128 and incest to ensure that I was never asked back to the School again. I delivered the speech and thought that I had achieved my aim. No more invitations followed. But, I was wrong. In November 2016, I received another email from Mr Willis asking me back saying that the last time I had spoken I had got “the balance just right” and “had amused people”. “Balance just right” “Amused people” Flattered again, I immediately wrote that I would be delighted and pressed ‘send’ before I had thought better of it. So, there I was again in March 2017, the victim of my own vanity; and I had to think of something. Mr Willis probably thought that I was going to deliver exactly the same speech as I had done in 2011. They knew, of course, that I could get away with delivering the same speech as I did six years previously because they knew that the pupils then hadn’t heard me give a speech before. After all, Young Mr Willis had been delivering the same history lessons since 1973 and was still getting away with it because he knew that Year 10 are as ignorant of the causes of the First WorldWar now as they were 45 years ago. But I didn’t deliver exactly the same speech as I had made in 2011. I made a short but very different point. (The audience breathed an audible sigh of relief on hearing the word ‘short’). So, what was this short point? Well, what I have said so far, assumes that nothing ever changes.We go on making the same mistakes. I can make the same speech now as I did 10 years ago and get away with it. SkippyWillis was still, it seemed, SkippyWillis. But however much we look for continuity, and however much I like to imagine people and places don’t really change, they will change and they will change in ways that one cannot predict. The world which shaped my ideas was very different from the world in which the young audience which I was addressing found it itself. While the School that Mr Willis and I started at in 1973 looked pretty similar to what it does today, it has changed radically. The senior staff had
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