The thought of a fox in the urban side streets of the city’s poorest district may seem farfetched. In reality, there is probably not a single Londoner who has not spotted one at some point in the past year or so. Steadily, the population of the much maligned mammal has risen as the environment provides plenty of shelter and food scraps.

What started as a group of three living in the thick undergrowth along the edge of the staff car park has risen to a skulk of 10 or more. As their numbers have increased, so has their bravado. They can be spotted several times a day, plodding along the car park, peeking into windows on their way to the neighbouring park. It is possible to spot individuals; the one with a damaged leg that limps along on three paws, the spindly and mange-ridden mother, the sleek and quick male who I remember as a cub last April.

I doubted the sleeping story immediately. The foxes don’t sleep in the open. The path between their car park den and the local park was a motorway to them; a means of getting from A to B. It was familiar to them but equally it was a place of danger. They seldom loitered let alone slept in the open, other than to boldly peek in a window or two as they padded down the cobblestones. No, the fox was surely dead I thought.

And sure enough dear readers, upon reaching the classroom window, I could see it was too still to be sleeping. By now Big Bert, the school caretaker had joined me with a makeshift array of equipment soon to be a fox-disposal kit. “Sleeping, eh?” he winked at me as we opened the classroom door and approached the lifeless body. Our collective breaths froze in the mid January air, as we circled the remains.

Big Bert poked the torso with a litter picker. It was hard, frozen both from rigor mortis and the blast of Scandinavian cold currently blanketing Britain. He lifted the animal up and the body did not change shape. Gravity has no providence in such matters.

I held open the rubbish sack but the weight of the body was too much for the litter pickers; they bent and strained. Bert’s baseball-mit-sized hands draped in thick industrial gloves grabbed the animal by its sleek tail and stuffed it into the bag. A chorus of disgust arose from 6 Yellow and I turned to see 30 faces pressed against the glass; processing the collective realisation that the fox was not actually sleeping at all.

Hello again, dear readers. I offer no apologies for my sporadic efforts in updating this blog. The blog has always and remains driven by catharsis and life has been quieter in the post-inspection era. The school is thriving. Just like the skulk behind the car park.

It was in that moment; the stiff and frozen carcass being lifted by its tail that my thoughts turned to this blog for the first time in months. Something so full of life, now dead to this world and frozen in an un-natural pose, how could one not have drawn parallels with the journey of this blog?

And so, another omen. I poke at these words with a cheap litter-picker to see if I can coax life back into the body. Perhaps I shall try again, when and if needs dictate. Perhaps the rumour was correct: it was sleeping, not dead. 

Keep the Faith,

The Head

But I am acutely aware that this is home. This is the land and community into which I was born. My fetal cells, child cells, teen, were all collected on an isthmus of land sandwiched between swamplands and the Delaware River. That child was built of maple trees and flying cut grass. He was forged in summer sunlight, bright enough to turn the highway white.

From the height of the great green steel bridges that straddle the river I gain my first view of the town.  The canopy has thickened in the 30 years since I left. Lush, green, inviting, the leafy clumps are enriched by the slow flowing marsh.

But it is cancerous, toxic and silent.  I swivel my head across the landscape left to right from the chemical plant at the north end of town to the south where it disappears into the swamp amidst charismatic churches and bait shops.

My maternal grandparent’s house was a copy of every other one on their street. A functional box design, it nested between a toxic, foul smelling canal that poured perpendicular from the sprawling chemical factory that employed half the men in town.

We lived down the street until I was 3; the house behind the fire house. Tacked to the wall above my bed, a large map of the world was the last thing I saw as I fell asleep.

At the other end of the street a copse of 100 maple trees hides the chemical factory gates. The trees are not so close together as to provide cover. There was tokenism in mind when they were planted. Like the canal, they draw their lifeblood from the chemical tainted waters deep underground. They are contaminated and poisonous.

It is one of my first memories- the great maple trees towering overhead, their trunks far too wide to embrace. Their paper bark peeling away perhaps blistered and burned by the chemical water table.

