The passage of time is marked in a thousand trivial ways. For me, if it is Monday, it is back to work after the weekend. For Tuesday, it is the ASDA mini-shop. Wednesday is Obtiser day. Thursday is black bin day. Friday is Poets day. Saturday is the big shop. Sunday is the Sunday paper. Every fourth Saturday it is green bin day. Projects, Shows and holidays are things to look forward to and then they are gone.

And so it goes, another week gone from your nominal 3,600+ allocation of your own personal three score and ten.

The strange thing is that growing older, the years fly by but many of the hours drag on just as long. The ones spent in pointless meetings, waiting for buses to arrive, endless dull adverts at the Cinema, watching the clock doing a dreary task. Meeting old friends is a stern reminder of the ravages of time, so familiar yet so different. Old memories are often fresher than newer ones.

Last Saturday, I met Glyn Thomas, one of the longest serving teachers at Kenton School. He was a ceramics teacher and now Head of Art, being regarded as a venerable institution there after more than twenty-eight years teaching. However he didn’t actually start there until three years after I left, being about the same age as me. (& about the same build for that matter). I was chatting to him during the interval and he told me that he hailed from Halifax, came to Kenton as a Student teacher and ended up staying, although he hadn’t planned it that way.

During Saturday night’s show, he had two short slots in the programme armed with some old (and new) technology. He wore an over the ear Radio Cic so he could be clearly heard and a video camera was set up so we could see what he was doing on the big screen. The old technology was a potters wheel which was the most reliable of the three as the video cam lost communication with the network a few times and there were sundry problems with various Radio Mics during the evening.

(Radio Mics are the spawn of the devil for technicians because they are notoriously flaky at times and I have had gyp with them myself in presentations where they have worked perfectly at rehearsals then taken their bat and ball home when asked to perform. Big West End shows have a very elaborate cockpit drill for Radio Mic management to minimise any potential problems, complicated somewhat by the limited number of actual channels available and imminent possible legislation changes that are causing big headaches).

Before Glyn started, a number of girl dancers in old school uniform did a routine onstage then all faced the potters wheel wide eyed and attentive. He then explained that the near universal responses for teenagers presented with a lump of clay for the first time was to fashion it into the shape of a willie!

Removing the phallus- like object he had been shaping from the wheel, he threw another clay lump and fashioned it into a pot. The allegory here was that youngsters were like clay, full of potential somewhat without form, waiting to be shaped by education. forming the edge of the pot, he said that this being Kenton, it needed a bit of lip…

Returning to the pot near the end after a suitable level of firming up, he inverted it and skimmed the excess clay off the bottom, giving it a pleasing contour. He then related his second allegory, which was to mark the base, teachers having left their mark on pupils here for nearly fifty years.

He didn’t strain the allegory too much though, as the next stage would be to fire the pot in the clay oven, drawing the analogy of being set in their ways…

I personally can’t recall making a pot, although I can remember an Art teacher intensively kneading some clay that had folded on the wheel, in order to get the air out of it so that it could be used again. I can also remember that same teacher affixing a fellow fifth former with a stern look and saying in a loud voice “Don’t you play footsie with me!” during a lesson. The reaction of the girl made it obvious that she had been…

During the show, there were was a short video vignette of a couple of old ladies talking about what the school had been like in the olden days. One was very corpus mentis, the older one though seemed a little out of it. Frustratingly, the video didn’t actually say who the two teachers were and I didn’t specifically recognise them so I asked. The younger one had been a Girls PE teacher so it was unlikely that I had very much contact with her although I recognised the name. The other one had been Mrs. English who was the lower school Art teacher. I only had faint memories of her back from 69/70 but I recall her as being very dreamy and a bit like Sybil Trelawney, the teacher with the big glasses in Harry Potter who taught divination. One of Mrs. English’s world views was that art was never finished, the artist just chose to call it finished.That doesn’t really work in Engineering though…

(The long dark teatime of the soul is a Scott adams line)