King Solomon High

Suddenly, too much to post about.

First, the part that falls into normal life:

I was at King Solomon High School today, for a really fun event. I met everyone in Years 7, 8, 9 and 10. Over 600 students in all! Pretty knackering, but a great day - and probably one of the highlights of any of my school visits ever was being able to tell a story about a squirrel with slightly unusual habits to Years 9 and 10. Great ideas, guys. Sadly, not quite suitable for me to type up in detail here. But fun nonetheless, and a good reminder that sometimes the ideas that you might think are the silliest, or the weirdest can also be the most challenging, the most original - and the most entertaining! So don't dismiss those ideas that you think at first might not be 'acceptable'.

Also, a huge thank you to the staff at KS, in particular Miss Venuto (and let's not forget the extraordinary Ian) for setting everything up so well and working so hard over the last year to make my visit happen. Here's a little glimpse of just one of the fantastic 'Joe Craig/Jimmy Coates' displays up around the school:

I had a lovely evening tonight winding down with a couple of friends over dinner, playing some games and chatting. There was even home-made ice-cream!

And then, after a long, hard (but fun) day, and a beautiful Summer evening of laughs, I go back to my computer to find out that Michael Jackson has died.

And that's the part that certainly doesn't seem to fall into the pattern of 'normal life'. It's also something that merits a post in its own right, given the millions and millions of words that will be written about the man and his death over the next 24 hours. So I'm not going to say anything more for now except the obvious, which is no less necessary for being so obvious:

I'm shocked. I'm very, very sad.

I want to try to write more about it later.