My grandparents would hide Easter eggs there in the hollow and knotted feet of their roots. Pastel colours of a hot water and vinegar dye, they would dot the copse like phosphorus mushrooms fed on the noxious emit of the chemical plant.

I expect the maple trees in the copse to be 500 feet tall by now. Nearly half a century has passed. But they are not. They are the same height I remember them as a child.

My grandparents house has been rebuilt and is unrecognisable.

I look to the white hot highway. It is the fierce summer sunlight that turns the world the colour of faded Polaroid photographs. It is the sunlight that awoke the child behind the firehouse, illuminating the global view above his bed.

We would sit on the curb in that white summer heat watching the parade of veterans and marching bands some pageant queen perched on the back of a convertible.

John ran the shop across the street. He was old and sold soda from a fountain that was antique even then. After church we would go in for a pretzel rod or a banana popsicle. John was kind, quiet sort of man.

I heard the adults talking. John had gone to Greece and died.

I asked where Greece was. The explanation was far across the sea. I was thrilled. Thrilled to learn there was another land beyond the seashore.

I associate this place with boredom and that association has not left me 30 years on.

It is not real. It is a snap shot. I measure myself against it and make a notch on the doorframe.

My mother tells the story. I have no recollection of the event at all. The facts are diluted and shaken in the space of a generation. I ran with a branch around that maple tree. My aunt tried to take it from me but I eluded her chase, falling and somehow ramming the stick down my throat. The hospital extracted it and the distance by which it missed my larynx shortens with each re-telling.

I do not recall one dot of the event. It is folk lore to me. But the paper thin bark peeling from the maples, the pastel coloured eggs, my grandparents’ house built by Russian tradesmen are all clear.

At two years old I could have lost my voice.

But I have not lost my voice. I have a voice.

-Southern New Jersey

Summer 2012

Keep the Faith,

The Head

2000 soldiers guard a great crystal bowl turned upside down. I press my nose against the glass and fog my view. Visitors to the city, my city, politely squeeze past and enter the party bowl. I am invited to watch on tv or for £15 a big screen in a park.

We are the old women outside the church watching some unknown bride.

Optimism once reigned supreme. Seven years on when the preparations became part of each day’s conversation have been building in crescendo towards this moment. MacDonalds and Cocla Cola are crowned. Long live the King the corporate suits cry out. But This is not about the burger. It is nominal and exclusive. The lack of a debate about the whole morality issue of corporate influence to the point it is unapologetically accepted.

It is the party we are not invited to.

So the teams sometimes in groups of half a dozen, sometimes in pairs, sometimes alone.  They wear matching chinos and sporting tops. They photograph everything looking for Sherlock Holmes and Harry Potter.

Team Indonesia holed up in the Waldorf. The Swiss tucked up behind Southwark Cathedral. The streets filled with the sporting fruits of Polynesia . Everyone is lost and asking for directions. Where is the Oxford Street?

Instead I walk along the Thames towards Tower Bridge. I want to see the rings simple and still meaningful to me; hanging from the ramparts of Tower Bridge. They are still the rings of Munich of Mexico City, of The Games with soul still in situ.

At first glance I thought he was wearing a varsity jacket; the Serbian shot putter. Squat and rooted in the earth. Thick, unmovable like a tree trunk.

I walked behind him for about 50 meters from the reconstructed Globe, lovingly rendered so not to look like a Disney attraction.

He slipped into a nook outside the Anchor pub on Bankside. I wanted to stop and share the legend with him: beneath the pub is a fabled tunnel into the Clink prison next door. But my Serbian does not even extend to hello.

The shot putter is young. In his jacket he reminds me of my high school days. I watch him until he notices that I am staring. It dawns on me that he is a sentry; standing guard as I take my leave from this city.

Someone sends me an email: ”We all need to go home every now and then.”  I have not ventured onto the  soil of my birth for nearly half a decade. It does not feel like going home. It feels like I am taking refuge.

