School Food

[Mary Chambers]

Yes my apologies.

It could have been worded better but there has been a lot of responsibility on my shoulders today. I was Chancellor of the Exchequer until lunchtime and then was required to be the Secretary of State for Climate Change this afternoon at very short notice.

I can see that would be quite tough

[Lateralthinking1]

I can see that would be quite tough

Yes, thanks.

Funnily enough, one of my main difficulties with that school, which is still among the highly regarded, involved someone else not getting his school dinner. I was in the situation where each evening I would encounter various locals. They would tell me what a wonderful place it was, although they had no experience of it. I witnessed awkwardly with such comments anything from obsequiousness to jealousy. I would also be thinking back to incidents during the day which were far from the presentation.

For example, that one and a half hour lunch break, thirty minutes more than the state sector. Yes, gentlemens' hours are established early in life. And there on one day a mob that I absolutely refused to join. It locked a teacher in his classroom for the duration, the chairs and desks from adjoining rooms piled high to the ceiling against the locked door. Thirty or so braying individuals up on the second floor, over-excited and bordering on hysteria, hammering on the door and throwing insults at the poor chap. Of course he left at the end of the year. Every one of those kids now an adult in a position of influence and lording it over our lives.

A point that I was making is that insiders are of one mind. Others are generally educated elsewhere and do not encounter that sort of thing directly. Once in the workplace, they have some sense of us and them but it isn't as brutally stark. They are if bright willing to adapt, often not wholly enthusiastically, but there is ambition and the bills must be paid. They are lucky. They don't carry a sense of not wanting ever to go there, unlike someone who has seen it when young and alone, feeling completely appalled.

[Mary Chambers]

Thank you, Lateralthinking1. I think I understand now, more or less.

[Dave2002]

We had a cylindrical suet or spongey sort of pudding covered with red jam. We used to speculate what the pudding would be - "wonder if it'll be dead baby again today?"

[mangerton]

We had a cylindrical suet or spongey sort of pudding covered with red jam. We used to speculate what the pudding would be - "wonder if it'll be dead baby again today?"

That's a bit like dead man's leg, as quoted in "If....." (vs), or indeed the gangrene stew we were sometimes given.

[Dave2002]

I think we had our phrase first - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If.... Ah, stew. We had one of those too. That was pretty horrible, full of bits of gristle. The meat was probably mutton.