Dear LPG,

I am an old boy now but when I was young and at school we all used to look forward to the summer holidays, and times don’t change much.  From what I can see, the young seem to be the same because my grandchildren really looked forward to being at home for the summer this year in spite of being stuck there for most of 2020.  But after six weeks of being at home I think, without exception, they are all looking forward to going back to school, just like most of us did no matter if we were the studious youngsters or the more rebellious ones.

I suppose that I would have been thought of as a bit of a rebel during my school days and there are many stories that I could tell.  We boys were used to “six of the best” while the more wayward young ladies were used to being smacked across the back of the calf of the leg.  I wonder if detentions are still handed out as often now as then?  I must admit to spending more of my fair share of evenings sitting in a classroom long after everyone else had left school with a teacher watching while being made to write many “lines”. There were two main methods of doing this depending on how long the actual line you had to repeat was.  They usually started with the words ‘I must not…’, and often continued with phrases like ‘talk in class’ or ‘copy my friend’s homework’, in my case. 

Some of us chose the classic ‘one sentence at a time, straight across the page’ method where you just repeated the sentence from start to finish fifty, one hundred or however many times required.  But I always thought that the ‘downwards method’ was quicker. 

I would start by writing the first line to work out if I needed one or two lines per repetition, and then I would fill in all the ‘I’s from the top to the bottom of the page before returning to the top and beginning on all the copies of the word ‘must’ after which I would return to the top again to start on the word ‘not’ etc.  I wish I knew then what I know now.  I could have done with a computer and the ‘copy and paste’ method in those days.

Over the last year or so we have had a weird sort of summer holiday; a break from all the normal things that we have been used to doing which has felt like a sort of punishment, and for me each day’s repetition of my lockdown schedule has felt a bit like being on detention at home while having to repeat the same tasks over and over again; just like writing those lines without being able to use the so called ‘downward method’. 

I used to hate schoolwork, homework, and especially writing lines back in those days, yet after a year and a half of what we have all been through, I can’t tell you how good it is to get out again.

I wonder if there are any other older ladies and gentlemen who remember being a bit wayward at school and are really glad that our much extended ‘2020 - 2021 winter, summer and everything in between’ holiday is finally coming to an end, even if it means doing some of the things we would rather not? 

DS, Camberwell