Keep the Faith,

The Head

The whole day had been in jeopardy. Three months of unseasonably cold rain had made London’s green fields a sea of mud. The concert venue carefully segregated from the rest of Hyde Park had been turned into a sea of clinging mud and rough wood chip.

I have lost count of the number of times I have seen the man perform now. Bruce, The Boss, Springsteen, whatever he is known as; I have been attending his concerts with loyal regularity since the mid 1970s. Then I was a young teen following the music that the older kids were listening to. Eventually the music became a reflection of my own life. But each time I had seen him play, the crowd around me had gotten older. I hadn’t aged; of course, I was still the child of the 1970s hung-over from Woodstock and embracing David Bowie. My arthritic hip prodded me in the side reminding me that youth was an illusion.

We had arrived two hours before he was due to perform. My wife suggested we sit on the plastic bin liners she had brought in front of a big screen on one of the few relatively mud-free areas of the venue. We sat back to back, drinking vodka and munching magic brownies as we waited for the show to begin. Others joined us on the grassy knoll and soon about 20 small camps filled the space. I took great consolation in the fact I was neither the oldest nor the fattest concert member- not by a long shot.

The brownies worked their magic and I sought out conversations with those camped around us. The man behind us, far too young for the woman he was with, smoked a cigarette which caused huge dismay to the people behind him. In that passive aggressive tone only a sanctimonious ex-smoker can recognise, the indignant woman invited him to blow his smoke in a different direction. I invited him to blow it our way not just t remind myself of my Benson and Hedges days but also to counter the aggression with a spirit of “all is cool.”

I made the observation to my wife that the knoll now resembled a cemetery.

As the chords of the first song were struck, the 50 bodies on the lawn began to complain in unison that they couldn’t see. Their small claimed patch of little England had been infiltrated by people actually wanting to stand, dance, interact with the performance. I struggled to my unsteady feet and hoisted my wife upright. I was a child of Woodstock, not the Stock Exchange.

And at the concert’s end, a Beatle walked on stage. I had waited 35, 40 years to see one of the Fab Four in the flesh and the moment had come in a muddy field where the Stones had played their legendary 1968 concert for Brian Jones. It was a defining moment for me in my 50^th year.

And then the sound faded out. Curfew. The rich and powerful residents that live in the multi million pound apartments along Park Avenue had lobbied Westminster to ban any noise after 10.30. The moment was gone, evaporated.

I shouted out my disgust and raged against the system. I turned to vent my disgust that the free spirit of the 1960s was gone, replaced by the selfish gaining the moral high ground. The Beatles were either dead or had sold their soul out long ago.

Keep the Faith,

The Head

The playground at lunchtime is a market place. Children of varying ages compete for the attention of staff. Children, each in their own world, dragging their own personal baggage and level of need. Some hold tightly onto my arms. Others side step my gait, eager to get face to face in order to pass on the details of every injustice bestowed upon them by other children. Others want confirmation that I am, in fact human, asking questions that seem obvious but shows they cannot separate the Head Teacher from the person: “Do you have children? What are their names? Do you tell them off?”

The games I play with them are designed to include as many as possible in a short amount of time. The aim is for dozens rather than a few being able to make contact before the playground bell marks the return to classes. Even then, they trip over my size 11 Doc Martens (equally at home defying the diagnosis of the Diabetic clinic or exiting the playground) as they squeeze any remaining attention from the sponge. “How old are you? My gran is older than you.”

One little girl and one little boy are the first to approach me every afternoon. Both are five and keen to take part in the game of Monster Chase or Sticky Toffee we will play each day. The girl is quieter.

The boy is inquisitive. He is stocky and thickly built. His halting Urdu accent reflects he is second generation Pakistani British. He smiles incessantly, obviously loved and nurtured at home and safe enough in his school persona to ensure he will flourish in the next 6 years with us.

Today he danced alongside me as the children funnelled from their classrooms onto the playground. It was not my daughter’s ages or the name of our cat that he wanted answers to. “What religion are you?” he asked.

