St Patrick's Day

St Patrick's day today. Basically an excuse to drink Guinness. I'm not Irish and I don't have any Irish relatives, but I'm Catholic because my grandmother converted as a teenager, at the same time as her elder sister married and Irishman. So like most British Catholics, my faith is from Ireland.

in Adam and Abagail Go to St Tom's the children get a free day for All Saints Day. All Saint's day comes at the start of November, so about the middle of the autumn term. It's very important that schools mark these types of festivals. Which for a day school leads to a bit of a contradiction, if you give children a day off, most of them won't attend mass, because even if parents are good weekly mass goers, a lot of them don't attend holy days, because it's a difficult disruption to routine. If you don't give children a day off, it's not really a holiday, and the "feast" can easily degenerate into just a hastily organised and partly resented compulsory school mass.

A boarding school doesn't have those problems. A feast day can be marked properly, and it can always be marked.