Prefect sandwiches and bricks

In 1984, a film was released called 'Another Country', which starred both Rupert Everett and Colin Firth. I don't remember it being particularly popular at the time and I never hear it referenced these days but I loved it. The film centred on an odd friendship between the characters played by Everett and Firth, set in a public school.

I won't recite the plot - go and watch it! - but there is one scene where Everett's character talks about how badly he wants to be a prefect. Firth queries this, since Everett hates school. But it transpires that his desire is nothing to do with aligning himself with the school and everything to do with the perks that come with the job.

And so it was at my school, which was a grammar school run along pubic school lines* by the then Headteacher, AJV Roberts. For us, the chief perk of being a prefect was inhabiting the prosaically named "prefect's room". In here, a territory rarely visited by teachers, we had comfy chairs and a kettle. It might not sound much but it was bliss.

It was there that I learned to complete - or at least have a fair crack at completing - The Telegraph crossword, which even back then was the only acceptable reason for buying that newspaper. But that was very much at the intellectual end of our spectrum of activities. The other extreme was the prefect sandwich.

This was assembled by taking all the cushions off the settee and one prefect lying on the base. He would then be covered with a couple cushions and then another prefect. And so on using additional prefects and the cushions from the other chairs. 

Perhaps one of my favourite memories of school was when the head of sixth form - also the prefects' form master - made an entrance during the 
assembly of a prefect sandwich. He was a wonderful man named Colin Prince, with an excellent sense of humour, and his reaction and the subsequent dressing down of his captive audience was a delight. 

Two of the interesting aspects of a prefect sandwich, from an engineering point of view, were firstly how high it could go whilst remaining stable (about five prefects) and also just how much weight the foundation prefect could stand. Skeletons and rib-cages specifically remained intact even underneath four additional bodies. 

All of which leads me to bricks. For some reason I have been thinking about them a lot recently. Perhaps it's because the house we're hoping to buy is built from them, idk. In an odd way, I've always liked bricks and, indeed, watching bricklayers at work. There's something very satisfying about the placement of the staggered lines of bricks and the trimming of the cement, the sharp tap of a trowel edge to break a brick in two.

The fact that a brick can be broken in this way and the manner in which  bricks can crumble and decay over time, might lead one to think that they are not, of themselves, that strong. Yet when I drive through Manchester and Salford and look at all the mighty red brick buildings, I always think about how much weight those bricks at the bottom are bearing, just a prefect at the bottom of a sandwich!

The particular bricks in today's photo are from Common, a bar in Manchester's Northern Quarter. The Minx and I met Hannah there for a late lunch and a couple of drinks, which was every bit as pleasant as it sounds.

*All my life I have been dogged by the assumption that I went to public school.

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-10.kgs
Reading: 'Plan For Chaos' by John Wyndham.