Us, We, Ours.

Walter was cold. I allowed him to wear my hat and scarf. I was careful to get my camera ready before he put them on.

Sorry Walter ...well, actually, no I am not. You made a number of people smile quite a lot.

A long day, with a variety of different tasks completed, or at least started. Interesting meetings with students and with colleagues. Excitement when the power went off during a meeting this afternoon and lost a pile of my work (I say excitement - I clearly mean something else). Terror an hour later when the section of the building I was in was plunged into utter darkness - of the sort where you cannot see your hand in front of your face.

The hooting owl in the grounds added to the horror movie moment.

Then this evening, our Achievements Evening - celebrating the successes and achievement of the current senior students and the cohort that left us in the Summer. It's always so good to see the former students and to see how quickly they turn into young adults.

Fantasic contributions from our students and one particularly memorable performance by a student and her father, who mesmerised me (and the rest of the audience) with a traditional Persian folk song - absolutely beautiful - haunting, melodic - it will stay with me.

So, tonight I am grateful, again, that we are not like the others. That we work together and consider each other as a community that is bigger than us as individuals. That the people that we work with, alongside and for, see the value in education and in working together. That we see the young people that we work with as ours and invest in them as though they were. That their families feel a part of our school, our community.

That is what education should be about and I hope that the students, current and former, know that we place great value in what we learn from them as well as what we impart to them.

Even if we are all slightly bonkers.