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Mr. Theobalds. Very soft spoken. When asked why we should use ink to graph quadratic equations, he said "I should think if you took pride in your work, you would want to do it in ink."

I fondly remember the whole A-2 crowd. Or was it A-1. What the heck is 9th grade, anyway?

I'm up for as many as possible. I remember Miss Blake, the French teacher, who was quite funny, and very attractive. She made me memorize a poem in French one time.

Getting sent to the headmaster's office on a Saturday sticks in my mind. I'm not sure what the infraction was. Probably I was being cheeky, as I was wont to do. Mr. Bourke and I had a very nice talk, as I remember. It had something to do with responsibility, and thus it was that I had the responsibility of having to go in on a Saturday.

Lot's of them, and lot's of characters. My first day at Priory, while in a study hall, somebody heated up a large coin with a match and sent it on the floor over my way. Naturally, I picked it up, and, just as naturally, I howled with pain upon being burned. Of course, I was chastised for having broken the decorum, such as it was, and the perpetrators, who were laughing in the back, were never sought out by the teacher. An invaluable lesson.

The patties were great. Was that goat? And occasionally in the papers we read about a finger showing up in a patty, but thankfully this never happened at school.

I can't say I was enamoured of the hierarchical arrangements, with monitors and prefects being able to boss me around. Truth be told, I had it coming at times. And had I been one of these higher level students, I suppose I would have thought of it differently.

It has been useful to understand something about the British educational system, as well. A and O levels were way above my grade, however.

Crazy is pretty relative. I think a lot of the characters at the Priory School were pretty wild. We were very fortunate to have had the experience of attending.

Now I live in North Carolina, where I work as an environmental engineer. Once in a while this involves international assignments, and in 1999 or so I went to Kingston for 3 weeks, working for US AID. This included working with some US Peace Corps volunteers in Jamaica. We (or rather, they, the Peace Corps kids) excavated a VIP latrine (that's Ventilated In Pit) down in the shantytown area, and folks at the health ministry did some microbiological work on the samples.

I'm married, with two kids, who are 3 and 4 1/2 years old. My wife has a facebook page and keeps telling me to get one. Now it seems I need one to check out the Priory facebook page.

Last updated Saturday July 04, 2009