Which means, in simple terms, that it is becoming hard to differentiate one year from another, at least in terms of the orthodox diarist. There is something comforting about the familiar rhythm of the school year, and these days it is a good deal more predictable than the seasons. The Play Term may have basked in most unseasonal sub-tropical sunshine, but it still encompassed its familiar rites of passage: Prep School Headmasters dined in College Hall, Sixth Form Entrance candidates sweated over entrance papers up School and long deliberations followed; pupils who veered between the challengingly fit and the merely optimistic set out on the Lyke Wake Walk; the Drama Festival, Long Distance Races, Parents' Evenings, Lower School Expeditions, Carol Service - all these happened. Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose, and in due course, the marathon Play Term was played out.
Reconvening in January, a disgracefully large number of pupils returned bronzed and fit from weeks in the West Indies; few staff, licking their wounds after the financial traumas of Christmas, got very much further west than Anglesey. Nor was there much chance for high living in the Lent Term that followed: modular exams, mocks, the start of the season of House concerts, more plays (in French and English), Fifth Form groups to Alston, Expedition Society forays, rock and chamber concerts one night apart from each other, School and House football, the SchoolsÕ Head for our oarsmen at Putney in the revamped boat house, the Bringsty relay, half marathon in Hertfordshire, the School concert at the end of term.
Election Term ought to be ferociously busy for Upper Shell and, especially, Removes. But a good deal else has happened besides: cricket, rowing (in abundance), athletic sports day, and tennis. School and House concerts, ubiquitous jazz in chic locations (Yard and Pizza Express in Soho, to be exact), cycling and parachuting weekends for Expeditions society, and Lower School expeditions after Exeat; more plays, German exchanges, departmental outings for historians and biologists, a protracted series of lectures for Sixth Formers on life, death - and UCAS. At the time of writing, the annual garden production (The Merry Wives of Windsor), the glamour of Henley Royal Regatta and the 21st annual PHAB are perhaps the major fixed points before another school year comes to an end.
But the integrity of the diarist demands something more than an almanack. In our society - metropolitan, superficially assured and utterly unmonolithic - it can be hard to identify much experience which is really in common to the School. Philip Needham and Guy HopkinsÕs combined production of MozartÕs The Magic Flute in Autumn, being of an excellence unprecedented in the memory of many here, may have come nearest. Commemoration on 22 November, a triennial event enacted with a degree of ceremony more appropriate to a Royal Jubilee, also embraced many, staff and pupils, past and present. Just in case anyone thought it all a bit portentous, the party up School afterwards looked - and sounded - more like a convention for New Labour. Westminster has long cultivated the dangerous knack of having its cake and eating it.
The harder question is to speculate on what it may have been which marks out 1996-97 for our pupils. For many Fifth Formers, it must surely have been the change from prep school to the big time in Dean's Yard. Quite how that was experienced is something which must be as individual as the child himself: bigger buildings, deeper voices, commuting, boarding, the sense of starting all over again at the bottom, and the challenge of making new friendships. For most, this will have been in some measure disquieting but manageable, and for a few it may have been overwhelming. The Fifth Form outings in London at the end of the Play Term, the class trips to School House in Alston and the two Lower School Expeditions - perhaps these were among the most intensely experienced moments of their past year.
It is much harder to answer the same question for those in the Lower and Upper Shell. Many have developed interests which can be easily accommodated within the School, and for these a guess can be made: football or water may easily have been the greatest moments of their year, or just as likely, music and drama. For the seriously studious, academic study or real life GCSEs may have provided the focus for their best energies.
But others take only a passing interest in the School's extracurricular programme and what might charitably be called a pragmatic attitude towards their studies. For them, friends, social life and arcane adolescent vogue may have made infinitely more impression than GCSE Coursework or the prospect of the Summer Shakespeare. For parents and staff, this withdrawal to a world into which we are most certainly not admitted is almost always unnerving. Received wisdom suggests that it is usually a temporary phase (lasting anything from six months to fifteen years), but it can be hard work for everyone while it lasts.
