Abingdonian 2020

60 The Abingdonian greater. Again, back to the cake, it is this alchemy of the whole that is so extraordinary. Exactly what it is, I can’t put my finger on, but it‘s there. ‘A teacher affects eternity: they can never tell where their influence stops.’ So thank you to all the teachers for inspiring and challenging us, for making us laugh, for telling us to tuck our shirts in or take out our earphones. You are great characters and superb teachers. To our housemasters, thank you for keeping us on the straight and narrow and nominating us for house competitions, especially house debating, and for the inspiring assemblies with growth mindset, resilience and bounce- backability as popular topics. Thank you to our parents, for driving us to and from matches on Saturdays, for collecting us from rehearsals and missed buses, but most of all for galloping up and down the Big School stairs at break- neck speed for parents’ evening. Thank you for sending us here. I wouldn’t want to have been at any other school. Mr Dawswell, for your endless good humour and kind support. I am sure you have been at every event that the school has ever hosted. Thank you. And Mr Windsor, the icing on the cake, for always putting us at ease, supporting us, Prizegiving Speeches by the Heads of School Good morning everyone, So, here we are, prizegiving on Zoom. I had never heard of Zoom until the lockdown. But they say “The past is a foreign country” and we have travelled very far in a short space of time. Yet it is also an apt book end to my first day at Abingdon, when the whole School Assembly took place on Upper Field. Our year has always had an eventful journey through school: we’ve had the 2016 referendum followed by Brexit, the Climate Crisis, two elections and now the Covid-19 pandemic. Many of us began at Abingdon in portacabins for our tutor periods, lessons, or even as a Houseroom. Our RS lessons took place in what is now Beech Court, and science lessons in what is now Greening Court. We are the only generation to have had our A Levels cancelled and everything that goes with it: the stress of doing the exams, but the relief when they are finished, and the associated rites of passage. But as Shakespeare says, ‘Sweet are the uses of adversity which, like the toad, ugly and venomous, wears yet a precious jewel in his head.’ I think that this is true and our futures are exciting. For James Lloyd, Abingdon is a marmite bagel, or for Ed Gill, it’s a Doctor Pepper, or for Archie Turnbull, a pizza slice smothered with ketchup. But for me Abingdon has been like a delicious cake. All the ingredients work in harmony and create a perfect whole. I don’t know how the alchemy works, but there is a masterful blend at Abingdon with a perfect balance of the sweet and savoury, the arts and the science, the sports and the academic, the curricular and the non-curricular. And the after- taste will linger with us all. I could just list all the incredible achievements for our year in sport, with the unbeaten hockey and rugby teams and so on, or the academic accolades and olympiads, the music, the drama. The list is endless, but I won’t. Of course it is all amazing, but I want to focus on what makes our year exceptional. Our year is diverse, it’s talented, yet inclusive with big brains, big muscles, big characters and big talents, yet we all see ourselves as part of something