The suddenness and bluntness of his question caught me off guard. I stopped and stooped so to look him in face. I had an innate sense that this was an encounter he might remember when he was 20, 40 60 years old and I wanted to handle it correctly.

“I’m a Christian,” I said.

“You will go to Hell,” he blinked back.

“Why do you say that?”

“Because you don’t have my God,” he offered. “You are not Muslim so you will go to Hell.”

To witness someone so young indoctrinated and intolerant drew a sigh from deep inside my lungs as I said, “I think God loves everyone.”

The child, a five year old, shook his head to confirm my damnation.

By now the quiet girl had joined us. I knew her story well as I had been briefed before she had even started her first day at our school. Born in Kabul the young girl knew only war. The same was true of her parents before her and her grandparents before them. She joined us 8 months ago with no English, no writing. The Taliban had banned all girls from education so she spent her days holed up in her Kabul house playing games with her mother.

Eight months on; she speaks fluent English. She writes beautifully and frequently brings her work to my office to admire and discuss. She writes about life in London and how much better it is. She is joyful at the idea of going to school, of being free to walk down the street and feel her hair in the unseasonably cool July breeze.

She is my personal battle with the Taliban. She is one who got away from Afghanistan. She is the one we will save and teach to read and write and think freely without fear of judgement in the name of God. She is proof I will not go to Hell. 

Keep the Faith,

The Head 

Luckily, many of our 84 staff speak at least one of these community languages and are able to act as a translator for me when I need to communicate technical issues to parents with still a very cursory understanding of English.

One 6 year old was brought to me today by a rather embarrassed teacher (unrelated fact: she is from Poland). The young child was from Sri Lanka and his mother, suitably new to English so that she needed to support of my Tamil-speaking teaching assistant in order to make sure she understood everything that I needed to convey.

Her young son, for the second time in the past month had exposed himself to another child. This is not as unusual as it sounds and happens a few times a year. Usually it is a gesture used by children to gain a reaction from their peer and thankfully only rarely a reflection of distressed behaviour.

The mother sat across from me in my glass box and stared intently at me as I told the interpreter what I wanted her to relay.

“Tell her that her son exposed himself to another child.”

The interpreter looked at me rather vacant and it was obvious that she herself was struggling to understand my intent.

I needed to extrapolate and said bluntly, “He showed another child his penis.”

The interpreter quickly looked away and at the floor as the reality dawned on her.

She nodded and drew breath, seemingly summoning the strength to pass on the message.

Her few sentences in Tamil sparked an animated conversation which lasted several minutes. I listened passively to the exchange. Both seemed confused as they chattered away pointing at the young boy and gesturing to the empty spaces around them.

Eventually, silence. The interpreter turned to me and said, “Mother says there is some mistake she never sends him to school with peanuts”.

Keep the Faith,

The Head

Indeed when the prospective groom came to see me in my West London office, in order to finally apprise their love to their fellow professionals, I thought it was a joke. I laughed heartily until I realised my male colleague was not laughing with me. He was merely smiling.

Fast forward 5 years and I am in a tastefully decorated marquee on an Essex farm drinking pink champagne and catching up with former colleagues from that West London school. One had moved on to a village school in Hampshire, another was working for a left wing think tank. Our former senior teacher had left teaching all together to raise a family in the French countryside. It was the newly provincial mother I found myself talking to over my sixth glass of champagne.

“I have been reading your blogs, but you need to write more of them,” she shouted in my ear over the sound of the band playing an old Motown classic.

It has been just over a year since a childhood acquaintance inspired me, via her own blog, to start a journal of my school’s adventures as it moved from failure to success. It was true then and now that I wanted the blog to be an exercise in catharsis, a chance for me to release some of the inner demons knocking about inside my head. If others found that notion entertaining so be it. The first rule of Head Lines was it is cathartic. The second rule of Head Lines is: It is Cathartic.

