The Rendcomb Magazine, May 1975 - The Old Rendcombian

EDITORIAL“You have seen sunshine and rain at once.”SHAKESPEARE‟S words (from King Lear, as if you didn‟t know) are perhaps more appropriate to this past springterm than they might at first seem. To begin with a humble example, the weather has done its best to prove “sunshineand rain at once” an understatement. Just think of the alliteration in “You have seen sunshine and snow at once.”Sport too has proved to be both successful in one sphere, and disappointing in another. Yet again we can blame theweather for a large number of cancelled fixtures, but those matches which did take place resulted, on the whole, invictory for the school (or rather, the 2nd XI).On the academic level this has been a term of high tension for the second-year sixth form, a term spiced with U.C.C.A.communications. The vultures hovering over the post table have nipped the bloody entrails from many a second-classdelivery (who can afford first-class these days?) and have tasted the various joys of acceptance, refusal, and unreachableoffers. The processes of revision and speculation about academic careers have kept us looking both ways at once.The distant future seems dependent upon the immediate future, which is itself dependent upon how well we understoodLatin grammar in the third form. “Sunshine and rain at once” - it‟s nearly all over, but the worst is yet to come.Socially, the term has had its high and low points. The disappearance of several members of the school to France,home, Germany, or the sick-bed over the last week or so of term has given the impression that the term is about to do aslow fade into a hazy sunset, but even so we have, for the most part, avoided the spectre of „flu this winter.Mock examinations are over. Next term it‟s the real thing, but in between, a holiday. But even the holiday is but thehalf-promise of a rainbow. Each day spent lounging “like a sun-dozed cat” turns into another pin to prick the conscience,and the textbooks grin evilly from their shelves. One must, one supposes, strike a balance. Anyone comingdown the pub for differential equations and a game of darts?In the words of the football commentator, the game is over, the crowds slowly file out of the ground, and as the drizzledescends we leave you and hand you back to the studio.4