School photo

Ah, the school photo. Chairs and benches out onto the field, 800 or so boys and all the staff arranged by year, hanging around waiting for the photographer to tell us he was ready to start, at which point his camera would start panning across the assembled school.

One year, I remember, a boy whom I only knew as Blads fulfilled the ancient tradition of starting at the left of the assembled throng and then, once the camera had passed him, sprinting 'round the back in time to appear at the other end of the photo. 

In the sixth form, my good friend Jason Denvir and I made our own, less energetic, statement by tilting our heads up and around to the right, as if we were part of a youth recruitment poster for the Young Communists or similar. It was rather effective.

My family didn't ever splash out on the photo, whose principle purpose was to be framed and put up in the school corridor with all of the other ones that had been taken down the years. Did many people really buy the school photo and put it up in their homes?

I saw this one today when I went into school, placed on a table with this clock, which seemed to have a nice resonance. School photos are so anonymous - just a sea of faces - that the young men and women in this photo might as well have been me and all of my friends, young and (largely) untroubled, our wholes lives ahead of us, the clocks of our adult lives only just past midnight.