Drastically misjudging a school speech

Part two.

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Five years ago I was asked to do a talk at my old secondary school. The painful build-up is here. But we’re now at the night before and I’ve noticed the headmaster has tweeted about my impending moment of glory. And also about the other speaker.

I’d been told it was a headteacher of a local primary school, who’d left more recently than me. And now I have a name that I can background check beyond even what an M15 vetting officer would do.

It does not go well. Being asked to do a speech at your old school should make you feel successful, but I’ve never felt more like a failure and a waste of space compared to this other speaker. Not content with just being a headteacher, she does loads of stuff for the community and works in the areas of diversity and unconscious bias. And still found the time to have three children.

I’m panicking now. A single-celled organism feels more accomplished than me. But I finish writing my speech and I’m quite pleased I’ve managed to get in the words incontinent, prison and strippergram.

The next morning I drive to my school. It’s a weird journey. I keep thinking - I know what my future is now. Like I was going to be able to tell 18-year-old me when I arrived.

She’s not there, but I do get a tour of the school, which I’d been very excited about but soon become genuinely furious that it isn’t exactly as I remember it. I realise that I didn’t want a tour of my school; I want to time travel back to the early 90s. Why must things change? I feel this about almost everything (Opal Fruits, Marathon bars, the WHSmiths logo) until I remember stuff like women’s rights and decent coffee.

I’m then taken to the headmaster’s office. He’s lovely and I meet my big rival, the other speaker, and she’s also lovely. It’s all lovely until I discover that my A-level history teacher, Mr Hayton, still works there. I loved Mr Hayton! We were a small class and he was really young; it was his first year of teaching. We got on so well and all went to the pub with him on the last day of school.

The headmaster, seeing my enthusiasm, says he’ll get him to come down. I cannot wait for the possibly tearful reunion. I will bring back so many memories for him! His first class! He’s probably been following all our careers. Maybe it was even him who added me to the school Wikipedia page.

I can tell from the moment he walks into the office that he has no idea who I am. I can’t believe I thought that after 28 years and thousands of pupils that he’d still remember me. It’s incredibly awkward.

I’m glad to move into the hall for the big speech. Until I walk onto the stage and see my audience for the first time. I have dramatically misjudged the tone and content of my speech.

I’d written for the student I was then. But this school has changed a lot over the years. It’s a grammar school, which is free but you have to pass an exam at eleven to get in. And the catchment area has hugely increased since I was there. I would never get in if I was eleven now. These are the brightest kids of the whole of Essex and East London. They have excelled academically. They’re not wasting their zillions of brain cells thinking about boys and makeup and which Thunderbird fortified wine is better, the blue or the red.

The headteacher speaker goes first, which is good as it gives me more time to panic. She is someone who is energised by public speaking. She comes alive on stage. There are no notes; she just speaks from the heart. There are dramatic pauses, inspiring stories and profound observations.

And then there’s me. Who seems to shrink during public speaking. I feel myself getting smaller and smaller with every word, especially incontinent, prison and strippergram.

They’d asked me to talk a bit about my radio career. And what people usually want to know is what celebrities I’ve met and what they were like. So I find myself listing famous people and, at best, it was like someone their mum’s age trying to look cool, and at worst, it was really ugly bragging.

I finish my speech by mentioning their exams and the teacher invigilator game. I’ve heard about this from many teachers. To get through the monotony of monitoring the exams, they pick a topic, like most likely to end up in prison, and then a teacher has to walk up to and stand by the person they think fits it best.

When my talk was over, the teacher hosting the event said quite tersely, “I can assure you, we don’t play the invigilator game here.”

So looks like I won’t be invited back again. Unless it’s another 28 years when everyone has left. I think it will take me that long to get over it.