So I make no apologies for the infrequency of recent entries. I don’t think that this is down to a lesser need for inner cleansing but more to do with busy schedules and shifting goals. The period occurring in the few months after school’s success has ushered in a range of personal physical changes. In January I quit smoking. In February I joined a gym. In April I was diagnosed with diabetes. In May I turned 50 years old.

So the outward looking symbolism of the blog’s first year appears to slowly giving way to a more introspective theme. So be it. As if to reinforce the notion the diabetes clinic has told me that I should abandon my trusted size 11 Doc Martens in favour of something kinder to my feet. (Remember, dear readers, equally at home marching through a period of transition as well as…well…at home in the bottom of the wardrobe).

Keep the Faith,

The Head

I struggled to define the notion but was able to provide her with several examples: namely the lyrics to the Alanis Morrisette  song.

“Imagine an old man had worked his whole life to keep his head above water,” I offered like some great mountaintop guru, “He buys a lottery ticket and wins £100 million. The next day- boom- he drops dead. That’s irony.”

I know, I know. The pedagogists out there are screaming upon reading this: “An example is not a definition- schoolboy error!” In reality the best definition of irony is using an opposite to covey the truth.  But equally one could apply that to sarcasm and sarcasm is something that percolates deep into the British sense of humour.

Once upon a time, I was a teacher. In fact I was a teacher in the school we now live next door to. At the time (mid 1980s) I was living in the East End and commuting to the six-storey Edwardian school building now adjacent. A quarter of a century later I am living here in the heart of theatre land, in the shadow of the six storey Edwardian school and commuting to a school in the East End. Ironic.

Memory affords me the comfort of thinking I was a very good teacher. I was well liked by parents, colleagues and most importantly, the children I taught. I had a reputation as a strict disciplinarian but with a cheeky sense of humour. My love for sport permeated my work and my pupils would frequently find themselves with me on the rooftop playground; six storey above the streets of Theatre Land.  There we would play football or cricket in the confines of the school’s zenith. There we would have to be perpetually carefully not to let the ball rise above the twelve foot high iron railed fence that ran around the perimeter of the roof; lest it carried over the edge of the school and came crashing down on passers-by.

On occasion the zeal of the game would supersede the twelve foot rule. At those times the ball would indeed fly high in the air and we would all stop and stare as the moment slipped into slow-motion action. It would curl outwards, hanging in the wind with just a hint that it might safely return to the rooftop pitch before disappearing over the side of the building. The unrelenting background noise of the city would never afford us the chance to hear the ball as it hit the street below. Indeed the Twelve Feet Rule specified that whichever child had last touched the ball- sending it on its fateful journey onto the street below, had to accompany me downstairs on the retrieving trip.

I cannot begin to count the number of times I made that long journey down and then back up the six flights of stairs between the rooftop playground and the street below. Each time I envisaged reaching the street below and finding a passerby bleeding and dazed, holding the tennis ball that had plummeted unannounced from sixty feet above. Each time, thankfully, I would reach the street with the offending pupils and we would find the ball laying harmlessly in the gutter.

Twenty five years have passed. Those ten year olds of the day are now in their mid-30s and have children of their own. I see them as I walk the streets of my neighbourhood and I am heartened by the fact that they take the time to stop and chat and share their memories of primary school.

Last week, I walked out the street door of our block of flats and immediately sought to negotiate my way across the street. I paused outside the neighbouring building; the same six storey Edwardian school where I had started my teaching career all those years ago. A young man with a child stopped me, calling across the pavement, “Sir, sir.” I stopped and immediately recognised a former pupil. He was twenty years older than when I had known him but the facial characteristics allowed me to immediately place him. If further proof of his identity was necessary, the young boy at his side was a carbon copy of his father in his youth. He even had the same small, John Lennon style glasses. I stared at the child as I exchanged small talk with his father, eventually having to offer the observation, “Your boy looks exactly like you did at that age.”

At this point the father employed his son into the conversation, explaining who I was and how we knew each other. The child’s face changed, he became genuinely enthusiastic about our exchange now as I began to replay stories of his father when he was a child. The father embellished by sharing his memories of me and the great games of football, rounders or cricket we would enjoy. “This man was MY teacher, “he explained to his son, “And he was a bully.”

