Happy Birthday Ritchie!
1 Like
Thanks everyone!
1 Like
All the best mate!
1 Like
J. Sheekey. I’m pleased to say that I didnt take any pics, but also that it does live up to it’s reputation. It was fantastic.
3 Likes
Happy birthday. 
5 Likes
Fuck you with your dinosaur emojis! 
8 Likes
Happy burrfdee Ritchie! Hope the scoffs are delicious!
1 Like
Happy birthday, Ritchie!
1 Like
Boom 
1 Like
You look great on it, for a second I thought it was one @Ruprecht collages
1 Like
Ava left school yesterday. She picked up her usual couple of awards. It’s got to the stage where she doesn’t even mention them until a couple of days before! She’s so modest, she doesn’t really let on much.
I can’t tell you how proud we are of her. She has really made an impression on the staff there. To have the idea in the first place at 13, to go in with no inferiority complex, despite being surrounded by heiresses and grasp every single opportunity presented to her, to me is amazing. She’s absolutely smashed it.
One of the awards yesterday was for her leadership of the CCF. There was a long preamble pointing out her qualities. I got to talk to the guy afterwards and suggested he’d overdone it. No, he said, you have to understand that she has brought something different to the role. Had worked tirelessly at it, and that they had never had anybody better. That she had whipped the group into shape and made the CCF into something that everybody at the school wanted to be involved in and had huge respect throughout the school for her leadership qualities. He said that she is “utterly incredible.” I nearly burst into tears…
I guess the tangible, quantifiable measure will be her A level results. Exams actually aren’t her stong point! We only care because she wants to do well. However, over the last 5 years we’ve got to see exactly the benefits of a top class independent school. It isn’t just the academic stuff. The country would be a better place if that standard of education was available to everybody. She is leaving there with huge confidence, having been able to take up many extracurricular activities and having been supported in every one of them.
37 Likes
Sounds like Ava is going to go far in her life.
My neice managed to scrape through her 11 plus to get to a good grammar school,but she struggled there.
Also struggled with the wealth of some of the parents,one girl was the daughter of the bloke who started/owns IMDb.Think she felt intimidated by it all.
Glad it’s all worked out so well for you all
4 Likes
Small world. An old (a very old) colleague had a mate who in the dawn of the internet had started listing his favourite movies and details about them and it kind of turned into an internet movie database, which was then bought by Amazon for a colossal sum.
2 Likes
Go Ava!
(Not the first time I have typed that!)
She has grasped her opportunities with both hands and I am sure she will be a success in whatever she decides to do.
1 Like
Thanks, Stu! She’s happy and smiles a lot, which I guess is what you hope for as a parent. University next. Where she goes depends on the grades she gets. History and Politics…
She’s getting better at living where her feet are, not making to many plans, but I suspect she’ll end up doing something in politics. That’s her passion.
4 Likes
Any thoughts of doing PPE at Oxford? The start of a long political career. The country is in desperate need of capable leaders rather than the wan***s foisted on us.
It will be full of the type that Ava has learned to cope with and outperform. Worth speaking to the staff to see if they have any ideas.
3 Likes
She did think of it, but then applied to Cambridge. She was interviewed but didn’t get in. You can only apply to one or the other, so rather than take a gap year and try again, she has decided to go in September. It’ll be Durham if she gets the grades, or SOAS in London.
4 Likes
There is the slight issue of the 4-5 times disparity in funding to deal with for that one, a point lost on a conductor of an orchestra I played with who seriously wondered aloud why more schools didn’t do the whole “marches playing while kids go for their dinner” thing like Christ’s Hospital.