Lift Up Your Hearts

The Dean of Coventry Cathedral is John Irvine (E 1962). The Cathedral is famous for its work if reconciliation. Just as Haileybury will celebrate 150 years in 2012, so in the same year the new Coventry Cathedral will celebrate its Golden Jubilee.

The Dean writes on the cathedral website:

To walk from the ruins of the old Cathedral into the splendour of the new is to walk from Good Friday to Easter, from the ravages of human self-destruction to the glorious hope of resurrection. Your heart is lifted, your spirit is renewed and you feel that there is hope for the world. Thanks to God's mercy, reconciliation is possible.


There is a virtual tour of the Cathedral here. 

Vivat!

No one in the Lower or Middle Schools can be without his or her Prep Diary for very long. Ring bound A5 size books they contain the time table and a daily diaru in which preps are noted and from which they are ticked off. They don't quite serve the purpose of the termly Red Book known to older generations of Haileyburians, but now abolished. The red book had the class lists and the phone numbers of the Housemasters and other such information. Some of this is now printed in the first pages of the school calendar. 

The Red Book also had the verses of the Vivat printed in the back. No one sings it any more at school - at least in England. In Kazakhstan it is very much alive. 

For those who do not know it here are the words:

The Romans were a knowig race

Vivat Haileyburia!

They made a road down to this place

Vivat Haileyburia!

Romans came and passed away

Normans followed; where are they?

But we are here and here we stay!

Vivat Haileyburia!

Then shout five hundred voices all,

Vivat Haileyburia!

Our days of old we first recall,

Vivat Haileyburia!

But whatsoe'er their fame of yore

We've yet a mind to make it more

Our age of god still lies before

Vivat Haileyburia!

Then vivat, vivat round the board,
Vivat Haileyburia!
And yet once more with louder chord
Vivat Haileyburia!
For we've been boys and men together,
Have weilded bat and hunted leather,
When life was bliss in summer weather.
Vivat Haileyburia!

And sweet was then the victor's crown,

Vivat Haileyburia!

But friendship's joy struck deeper down,

Vivat Haileyburia!

And though our distant feet may roam

Our hearts will ne'er forget the home

The dear old school beneath the dome

Vivat Haileyburia!

Then close your ranks and lift your song,

Vivat Haileyburia!

That life is short, but love is long;

Vivat Haileyburia!

And all through life, where'ere we be,

School of our hearts we'll think of thee,

And drink the toast to three times three,

Vivat Haileyburia!

Options, Options

We were at Haileybury late on Sunday evening for the Removes options evening. The young people have to choose which subjects to do at GCSE and iGCSE. Since many universities use the results at this level to determine the offers they make of places the choices made now at 13 and 14 years old can have a bearing on the whole life of the children. No pressure then.

Everyone does the following:

English Language
Mathematics
A Modern foreign language, which may be their mother tongue if not English; French; Spanish; Italian
Religious Studies
Science

Science can be studied as a course in Biology, Physics and Chemistry leading to two GCSEs or as three separate subjects, which uses up one of the options.

The options require one to choose one subject from each of the groups:

What would you do?

Lift Up Your Hearts

Blogger has a 'stat counter,' so that one can see how many people come to read the blog, and which posts are the most popular. They cannot be perfectly accurate, but they give a good idea. According to the stat counter for this blog the all time most read post is the one on Commonplace books.

For this Saturday night / Sunday morning then, another dip into the common place book I started when at school. In my VI Form year I was directed to the author RC Hutchinson and read a number of his books including 'Testament,' a great work set in the Russian revolution.

Sometime in 1984 I noted this scrap of dialogue from the book into my commonplace book. The Christian and the Bolshevik debate their actions and the difference that the former will not agree that the ends justify the means. The Christian explains:

"Our difference is not a matter of mere politics, it is a difference in attitude towards truth, towards the purpose of man's existence. It is only this. I believe that every surrender to cruelty makes the battle harder for those who follow."

Hutchinson's last novel, 'Rising' (which I seem to have read in 1982) was a haunting tale of redemption achieved through the sacrificial self offering of one man for another. I noted this passage:

"Sometimes when Sabino was small he did helpful things for me. Oh, only little things. But without my asking. Then he'd do something heartless and drive me to despair again. No, not quite despair. I kept remembering the other things, the times when we he'd thought of people's feelings. It meant there was a spring of goodness in him, out of sight - something which would come to life again. It's in him still - it doesn't die to nothing, it can't, that part of a person which has once made us love him. We accept the fact of evil, which we can't explain. Surely we've got to accept the mystery of goodness too."