Adrian Buck > Recent Status Updates

"[Cameron] was floundering in a pair of blind spots, to emotion and the British public" - he's spot on here, and as a private schoolboy of the same vintage, can I add how disappointed I am with the British public.

"I knew from experience that my private boarding school was physically dangerous and an emotional sinkhole. By comparision, Commonweal must be lethal." - my mother used a similar argument to reconcile me to boarding school. My view now is that nowhere, not even home school is physically and emotionally safe for adolescents.

"You mocked the way I spoke, and what I hadn't read" - yes, that's how they do it.

"It was your father's decision." - It was my mother's, she was desperate to get me away from my stepfather's influence. Boarding school did that very effectively. I often wonder what my life would have been like if I hadn't gone. Perhaps I would be a Brexiteer.

"We wreck Oxford restaurants, pay minimum wage, shift profits offshore and, keeping pace with the times, corrupt elections by misunderstanding stolen personal data. We accept political appointments when we're clearly underqualified." - I don't, Beard seems to wish he did.

"He imagined himself solemn and puerile, respected by children more forgiving than his own." - I don't have to imagine this, I'm far more popular with my students than with my children. This I think goes with the territory.

"I went weeks at a time without brushing my teeth, but no one was paying attention" - this wouldn't have been possible for me at school, the other boys were a far more effective hygiene police than matron.

"In 1976 it was Hardcastle who wore glasses, and in the first few terms was my friend, by the second year, if he much as brushed against me, I had to wipe the stain from my sweater to free myself for higher tariff friendships involving popularity and power." - cf About A Boy, to see this happening in state schools.

"Whereas the administrative inconvenience of other punishments, apparently, risked making the miscreant feel important" - lines, detention, runs, jobs, gatings, fines and suspensions were all used at my school.

"They developed herd immunity, pretending not to know that at the expense of poorer British children their sons would later have the pick of the country's choicest opportunities" - Nonsense, mine were clearly focused on the idea that they were buying me a better education, and that opportunity came from that education.

"With the coming of social communities and urbanization we evolved into something different, substantially deviating from the constraints that kept us in harmony with nature" - shades of Teilhard de Chardin and the Extended Phenotype in this.

"They outsourced the unkind England of 'I want never gets' and 'spare the rod spoil the child', paying for a culture of intolerance they didn't have the heart or the time to enforce at home." - my step-father beat me far worse than my masters, and the cost of my schooling became a great source of resentment towards me, and basis of criticism of me. My education drove us further apart.

"With the right start of life, I could become prime minister, an idea that up until about the general election of 2010 I found utterly ridiculous" - the return of the public school boy to political prominence is astounding, perhaps it is part of Blair's bitter legacy to the UK, but it seems their return was facilitated by the complete abandonment of their traditional virtues.

'For a small but influential tribe, an odd and unnatural idea had been normalised' - a major problem with memoir is its lack of historical perspective. According to "The Origins of English Individualism", in 1500 it was normal for the English leave home at '7 or 9' to learn better manners (174) Having recently read "The Nuture Assumption" their seems little point in keeping them in the house beyond the age of 14.

"...while affecting not to notice that in the car, in the echoing entrance hall, and again with his new friend he's only just met, het son is trying desperately not to cry" - I was eleven, not eight, my mother cried, I couldn't get rid of her quick enough.

"I wept with abandon because I could: at last I had a reason that even the headmaster conceded was sad." - in the latter half of my first term I decided I was homesick. If I cried my housemaster, would take me out of the dormitory, give me a shandy and cheer me up before sending me back to bed. I wasn't actually homesick, but it was the first time in my life that anyone had expressed any interest in my feelings.

"It was one of those fully-lit summer evenings...I can't remember how my pyjamas came to be missing." - when I was 15, in early July I took my pyjamas off because I was too hot. I was woken at about two in the morning, with my legs being against either side of the bed, at the end of the bed another sixth-former was taking a photo. They threatened to put the photo on every notice board in the school.

"By the early eighties beating children just didn't children just didn't look right" - by the early eighties, teachers' hearts were no longer in their beatings, mine were perfunctory affairs; when given a choice, we would opt for beatings over fines or gatings. The teachers who serious about it were close to retirement - Joffrey Stephens, 2 black tram lines - or banned, Ben Jowett because he had drawn blood.

"This second humbling happened aged thirteen, rather than at eleven when most children start at secondary school." - people joined the private school system at different ages: some at seven, when prep school starts; I started at eleven to avoid the local comprehensive; some at thirteen when public school starts; some at 16 to do 'A' levels. I never felt I was the same as those who started at seven.

"Thus human beings have evolved to live for at least forty years so that they can produce ten or so children, at least half of whom will survive to maturity and beyond. It's perhaps no accident then, that this is the age of a women's menopause." - wrong in too many ways to mention here.

"...the ideal private school education would instil the positive qualities of the Puritans - moderation, piety, good manners - and the advantages of the aristocracy - panache, entitlement, hereditary leadership " - the most shocking thing about the return of the private schoolboy to English politics has been the wholesale abandonment of Puritan virture: a reaction to Thatcher's purge of the wets?

He should read further back: Stalky & Co based on Kipling's experiences at the United Services College from 1878 reminded me of my own at Taunton, 100 years later.

"The customary look of the main building, as described by Roald Dahl, was 'private lunatic asylum'..." - the original building of my alma mater actually was one, barred windows and baffling corridors included.

"Private schools now prefer to be called 'independent', even though their existence depends on government-sanctioned charitable status, exemption from business rates and state training of their teachers." - their current inequities actually arise from the massive fees they command, and the massive educational assets they control: they probably don't need the subsidies any more.

My eldest saw the cover and said must buy that for Daddy.

"Despite the Dickensian image of destitution and widespread poverty, which was certainly highly prevalent, the increasing access to services led to the decrease in infant and childhood mortality...." - infant mortality didn't fall significantly in the UK until after Dickens death.

"Somewhere along a line, I realized that I was one of them, finding in science, or at least in physics and mathematics, some version of the spiritual sustenance that seems to be a universal need." - it's easy to believe that the creation and dissemination of knowledge is the purpose of human life, the majority of mankind though has to maintain the socio-economic apparatus that makes this possible.

"sublinear scaling and the associated economies of scale lead to bounded growth and the systematic slowing of the pace of life" - ecomonies of scale vs the size of the market dertermines the numbers of suppliers.

"In what follows I shall concentrate primarily on dererminate growth...inderterminate growers [fish, plants and trees] die before they reach a stable size".