I didn't know you could hire small drills, I thought you could only hire huge industrial ones and similar machinery.

Yeah, you can hire them. I wish I hadn’t. I’m going to have to buy blutak now, to fill what I’ve pointlessly drilled before I paint that side. It now sits, half finished, in the middle of the living room, looming in half painted form.

I have today fixed no fewer than three mirrors to various walls at my parents' house.

For the vampire infestation?

I'd rather deal with vampires than with my dad asking me the same question 3 times in a row cos he's forgotten that he asked it the first 2 times

I’m doing up this house I’m staying at. Overseeing the renovations etc. In a box I was sorting through earlier, I found an old prospectus for a school - actually, the handbook for 1962/63. It’s quite a look to the past.

£3 13 6 per quarter for pianoforte tuition, 22/6 for elocution. I was taken with one page, pornographically titled ‘The Coming of Mr Large’. Sadly, it is just announcing that a new teacher called Mr Large is starting.

Also - ‘we are pleased to announce that a bequest of £1,000 has given us the opportunity to proudly furnish our cabinets with a greater selection of the finest rifles’.

The past is a different country.

‘Pupils shall be entitled to one scone with jam or cream at the forenoon break’.

‘A three course lunch consisting of a soup, a main dish, and a seasonally appropriate pudding, all prepared from the freshest ingredients will be served to all pupils in two sittings, the first at 12.5 and the second at 1pm. Catholics and others may opt for fish or other on relevant days and occasions, having given first two days notice to the kitchen’.

‘The highest habits of order, neatness, politeness, and moral rectitude are strictly enjoined upon all pupils’.

I hope there was a Miss Brodie there to liven things up with her truth and beauty, and to tell her girlies what ‘The Coming of Mr Large’ really meant.

Basic requirements…

‘Recitation upon command shall be expected in the third and fourth quarters of the first year of easy passages of Caesar and Livy’.

‘Translation of easy sentences into the Greek’.

‘Knowledge of barometric instrumentation’.

‘Composition of original prose in Latin, without notes’.

‘A spoken interview to explain a commercial application of Scots law’.

‘To draw, from memory, a map of France with major cities and the major railway lines’.

This is what’s demanded from 12 year olds. In the second year they move on to Cicero, Virgil, Ovid, Homer, Euripides, Lucian, Xenophon, and Thucydides, while in Mathematics and Accounting they’ll be studying ‘notions of degree, homogeneity, symmetry, interest, discounts, stocks, exchange, totting, velocity, acceleration, impressed force and friction, invoicing, commercial transactions, basics of partnership law, subsidiary and departmental accounts, trading account, profit and loss’.

I think this might explain why Britain had an empire, and why the Scots ran it.

‘De Moivre’s theorem’ - I’ve never heard of it, and having googled, I’d have cried if I was presented with this at 13…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Moivre%27s_formula

Also - tuition in ‘correct breathing’.