Friday 15 September

Dear Antony,

I have to say that you did a marvellous job of sorting out the piles of ancient music in the choir vestry. You are one of my oldest friends, and I knew that you, with your background in Advanced Cathedral Worship, were the only person who could be entrusted with such a really really important task, which of course I would have willingly performed myself had I not been burdened with my silly organ-playing duties. That you so graciously undertook this dusty labour for me, your young and unworthy Choirmaster, says much for the strength of our long-standing friendship and the esteem in which you are held by me, and by my dear Mother, who by the way wishes to ask if you would please call her Angela in future and not that rather frosty and impersonal Mrs Acne (please?)

Yours with gratitude and admiration,

x......................................x

Barry Acne (Organist and Choirmaster)

Mum said if I don’t sign it I could move my bed and all my belongings into the shed. It would be blindingly obvious even to a woodlouse with an IQ of –273 that I didn’t write it (I mean, can you imagine a literate and well-educated professional male person such as I myself ever using the expression ‘really really’?), but Antony is vain and thrives on flattery and is probably even at this moment being patted on the head by a horde of admiring Flower Ladies.

I’m not sure I did the right thing, but I do have my own dignity to consider, and there are times when a man must stand up for what is right, even against his own mother. The prospect of another night on the floor of that shed was not pleasant of course, and I confess that I struggled greatly with my conscience, before I signed the wretched thing. Mum uttered a self-satisfied smirk and said she’d pop it in the postbox straight away.

There was no school today. It seems that 98.1% of the pupils, I mean students, have come out on strike because they have no confidence in their teachers, and most of the teachers have come out on strike because they didn’t like having to go back to work. Apparently the only teachers in the staff room today were Simon and Miss Smith and Mr Grudge. Garnham was standing outside the gates when I arrived, and he says he peeped through the staff room window at 8:54am and saw Mr Grudge drinking whisky and reading Shakespearean sonnets to Miss Smith. Garnham also says that he saw Simon sharpening a hammer and repeating ‘grrr, grrr, grrr’ to himself in a shrill falsetto, but the consensus is that Garnham is an untrustworthy witness. He is very short-sighted and has to wear corrective spectacles, so in all likelihood it wasn’t Shakespeare at all that Mr Grudge was reading. It could have been the Beano, or the Fifth Form timetable, for all Garnham knows. But Garnham swears he heard Mr Grudge say ‘How-do. Islay for you? Lumme! Can’t thou ease? ’, and then Simon picked Mr Grudge up by his collar and shook him about a bit before gathering Miss Smith unto himself in a protective manner and leading her forth, no doubt to some bosky dell designed by Nature for canoedling, or, if there was a sudden world shortage of bosky dells, the groundsman’s hut on the school cricket field.

But as I say Garnham has proved himself to be a most unreliable person in the past, as I know to my cost. He still has that James Bond book that he acquired from me by false pretences and now I do not believe a word he says.