With an enviable range of school trips, visiting speakers and the whole of London at their door, Upper School have not been short of diversion this year - the officially School-sponsored kind. Perhaps the biggest stimulus for many of this yearÕs Sixth Form has been the chance to study their favoured subjects, and the arrival of a large number of very congenial new pupils. With A Levels come Private Studies (of varying number) and, with them, a bit of flexibility during the days. A defining moment for many in the past year may have been their attendance (voluntary) at Commem: however laconic they may have appeared, most pupils were susceptible to the sense of occasion the service evoked, and thoroughly enjoyed the party afterwards.
Interestingly, in April most of the year surrendered the chance to drink coffee in Private Studies for three periods and showed up for Hustings for the Mock Election in which representatives for each of the big three parties were drawn from their year group. Jonathan Monroe led the Liberal Democrats to victory, and George Mangos was a very near runner-up for the Conservatives. Jenny HaydockÕs third position for New Labour was a very unfair reflection of her talent and professionalism - a trait shared by all the three speakers. The audience loved it all: having now the maturity to enjoy occasions which would have been largely inexplicable three years earlier, many discovered perhaps unexpected satisfaction and fun in a place they thought they already knew.
What of the Remove? For many, this past year will have been conditioned by the increasingly relentless treadmill of UCAS, interviews, Oxbridge euphoria or blues, and the grind through Mocks in February to the A Levels themselves in June. The School's sporting and other extracurricular programme has undoubtedly provided many with essential counterpoint to what can be an almighty slog, especially in the final weeks. There are less formal diversions too: the perennial spectacle of A Level candidates spending large amounts of time playing Yard football sometimes sets staff's (and parents') teeth clicking in frustration. While the exercise can be a vital unwinding from long hours of study for some, for others it is simply an evasion which continues until, most probably, peer example sends the pupil to his books. Teaching at this level can be extraordinarily satisfying, but it can also be stressful, as one tries to walk the tightrope between constructive exhortation and nagging. Westminster Removes are the definitive and living proof of the capricious nature of adolescents - brilliant, approachable and hilarious one day; petulant, bloody minded and vexing the next.
Each year, staff watch the Removes in their last weeks with fascination and a bit of protective concern. Some have long outgrown whatever we can give them; others seem very vulnerable. In 1995, this very Report made a mendacious denouncement of Gavin Griffiths for hiding behind the Headmagisterial Saab when he should have been supervising the mayhem that accompanies the annual Remove photograph. The Editor's hubris was justly punished when he was nominated by that very same Gavin Griffiths as his successor in this least enviable of tasks. It is a bit disconcerting trying to control these urban sophisticates when they start behaving like a large group of Millwall supporters who have just stumbled across some Chelsea fans in a dark alley.
The result is a slightly out-of-focus group, set against the handsome facade of College from the garden: self-consciously 'hard lads' concentrate on dominating front centre, but the chief interest lies in the satellite groups: shy or brazen, spontaneous or posed, they look a heterogeneous lot, but youthful, charming, on the brink of life - and all coated in a shower of self-raising flour. Above all, it suggests Westminster, and the friends they have made here, has given them a strong sense of identity. That is certainly reassuring.
For Common Room, there is a sense of impending change. Long deliberations have been given to our catering arrangements and our system of staff development. In the usual relentless quest for self-improvement, many returned a day early in New Year for an in-service training day devoted to First Aid. The Editor saw in this a unique photo-opportunity but had his camera confiscated at an early stage. This year will see a larger departure of staff, almost entirely through promotion, than at any point in WestminsterÕs recent past. Next year, with the retirement of the Head Master, a major chapter in the School's history will be rounded off. Here, just as on the other side of College Green, we are not immune from a sense of fin de siecle.