Its ages since you were Richard’s teacher at Hendrefoilan (J3, I think)…. and even longer since you were up at Townhill. I hadn’t realised that you were still in Killay

I agree with your comments about Harold Smith. I remember visiting the school once with a group of German exchange students. He was enormously proud of his school and its children and staff and insisted on doing an ad hoc fire drill to show off a bit!…. It was certainly impressive…the whole school outside, checked, lined up and returned to their seats within about a minute and a half. The Germans were well impressed by the Welsh efficiency!

All best wishes,

George Thomas

Q: Where am I!!!
A: 1:48, squinting, bottom left.

If it helps also I have some significantly embarrassing footage of your 14th birthday, but it’s just too hideously mid-80s to put on the web; I feel it’s probably better that we can grow old gracefully and just fondly recall exuberance of our youth.

Do you ever stop running around? I am pretty sure that you were cheating in the egg (potato) and spoon. That may be the reason why the Green team never won. Although you had your moment of glory as vice captian of the victorious Blue team when we were in J4.

You may not recall this but during “wet break” (when we were all kept inside due to heavy rain) the mentally agile Chetty Jr. could often be found conscientiously working through the tests in the series of books that began “First Year Assessment Papers in Reasoning”.

It’s one of the things that opened my eyes to the idea that problems and work were just badly worded puzzles*, and thus, fun. A teacher could have pointed me at the books but I’d never have opened them if you hadn’t. I hold you partially responsible for everything I’ve done since.

*the other eye opener was a couple of years later when Mr. Thomas would regularly go through his book of puzzles and brainteasers before home-time; something which obviously only occurred if it wasn’t a sunny day, in which case we’d all be in the bottom yard playing crazy cricket.

Ahhh Subbuteo. I remember you bringing it in to school on the last day of term, and beating everybody at it. Some things never change.

Boris is long gone but I still have my subbuteo from that time (and gain far too much satisfaction from beating my pupils). Not sure whether you ever played that on our living room floor? One of the downsides of moving around as a kid is that you don’t get people reminding you what you were like as a kid. But then I guess that one of the benefits of moving around as a kid is that you don’t get people reminding you what you were like as a kid…

This was about the time you had a Boris the Spider (which incidentally, scared me witless). It was also around then that you showed me how “knuckles” works for working out month lengths, which I still use to this day.