Unofficial Christ's Hospital Forum

Drinking is a thoroughly worthwhile academic discipline and there should be a PhD in it.

The minute my mother knew that I was going to CH she was on the phone to everyone she knew telling them the good news. It was the chance of a lifetime. Especially in 1952. To make matters worse my sponsor was an old boy of the school and a senior governor. The weight of expectation was on my shoulde...

Steve Hilton gets a good slagging off from Nick Cohen in this Sunday's Observer. Hilto now appears to have completed a journey from left to right. Starting off by claiming to endorse old-fashioned one-nation conservatism in the Tory party he is now a regular on Murdoch's Fox News, hosting all sorts ...

I'm just picking myself up off the floor. Avon and I are on the same side of the fence for once. I know that opinion polls aren't totally reliable but the last four have put Remain in the ascendancy by anything from two to six points. Foureyes's language skills and parental ancestry are all very wel...

Went on the Anti-Brexit march in London today. About 100,000 there I reckon. Most of the banners bigging up the fact hat we'd been lied to and only another referendum nearer to Brexit will be the answer. Right on cue Airbus and BMW put their heads above the parapet and voiced their concerns. How wil...

So sad, the closure. Even in the preliminary stages the evidence was shaping up to sound like some of the worst nightmares of Caitlin Moran.

I'm pleased that Nick Duffell and Dr Joy Scheverien's work with boarding school survivors is being well aired on this site. Now not everyone has a bad experience at these places but of those who did Nick makes the points that they are psychologically made to feel guilty along the lines of: "Wel...

Bakunin, I've learnt to ignore the argumentative and illogical ravings of Sejintenej (whom I remember from my time at CH in the 1950s). He uses any excuse to indulge in screeds of obscure and unevidenced rambling and sometimes abuse. It's a nuisance when you find trolling on a private site like this...

Since we mention Steeleye and Peter Knight I've been checking out old videos on You Tube and Knight's fiddle playing is shown wonderfully on "Steeleye Span: Old Maid in the Garret/Tam Lin" where an old Irish folk favourite is segued into a spirited reel. Maddy Pryor had at this time been j...

It sounds to me as if Michael Scuffil had the good fortune of a fairly relaxed regime under Page and Killer (who seems to have been quite the opposite in peacetime). In my last year I remember Nicholas Cox saying to me that he felt he was sitting on a volcano. I too felt that for much of my time the...

Alterblu, you're misquoting me. It wasn't me who said that I had an awful time of it at CH. Actually I coped pretty well all things considered. But I understand those who did have an awful time of it. My parents always said that CH had changed me although they wouldn't say in what way. So for many y...

People didn't ask to leave if unhappy because we knew how much our parents' hopes were pinned on us. It was a privilege that others didn't have, a good education, the magnificent facilities, etc etc. In my first term in 1952 aged nine I looked around the class and wondered why it was half the size o...

The Peter Knight I mentioned above was fiddle player with Steeleye Span from pretty much the start of their career. He was to Steeleye what Dave Swarbrick was to Fairport. As far as I know there was no connection with CH or the services.

One of the things that would be useful on some folk albums is a lyric sheet. I don't know whether folk singers inflect in a particular way but I was listening to Eliza Carthy's Anglicana album the other night and I was struggling to follow the words.

There was an extensive interview with him in today's Guardian. He went on to Oxford to study Theology, Hebrew and Greek. Makes a change from totting and flat roofing. No please, don't start lecturing me about political correctness. I will have my little joke. There was a Romany site near us in Kent ...