My old school

Fire from a safe distance: A great photo from JB junior with EB as a spectator.

God moves in mysterious ways: My old school (Woodmill High) burned down last night. I left there in 1969 but it was never a happy place for me (not that I ever wished for it to be burned down). The 60's were educationally speaking (?) a bad place; rampant corporal punishment, feeble teachers, a curriculum that was dull, unchecked bullying etc. etc. But I made it out alive as did numerous others all with healthy chips on our shoulders and a degree of bedded in trauma and anxiety. We were ill prepared for the outside world and it showed, the 70's were a proper mess of a thing as we explored that Brave New World. For kids there was quite simply a lack of preparation and mentoring, no warning or guidance as to what was to come our way via the injustices and vagaries of life, now we know better. Maybe we don't do much better though. The passes and failures are hardly hot currency, just dim relics on faded documents that are rendered meaningless by the passing of time and the growing up of spirit. It was grim but all we knew, such was a working class Scottish education and the then brutal and unfocused world of primitive academic ideals and targets.