Bully. I am certain that is what he said. It was that single word in the flow of conversation that is half heard. That single word only partially digested but repeated in the sinus and windpipe, foul and lingering on the palate.

The child heard it too. I saw it in his face which melted from enthusiastic to forlorn. He looked up at me disapprovingly. Reflected in the lens of his John Lennon style glasses I saw where we were. Glinting in the refracted, disappointing, weak, London summer sun I saw the rooftop playground in the child’s lens. We were standing in the spot where the ball would come bounding down as it met the street side pavement.

So it was. My warm and comfortable images of a beloved teacher deeply seeded in the minds of hundreds of ex-pupils evaporated. I was startled. The image was one I trusted to keep me warm in the cold nights of old age.

I looked back into the face of the father. He winked and smirked simultaneously. The Brits say they take great delight in playing the fact Americans can not read the sarcasm in their humour, the irony in their daily existence. For the most part I can. But as the pair tottered off into the swarming London pavements I wanted, but couldn’t, call after to ask if the bully tag was serious.

I stared up at the rooftop playground wondering what had hit me; just as the passers-by must have done in those mid 1980s days. The word bully had dropped on me from high, glancing off that part of my brain that holds memories, or at least holds the lies we tell ourselves to keep ourselves sane. It hurt. I touched my head and looked at fingers checking for blood. Six storey up someone had broken the Twelve Feet Rule; the one that keeps things contained and safe and controllable.

Oh the irony that the conversation happened in that very spot.

Keep the Faith,

The Head

The barman is dressed in an art deco period white dinner jacket and black bow tie. It is 10.30am and far too early to be dressed this way. He serves us rough, broken almond shortbread and the best coffee we have had in two days. Without speaking my wife hands me more paper as I furiously write. It is like she is feeding the furnace of a steam locomotive.

Days ago the doctor confirmed I was diabetic. The unwelcome but inevitable family inheritance has come home to roost at my 50^th birthday. I picture my father: confused and lengthening vacancies in between insulin injections. I think on my sister’s half amputated foot. Her organs burned out and propped in her coffin at the age of 47. I think on my maternal grandmother; sweetened blood bursting the walls of her 57 year old heart. Their genes half century ticking like a time bomb deep in my bones.

Ernest knew. Hemochromatosis. His father had it.  Oinbones showed the same symptomatic signs. He didn’t wait around. Heavy drink and see the world until the small hours of the night when he swallowed that shotgun.  He knew how the story ended because he wrote it himself.

And in this bar: Harry’s Bar, dear readers, Hemingway wrote a novel about the ages of man. He wrote about our creeping greyness and thickening blood and the lessons we learned as we think back on our youth. He wrote about seemingly meaningless acts 30 years prior that take on new meaning and symbolism as we ponder them from the vantage point of age.

Once I knew a Venetian. She was the only one I ever met. 1983: the communal payphone in the university dorm rung for me. A halting Italian accent on the other end is Paola, my roommate’s legendary friend. We call him Jarhead as he is an army brat and has lived all over the world. Memory does not afford me the story of how they met; no doubt at some sunny Mediterranean military base. Jarhead  had spoken of the girl he had met and her promise to one day show up on his doorstep in America. Now she had made good. She is at the Port Authority bus station in the city. She had made the long trip alone; across the sea from Venice. The army brat does not know. We entice him into the car with some concocted tale of an emergency situation in the city.

Paola surprised Jarhead.  His face was consistently stone and never betrayed by emotion. He cracked that night.

Paola- petite and exotic with the soul of an artist stayed for weeks. I was painting a mural on the wall outside our dorm at the time: a screaming white mask with heavy dark eyes. One night, Paola deliberately painted the sole of her right foot with the remnants from the black can and pressed the print on the wall. There it stayed for ever; or at least through 1983, reminding us that she had passed through.

