Archive special: Year 10 responsibilities
24 Years at the Tap End archive edition
The Christmas Day podcast went back to Chris’s Year 10.
School had started giving pupils small amounts of additional responsibility.
At lunch, Chris and his year group were allowed into a particular part of Cassiobury Park as long as they stayed within a defined boundary.
They were also approaching work experience.
Chris filled in the school form explaining that he loved music, radio and football.
The school matched him with an accountancy firm.
Scott thought the placement process had missed the target fairly dramatically.
Chris bought an oversized suit
Before starting work experience, Chris bought smart clothes.
The suit was much too large.
He arrived at the accountancy firm looking formal but not especially well fitted.
His actual duties were less dramatic than the outfit.
He learned a little about different areas of accountancy, fetched things for people and used the photocopier.
The company gave him a card at the end of the week.
Chris was grateful.
He did not leave with a sudden passion for becoming an accountant.
The bullying assembly needed an ending
Year 10 also required each class to stage a school assembly around a set topic.
Chris’s class had bullying.
He became involved in organising it.
The presentation used music and cards with words designed to illustrate the subject.
Then Chris decided the assembly needed a big finale.
He chose Baz Luhrmann’s “Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen)”.
The link between sunscreen and bullying was not especially strong.
Chris simply thought the record would give them an ending.
Small bottles and sachets of sun lotion would be thrown towards the audience when the famous final advice about sunscreen arrived.
Nobody had checked the lids
The assembly began.
Teachers filled the first rows.
The music played.
At the finale, members of Chris’s class threw the sunscreen.
Only then did Chris realise something important.
The lids had been removed.
Sun cream sprayed everywhere.
Teachers in the front row were covered.
The hall descended into chaos.
Chris was marched straight into the headteacher’s office and accused of orchestrating the mess.
He insisted the disaster had not been intentional.
That did not save his lunchtime privileges.
No more park
Chris lost the freedom to go into Cassiobury Park at lunch and had to help clean the hall for the following week.
Years later, the smell of sun cream still reminded him of being told off by the headteacher.
The Tap End chapter turned what had been intended as a story about growing responsibility into evidence of why Year 10 pupils perhaps should not have been trusted with open bottles of lotion in front of the entire school.
On Christmas Day, the archive slogan practically wrote itself.
Trust Chris.
He was the sunscreen.
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