisis that never really happened – the teachers felt the impact, but our students came through well. The mass testing sessions in March and September were milestones that felt momentous at the time, but now I look back and they seem routine, and of course there will be more of this to be done at the start of next term. The Covid mitigation measures have been a fixture; as I sit writing this in a Year 12 Study Session almost all of the boys and girls are wearing masks; we have become conditioned to a new normal. Life will never quite be the same again in the future. And, to be completely honest, I will not be sorry to see the back of 2021.
This will be my last blog of this calendar year*. I asked my wife, an English Teacher, what I should write and she recommended a Tennyson poem which I have reproduced in full below. It’s a good choice, as it uses the peals of Christmas church bells to ring out the old and bring in new hope. Let’s all hope that 2022 gives us more reasons to be cheerful, for more of the time, and that all of our fantastic young men and women at Bishop’s have an exciting and fulfilling year.
SDS
Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light:
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.
Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.
Ring out the grief that saps the mind
For those that here we see no more;
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.
Ring out a slowly dying cause,
And ancient forms of party strife;
Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.
Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
The faithless coldness of the times;
Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes
But ring the fuller minstrel in.
Ring out false pride in place and blood,
The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.
Ring out old shapes of foul disease;
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.
Ring in the valiant man and free,
The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.
*Next week’s guest blogger will be Rev Stella Wood, BWS Chaplain.