And now, thirty years on, what do I remember of that dorm room? The aging lazy boy recliner we had rescued from some vacant lot, the mural outside the door and Paola’s footprint on the wall.

And now, thirty years on, I was in Paola’s city, in Pound and Maughan’s bar,  at Hemingway’s table.

An elderly American tourist shuffles past the door of Harry’s bar; white Reeboks and a baseball cap with the name of a battleship on it, “Bridge of Sighs. Not size. It’s SIGHS . You know- exasperated”

The skin of my face seems to be collapsing and collecting in my vast double chin in every photo that I review on our camera.

My wife laughs as I tell her, “ Mr Pineapple would like the Bridge of Sighs, he is naturally exasperated”. The elderly American tourists shuffle onto the Ponte della Paglia in white Reeboks and jostling to have their photo taken. Bridge of Sighs: the prisoners last view of the sea and sky before descending into the darkness of prison. How ironic thousands turn to looks at it, their backs to the sea and sky every moment since.

My feet are swollen. We walk and get lost. We stop for a coffee and get lost again. There are no cars to watch out for. The last of the cars are abandoned on the end of the long bridge Mussolini built to the mainland. Boats are the default setting for transport. Boats and feet. I scan the lapping canal water at the base of crumbling facades. I am looking for Paola’s left footprint on the wall.

The plague ravished this city. It did it time and time again between the in the 14^th and 17^th centuries. Half the population would eventually succumb. Venice, it seems,  has never recovered from the shock and every few meters there is a reminder of the tragic past and frailty of life. Every other shop window contains the mask of a plague doctor: black shrouded and with a long hollow beaked mask. 400 years ago the beak would be filled with herbs as a misguided science against the disease.

The city is stunningly beautiful. Built on pines driven into the mud 1600 years ago and now long petrified; the medieval homes of wealthy merchant survived while the rest of Europe burned and burned again. The crumbling plaster falls from the facades, wooden bare shutters drawn throughout the day. It is the aging beauty of Sophia Loren. Weathered and lived in, radiant and timeless.

Look closer: skulls are chiselled and sculpted into the walls. Stray cats are held in high regard. They keep the rats at bay which rules this city by night. Despite the reputation I have yet to see one and it disappoints.

We have lunch in a rough eatery in the Rialto market. I have Pasta Pescadore. I am Col Kurtz. Sell the house, sell the kids. I am never coming home.

I am reading a guide to Venice’s 400+ bridges. I coax my wife on the long walk to Ponte Delle Tette. “This I have to see,” I tell her as I relay the story of how 15^th Century prostitutes would stand topless on the bridge or on nearby balconies. It seems this was a quality assurance exercise. Mrs Head reluctantly poses on the bridge in a more dignified and modest pose.

Our hotel bed is positioned facing the window, not the telly. I like it that way. A switch to the side opens the electric shutter and the lagoon is in front of us. A day of boats on shifting water remains in my inner ear and the large bed rocks with my lingering equilibrium. I shut my eyes and my sea legs wobble.

My wife is silently reading a guide to Venice Bridges. She tells me the story of the Ponte Dei Pugni: the Bridge of Fists. In the 17^th Century fights on the bridge were common place and an accepted means of settling disputes. “There is a marble footprint embedded in the stone of the bridge,” she reads aloud, “to mark the spot where the fighters stood at the start of a bout.”

And so it was. I scuffed the bottom of my walking shoes, my swollen feet on the marble footprint. I pushed off of the spot with the same foot my sister had half amputated. I was a fighter. I am a fighter. I pushed off from the footprint and shadow box on the bridge. I will not succumb like Ernest did. I can change my destiny.

Paola’s footprint now forever linked on the Bridge of Fists.

I thumb through Hemingway’s Across the River and Into the Trees:

‘Tell me some true things about fighting.’

‘Tell me you love me.’

‘I love you,’ the girl said. ‘You can publish it in the Gazzettino if you like. I love your hard, flat body and your strange eyes that frighten me when they become wicked. I love your hand and all the other wounded places.’

