Welcome everyone to this wonderful occasion, and thank you Headmaster for honoring me with your invitation. It is indeed a huge honour to be invited to address pupils, staff, parents and friends of one of the very best schools in England. I could say THE best school in England, but as a partisan of TRUTH I cannot actually PROVE that, but 'one of the very best' is self-evidently true as the evidence lies all around us - AND indeed on that modern miracle the internet!. Every time I return to these hallowed grounds I get very emotional, because this was my home for seven years, two in the main hall and five in what used to be Halls House before your lot demolished it! I may indeed be standing but a few metres from my old dorm somewhere just above our heads. Not a lot of people know this, but I shared a two-bed dorm for one term with Sir Cedric Delves - a charming and modest chap who later became Commander of the S.A.S. Nobody could have guessed at the time that that would happen, just as in this hall there are many young people who will one day also be hugely successful and admired. So, it is an amazing joy to be here, but I would certainly not feel as if I were at home the way I do had IHS not taken over Woolverstone Hall when our school closed - nor indeed had the staff collectively since then not shown such astonishing generosity and inclusivity towards WHS. That they HAVE shown that may be partly because WHS and IHS had a long history of close collaboration - particularly in music - but I am sure it is also due to both the human quality of empathy plus the deep sense of history, tradition and connectivity felt by IHS. So thank you for that. It could have been so different - but it isn't! The sadness we WHS Old Boys felt at the closure of our school has been largely healed. I have been back a number of times since 2003, and each time am once again stunned by the beauty of this setting, but that alone is not enough to make a beautiful school: the staff and pupils are even more important. Choosing between a beautiful place with horrible people and the reverse really is not difficult - but WH with IHS in it is beautiful in both ways. I have been lucky to meet a number of IHS staff over the years and come to realize that you are as fortunate as we were in our teachers. As for pupils, when I wandered over the main field on my arrival no fewer than three of them separately milling about during their break smiled at me as they passed by and said "Hi." That kindness to a strange old man stumbling about told me what human values are instilled here. Concerning teachers, I was lucky to have had a wonderful education here. The setting and facilities were of course superlative - apart from our tiny gym and swimming-pool! - but even more important were my teachers. Many were just wonderful human beings who went far beyond the call of duty in their devotion to our well-being and development. I have one big regret, and mentioning it now may help you to avoid it. I never thanked them adequately when I left school. One's frame of reference is obviously limited at a young age and I only came to really appreciate many of them some years later. I did meet some of them and did so, but for others it was too late. So - my advice to you is this: if you admire and appreciate someone, then TELL THEM. People are not mindreaders, and they will be happy to hear it directly from you. Of course, the same applies to romantic feelings for someone. Just tell them: they should know, and there is nothing to lose by honesty. I hope you watch "Anne with an e". Anne and Gilbert came close to losing each other as each was too shy to unburden their heart. Well, today is a special and beautiful day, and not just because the sun is shining (or 'even though the sun is not shining' depending on the weather!) It is special and beautiful for two reasons: ONE because even though the universe is billions of years old this day is UNIQUE. There has only ever been and will only ever be ONE DAY 8th July 2024 in the entire history of the Universe - which as Einstein said is perhaps infinite! TODAY IS UNIQUE, just like every human on Earth. And the universe is almost entirely either cold and dark or inconceivably dense and hot - and yet here we are. WE ARE SPECIAL - YOU ARE SPECIAL. Life is a gift, and a truly astonishing one. Let us use it well. Let habit not dull our appreciation of how miraculous life is. Let us BE special. Let us do SPECIAL things! Actually, nobody can say for sure because new ones appear almost daily and in any case it is in fact not that easy to define exactly what a word is. For example, are 'phone' and 'telephone' ONE word or two? But we can safely say that there are over half a million words. Don't worry - I suspect nobody on the planet knows them all - or ever has done! But there are only a dozen or so that REALLY matter, and those are: love, morality, empathy, respect, tradition, honour, duty, loyalty, justice, sacrifice and the two we are especially celebrating today, which are of course .... (pause) success and hard work. Alright, 'hard work' is two words, but one concept. Perhaps we should make it a single word! For me, hard work is the basis of our civilisation: everything we have and which is around us has been created through hard work: the skill and knowledge of your teachers, the beautiful buildings maintained and cared for by your staff, the quality of the catering, the grounds lovingly tended by Glen and his team, and most importantly - your mobile phone! And of course without your parents' hard work and sacrifice none of us would be here today! Hard work is essential for the survival and continuous improvement of our species. I am sure that even cavemen worked hard to improve their lot. We only have electricity thanks to the hard work of Michael Faraday and others. Hard work is a vital element of civilisation - and of the Human Spirit, that quality which makes our species so special. And the point is, those we honour today have worked hard to deserve their prize. Some might say: "Oh, X is so clever he or she doesn't have to work hard." Possibly, but in my experience, such people often work harder than anyone as they recognize that they have been given a gift which honour demands they utilise in the service of Mankind. So congratulations to all prizewinners. Through your hard work you have honoured yourself, your parents, your teachers, your peers, your community and indeed your species. Well done. One thing occurs to me. We can't ALL win a prize, but what we CAN all do is our best. As a parent (and indeed a teacher for 50 or so years) that is ALL I can reasonably ask of my child or pupil. And your best may not be enough to win a prize, but it is still beautiful. Doing your best ALSO honours you and all those I mentioned above. I suspect your teachers have a pretty good idea who has done their best, but the best person who knows that is YOU! So IF you know deep down that you haven't done your best this year, you can fix that NEXT year - and who knows, even win a prize yourself. I believe all I have said to be true and honest, but it is a bit theoretic and even waffly, so I would like to leave you with a practical tip. This concerns IMPRESSING people. To impress someone is not showing off. You can for a start impress someone with your modesty! Impressing someone is a win-win situation, because being impressed is nice. It is a positive feeling to admire what someone is or does. The most obvious way to impress someone is with your personal qualities: the way you look and behave; the way you communicate (making someone really feel you are LISTENING to them will impress them a LOT). You'll certainly need to impress someone at a job interview, so you can practise on your personal qualities now! But there is another practical side to this. I consider myself to be a jack-of-all-trades.That has its advantages, but there is no one thing that I am really, really good at. It is, however, a real ASSET to be really good at something. It may be something you can turn into a profession, or just something you can do for the rest of your life that gives you pleasure - and OTHERS pleasure too! There is no sin in impressing and entertaining people with a skill: a musical instrument of course, but we can't all be gifted in that area, or perhaps just a "party trick": juggling, miming, doing different accents, card tricks, telling jokes or whatever. This school like mine before it is devoted to helping pupils to reach their full potential: in school work of course, but also in other activities - but they don't have time to do some of the things I mentioned - which are fun. I wish at your age I had chosen something like that to work really hard on. Who knows, had I done so I could have finished with a bit of a juggle today! I believe that EVERYONE can be really good at SOMETHING: there are only two conditions: A) it must be something you really enjoy doing and B) you have to practise it a LOT! So why not choose an activity that you really LIKE - and practise it? It really IS true that practice makes perfect - well, at least a lot better anyway - perfection is difficult!! Then you will both enjoy doing your thing and become very good at it - another win-win ..... Who said: "If you love life, don't waste time, for time is what Life is made up of." (pause) That was the immortal Bruce Lee, immortal because I believe that he will be remembered as long as humans walk the earth. Then from what I consider to be just possibly the most sublime poem ever written: The divine John Donne explaining that we are all brothers and sisters and should care for one another. Then there is perhaps my favourite quote of all time by someone I never met but whom I nevertheless love dearly. "How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world." (pause) |