My childhood is not something I think about very often, not really for any reason other than it is getting further and further  and further away.  I’m almost at the age now where there have been as many years of being an adult as there were of being a child but as I still behave like a five year old most of the time I don’t think I’ll bother letting that get me down.  In fact I’ll make a point of poking my tongue out at my dad later, just for fun.  He’ll like that.

Something happened recently, though, which reminded me of my early school days and made me remember what a happy time that was for me and how much I adored school, at least until I went to secondary school, which I absolutely hated.  It wasn’t terribly exciting, I’d been watching a chat show and Miranda Hart was on it, a comedienne/comedian/comedy actress/whatever you want to want to call her that I rather like.  While talking they showed an old school photo of her and I was surprised because the uniform she was wearing was remarkably similar to mine from my old prep school, Moreton House.  My uniform there was pretty awful, predominately brown: brown pleated skirt, brown jumper, white stiffly collared shirt, brown blazer and the mother of all hideous ties, an orange, brown, green and white diagonally striped affair.  It’s questionable whether or not dressing a child in this uniform wasn’t tantamount to child abuse , quite frankly, so I couldn’t believe there had been two schools in the UK around the same time that would have used it.

Aged 7, looking like a boy

Looking less like a boy...

"Accessorising" to match that beauuuuuuuutiful tie. Nice.

It turned out I was right, a minimum amount of googling revealed that Miranda grew up in the same town as me and attended the same prep school.  Because she doesn’t use her full surname , Hart-Dyke, any more I hadn’t realised who she was, but I remember the Hart-Dykes well because her sister Alice was in my class.  In fact I very vaguely think I remember visiting their house once but that might be a false memory as I’m fairly certain Alice didn’t like me!  I was quite excited by all this and after getting a somewhat lukewarm, unimpressed response from my sons despite the fact they like Miranda too I thought I’d text my mum with “Guess who I went to school with?!” But it turns out she already knew because her response was “Oh, I thought you’d realised.” Cheers for telling me, Mum.  I did try tweeting Miranda herself but given that she has over 80,000 followers I think she either didn’t see it or wasn’t exactly bowled over with excitement by my news. Can’t think why!

To be continued…