St Andrew's Day

It was St Andrew’s Day this Saturday. As the patron saint of Scotland, this moment in the school calendar is a special occasion for all those on the wrong side of the border, and is celebrated by some by the donning of garish tartan trousers (though thankfully kilts are forbidden).

St Andrew’s Day is basically an open day, where parents come to catch up with their son’s housemaster and take a look at various various events, including a jazz concert, a fencing exhibition and a water polo match. Oh, and yes, the wall game.

The wall game is probably the defining image of Eton to the outside world. The sight of twenty schoolboys, colorfully dressed up and sporting war paint, piled against a crumbling red brick wall with their peers watching on from above is just too irresistible, a symbol of tradition in its purest form, both quixotic and ludicrous.

To an outsider the wall game must look quite fun, but ask anyone who’s witnessed it and they'll tell you it's rather dull. The pace is excruciatingly slow, with the ball often trapped beneath a pile of bodies for ten minutes at a time, like a modern day trench warfare without the blood and guts. Scoring a shy or goal is difficult, the latter in particular being so extraordinarily rare that witnessing one is an ‘I was there!’ moment.

As a result there is a tendency towards draws. This isn’t such bad a thing however, since an easier scoring system would turn the games into one-sided affairs. This is because on one side you have College, the scholars’ house, and on the other side the Oppidans, the collective term for every single other house in the school. Consequently there is an enormous mismatch of resources, with the ratio of boys to choose from roughly 22:1 – a David and Goliath scenario.

This imbalance in numbers does not go lost on the collegers, who nurture an ‘us against the world’ mentality. It’s fair to say they care more deeply about the game than the oppidans, and those of them not playing gather in support behind the ropes, with their opposite numbers perched high on the wall like sinister birds of prey.

To be honest it’s quite surprising that going up on the wall is still allowed in this day and age, what with health and safety and all that. I can say from personal experience that the drop on either side is not inconsiderable, and even the unbeatable view of the action on the one occasion I scaled it couldn't make up for my sudden bout of vertigo .

My talents are far too limited to make the team next year. Besides, my single experience of the wall game back in F block was not exactly a positive one. I was assigned to the position of '1st wall', my role being to crouch over the ball at the base of the wall. It was a bit like being told to dive on the last i-pad in a Boxing Day sale, as everyone else around me jabbed and kicked me. With my head pinned against the wall I also learnt about the exfoliating qualities of brick, useful should I ever run out of Nivea face scrub. 

This year I only managed to catch ten minutes of the action as my mum and dad got caught up with other parents. For the past two years they haven’t attended St Andrew's Day, leaving me the freedom to wander around at will. But this time they turned up and not surprisingly got distracted by the gossip.

I was curious to find out what my (generally blunt) Dad thought about Runty's parents. Disappointingly he found them ‘very personable’, which now the only possibility that Runty’s was brought up by a psycho nanny who fed him wild berries and horse meat.

After glimpsing the wall game we headed over to Mespots for the OE football match. This was far more entertaining and we stayed there until it was time for absence (registration) and short leave.

Whilst in the car on the way home I flicked through the St Andrew’s edition of the Chronicle (the school’s main magazine), and came across a story questioning who I, as this mystery blogger, could be. I knew in advance that something like this was going to appear, but it turned out to be wittier than expected, with speculation that I was Ian ‘Belly of the Beast’ Bone or even Nick Clegg.  

So far I've resisted the temptation to write about this blog (it seems a bit self-indulgent), but the fact is that attempts by my peers to unmask me have as yet been unsuccessful. Most people are nonplussed about the whole thing and don’t even read this, but a few individuals have taken it upon themselves to be High Inquisitors, posting links on Facebook, drawing up shortlists of suspects and whittling these down after interviews and finger poiting. People have even resorted to approaching the IT bunker geeks for information on my internet history.

I can’t deny that all of this has been unsettling, especially since I wasn’t expecting such a strong reaction. But on the whole people have greatly underestimated the planning that I have put into this blog:

Firstly, people think that I would actually include details of my life on here by which I could be identified. There are obviously some elements of the stories which are not taken from my own experiences, but instead have been borrowed from others. When I was in F block my room was on a corridor with several C and D blockers, who frequently entertained me with tales their time in the house, and those of the older boys too when they were in F block. So roughly 5% of the blog is drawn from them, and the rest is all me. 

Secondly, people think I wouldn’t have the foresight to not use the school internet when posting things. This was probably my first concern when the idea came to me, and I have circumvented it by doing everything on 4G. I write the content on my computer, save it as a draft on a non-school email address and then copy and paste it using my phone. In theory the geeks could trawl through every single piece of internet history in the school to check all email drafts, but I doubt they can be bothered and it would also be an invasion of privacy.

Finally, people assume that how one expresses oneself on paper is identical to one’s personality in real life. Often people will have thoughts and ideas which they struggle to express in person, and I am one such example. For this reason especially I have escaped suspicion and should continue to do so.

As a side issue, I have received emails asking me to criticise other boys and beaks. This isn't the purpose of this blog –  it’s a school, not a parliament and I wouldn't feel comfortable doing it (except under pseudonyms), especially if I were to be found out.

Anyway, that's enough for this week. It feels kind of meta to be blogging about a blog, so if I don't turn up next Thursday it's because I’ve been drawn into an Inception-style otherworld where I'm saving America and the fit girl.