The beginning

Apparently you need to start going to open days and start planning for Form 1 High school waaay in advance or you get stuck. It’s not as simple as just applying, writing, accepting and paying through the nose anymore. You need to beg, grovel, bribe, supplicate and pray to all the gods for a good school place.

So my 11 year old wee cousin is in Grade six in Zimbabwe. She is visually impaired and we know not whether it’ll get better or worse. She wears glasses but needs to be pretty much 2 inches away from the paper with pretty big font to read. So we need to take this into consideration when we are choosing a school for her.

So last Monday we went to the Arundel open day. Yeah, I though it was a done deal, my aunt, her mother went there, I went there, it’s still a great school so how hard can it be. We know the deal…or so we thought.

Don’t get me wrong- I was a boarder there in the 90’s and I thoroughly enjoyed it. On the first day as others were crying into their pillows I was ecstatic- freeeedom I thought. Bye Mom and Dad! I had lived in weird sort of extended family set up for years and the school was round the corner from my grandparents’ and uncles’ house so it was hardly a huge move.

I loved Arundel, I made good friends, I was naughty, I grew up, I was well educated and exposed- all you need for later on in life. But really, when I think about it- most of us are a weird kind of breed. The really clever ones are not very fit for public consumption, the not so clever ones are somewhat better but the school is a shark tank. It’s all about big fishes and little fishes. I keep saying about how they never stop telling you in Form 1 that ‘you were a big fish in a little pond, but now you’re a small fish in a big pond’. But I think they forget to tell you that when you leave you’re a guppy in a big old ocean. You may be an Arundel girl but there are hundreds of people out there, better educated, more polished, cleverer, hungrier and generally better than you. Little bitches get finessed into even bigger bitches. You get a superiority complex, and then immediately get an inferiority one battling with the superiority pretty much for the rest of your life. Even my Aunt who went there in the 70’s feels like she’s kind of not right, anti-social and not keen on the real world.

So to cut a long story short, Arundel will probably not be the way forward. Aside from the social integration issues that may ensue, do you really think they would make the effort to cater for my darling cousin’s impairment- I think not. Thank goodness she wants Convent as her other option. But as you know we have to consider the visual impairment thing so……