Keep the Faith,

The Head

You will forgive me if I seem cynical, dear readers. I didn’t start out this way, honestly. Flashback to an early summer afternoon in 2005, finishing lunch in a school I was visiting somewhere in Chelsea: an unknown teacher burst through the door breathlessly announcing that London had got the Olympics. I remember a feeling of elation and surprise we all expected Paris would get it due to Britain’s involvement in George Bush’s Second Iraq War. The elation came as it dawned on me that the greatest sporting show on earth would be coming to my home and I would be a part of it.

I was even more thrilled when in 2009 I took on my current school, deep in the heart of the East End and in the sight lines of the new stadium. Immediately, I forged every link I could with the Olympic powers. Our school was one of the first in the country to be awarded the Olympic Quality mark. In my head I harboured a great dream of our school’s children taking part in the opening ceremony. And that’s where my enthusiasm started to unravel.

I approached the organisers with a request for a set of large Olympic rings to put in the school entrance. Denied.

I approached the organisers with a request to use the Olympic rings on our school letterhead. Denied.

Denied unless we were a corporate sponsor that is. MacDonald’s, Coca Cola, Visa could all use the logo but a local school was not afforded the same opportunity. The lottery for tickets came and went and no one I know got a single seat at a single event. This was about the same time polls were being published reflecting those who lived in the shadow of The Games were feeling disenfranchised from them. Increasingly 2012 was becoming a sponsored corporate money event that had nothing to do with the city at all. Yes I was naive enough to think it would be different.

So I made a display from the posters that the organisers sent our school (instead of a set of rings). I blew up the balloons that marked the countdown from 300, 200, 100 days to go. I planned for the school to shut early and open late to accommodate the Games.

I went to the meeting called by the local government in which we were briefed on security and how it would impact on our school during The Games. We learned that staff could not drive to work, that stations would be closed and to expect journeys taking two hours longer than usual. We learned which of our children’s’ families were being watched by unknown security police.

At some point The Games became something happening to us, not for us or even with us.

But still I tried to keep positive. When 20 tickets for the Paralympics arrived at our school, we were thankful. At least a handful of the children would get the Olympic experience.

And when 16 more children were invited to take part in a Test Event at the Olympic Park; one which aimed to smooth out the kinks in a 90 days to go dress rehearsal, of course we said yes.

The bus that dropped the children off at the edge of the Olympic Park went as far as security would let it. In the pouring rain the children had to walk from there. A few were in wheelchairs and were pushed along the sparkling new pavements until…well until the pavements were no more. The park is still a building site and finishing touches are being undertaken everywhere. It was vast and windswept in the unseasonable cold rain. It had the feel of a sea-shore pier before the season had started.

The walk was compounded and complicated by the pockets of ongoing construction. The group, wheelchairs in front snaked around the back of the stadium like a train. Nearly an hour after being deposited by the bus we had arrived at the arena.

“We have a shuttle scooter for the wheelchairs,” an organiser announced.

I wanted to award a 10.0 to the man for stating the bleeding obvious.

As the event wound down to its conclusion, our staff noted some of the other schools with wheelchairs leaving the arena early. Outside 50, maybe 100 wheelchairs stood in a long line waiting for the single shuttle to take them back to the gates.

“We will need at least 10 shuttle scooters for The Games,” an organiser announced.

And so this once in a lifetime event will pass me by. I have begun to look at air flights for the period just after July 27 so we can leave this city to its party. I haven’t been invited, nor has anyone I know. It will be the neighbour’s big shindig on the other side of the wall and we can listen to the dance music and hear the merriment all night but we will never be invited in.

The school is expanding. A new extension is being built. The architect asks me what pattern I want in the brickwork. I ask him to do the Olympic Rings. It will immediately identify the date it was built for all eternity. That will be this school’s Olympic participation. That will be my addition to these Games so long-awaited. By the time the bricks are laid, the corporate sponsors will have long left town in search of the next hyper venue. The bricks will be there a century, maybe more.

Keep the Faith,

The Head