…This morning the whole school went to see
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory at the Derby Playhouse.
One word to describe it: good…

My terse summary masks what I really felt about these kinds of occasion.

I hated them.

I couldn’t bear the noise and the melee and the sprawling disruption they commanded upon the normal schoolday routine.

Every time we went to a pantomime or a production in a local theatre, it seemed to become a ghastly war of attrition (not that wars of attrition can ever be anything else) between the audience and the performers.

I remember one particularly cacophonous stand-off between various schools from the north Leicestershire area and Little and Large.

My diary doesn’t mention which celebrities – or otherwise – were involved in this particular and no doubt mass participatory reworking of Roald Dahl.

I left out their names in order to spite them.