As the temperature drops and the night draw in, it can be hard to lift the spirits in early November, but this year has been harder than most. With the US election results casting a pall over last week, ongoing economic woes, and mock exams for Year 11 and Year 13, what we didn’t need was an “anticyclonic gloom” to add to the effect – a meteorological phenomenon that brought low cloud, fog and drizzle and denied us sunshine for days on end.
This is the time of year when I start adorning house plants with fairy lights, yearning for hot chocolate and marshmallows, and reaching for my little book of “hygge” for inspiration. It is also the time of year that makes me most grateful for my profession; I simply love the second half of the Autumn Term in school.
While even bog standard daylight was struggling to break through last week, school life was starting to throw up rays of sunshine, with the sounds of House song rehearsals and choir practice filling the corridors. Even meetings are filled with joyful logistical conundrums in November, as we plan for Carol Services and engage in heated debates about the number of mince pies to order.
This week, additional joy (and colour) was to be found in Odd Socks Day in support of Anti-bullying Week (with Prep and Senior students taking full advantage of the opportunity to personalise their uniform) and an own-clothes day to fundraise for Children in Need. We had the launch of the Children’s Parade, an event we are proud to sponsor each year; a trip to the Bird & Blend HQ in Worthing for our Cafe Enterprise team; and an absolutely brilliant evening at the Old Market Theatre watching our talented thespians perform ‘As You Like It’ as part of the Shakespeare Schools Festival, which featured a joyous dance-off and some of the most superbly spoken lines of Shakespeare I have ever heard in a school production.
So, the Stygian gloom of last week has lifted but whether anyone noticed it at all inside the Brighton Girls bubble of joy is another matter.