Still, transit umbra. I suspect the Crisis Team won’t be here long. Word in the Common Room last term was that Crisis Teams rarely stay out the year. Once the paperwork (sorry, computer work) is done, they tend to migrate to pastures new, leaving us to demonstrate how little relevance real life has to the world of their fiction.

Fiction? Well, you can’t build a School on theories and think tanks. A good schoolmaster knows that, and cuts his cloth accordingly. In the old days, we knew how to deal with the baser element. We didn’t need a policy to tell us bullying was wrong, or that boys should be polite and try to behave like gentlemen. There were no charters, no workshops, and certainly no abuse gurus—just a single Latin phrase that covered all eventualities.

In loco parentis. It used to mean “act as a reasonable parent does.” Now hardly anyone knows what it means. And besides, most parents nowadays are anything but reasonable. Instead they are litigious, entitled, gullible, defensive, rude, and obsessed with getting their money’s worth. As the new Headmaster says: no longer parents, but customers.

Most St. Oswald’s customers will love the New Head for all the reasons I do not—his charm, his youth, his oratory, his effortless use of jargon. For myself, I’d like to see him deal with a riotous fifth-form class last thing on a Friday afternoon, but I doubt I ever will. Men like Johnny Harrington never have to roll up their sleeves or get chalk dust on their hands. Men like Harrington sit and make plans while others follow orders. And men like Harrington know how to set other men in motion; winding the mechanism, pulling the strings, setting them off in directions they think they have chosen for themselves—

At long last, the Briefing was over. The Head and his Crisis Deputies went off to discuss the master plan over tea and biscuits in the Head’s inner sanctum. I know that sanctum very well; the last Head left it exactly as old Shitter Shakeshafte did, except that the smell of cheese has been replaced by the scent of floral air freshener. Bob Strange followed them like an expectant basset hound, leaving the rest of us to compare notes around the tea urn. Kitty Teague passed me a biscuit.

“So. What do you think?” I said.

Kitty gave me the kind of smile she reserves for her slowest pupils. “He seems very pro-active,” she said. “I think he’ll be good for St. Oswald’s. We needed a bit of a shake-up after everything that happened last year.”

“Pro-active. Isn’t that a kind of yogurt?”

She said: “You don’t sound very convinced.”

“I don’t think he’s the man for the job.”

“Why? Because he’s too young? Or because he’s not from a teaching background?”