LEGACY OF SERVICE
D uring the photoshoot for this article, there was a period of five minutes or so when I had to stand completely still, staring at a candle-flame.
We were in the small, village church where I am parish priest – a building I enter most days, and know well. Despite this, it was perhaps the first time I had ever stood so stationary within it, for such a time, without doing anything else. The flame flickered, my focus drawn to its colours, to the way it lit the wall and the stained-glass windows below where I pray so often, but at which I had so rarely looked with intent.
Roald Dahl fans will recall a similar scene from The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, in which the title character trains himself to focus on a flame for several minutes, without a single other thought entering his head. There is no indication, in that charming story, that the fictional Sugar was an Old Wykehamist, but for me it was Winchester that taught the contradictory skills of, on the one hand, focusing our gaze fully on a single topic, and on the other, enjoying a life so rich and busy that we too rarely do so. At the heart of both experiences, I suspect, is Div – although I probably didn’ t appreciate or register that as a schoolboy. It strikes me now, as extraordinary, and extraordinarily brave, to focus the entire curriculum around a subject which( at least in my day) was unstructured, undefined, and largely at the whim of the don teaching it. Across five years of Div, I studied graphic novels and ancient architecture, Romantic poetry and Baroque opera, the histories of medicine and botany and art. Some of these passions have stayed with me; to others I bid a grateful farewell after a few lessons. Onto all of them, though, we were all required to turn our self-centred teenage eyes for a week or two, never more so than each Saturday night, as we settled down to write our Div Task, often on a topic with which we were entirely unfamiliar until days before.
To that discipline, with the benefit of hindsight, I owe much of my life since. Slightly shamefacedly, I cannot admit to anything resembling a‘ career’ – I have skipped from field to field with more agility than I ever showed in that appalling Jun steeplechase, but finding in each move new delights and challenges, just as in Div we shifted from Shelley to Schutz. In a world where I, at least, am guilty of spending so much time scrolling and swiping from one image or opinion to the next without pausing to consider, I recall with fondness and gratitude an education which taught me both to stand still and see, and simultaneously to search constantly for the stimulating and the new.
But Henry Sugar is clear, when learning to see and to search, that there must be a purpose to such discipline. For him, it begins entirely selfishly: the candle-flame is part of his training to read through playing-cards, in order to beat the casinos and become rich( er). Ultimately, he sees the error of his ways, and uses the funds he gains to establish orphanages around the world. My Winchester journey began, perhaps, with similar self-interest.
I recall with fondness and gratitude an education which taught me both to stand still and see, and simultaneously to search constantly for the stimulating and the new.
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