Today’s Moving Day, finally. I mean, most of our stuff is already at the new place, but the movers are coming to take care of all the Big ‘N Heavy Stuff — bed, armoire, couch and chairs — and I’ll be sort of between Internet services. (From long and bitter experience, I expect that despite all my careful planning, AT&T is somehow going to cock things up so I might be Internet-free for the next couple of days.)
Please be patient; “normal” service should resume shortly.
I hope.
Must our children suffer any more? Yes, according to the headmaster of this school in Britishland:
A [school principal] has insisted that a 12-hour school day will give pupils ‘buckets full of endorphins’ – as the 7am to 7pm scheme comes into effect today.
Children at All Saints Catholic College in the affluent neighbourhood of Notting Hill, west London, will partake in a whole host of activities instead of spending the time at home on their devices when classes finish at 3.15pm.
This includes homework time and activity clubs from dodgeball, basketball, art, drama and cookery classes in a bid to break the cycle of smartphone ‘addiction’.
The controversial decision to introduce a 12-hour school day comes after the principal found ‘shocking’ things on confiscated mobile phones, including pupils blackmailing strangers and catfishing one another.
[He said:] ‘It’s pretty clear across the sector this is a real issue in terms of the vacuum that phones fill for children when they go home. There’s a crisis in attendance and if we look at the last 10 years or so there’s a depletion in services that are available to children after school. He said the school will ensure homework is done within that time, while also making sure that children take part in activities so they go home ‘with a bucket full of endorphins’.
Not to mention that the little shits should be too exhausted to get up to mischief.
Not that this is anything new, of course. Allow me to present a typical day in the life of a schoolboy at my old school, St. John’s College, back in the day:
6.40am: Rising bell
7.02am: Roll call
7.10am: Breakfast
7.35am: School prep (make beds, get books together for class, etc.)
8.00am: Morning Chapel
8.25am: Classes begin
1.25pm: Lunch
2.10pm: Reading and study (classrooms or dorm rooms)
2.50pm: Sports (compulsory; cricket, swimming, athletics, tennis, squash in summer; rugby or field hockey in winter)
4.15pm: Roll call
4.20pm: Free time, unless taken up by extra duties: sports, choir practice, punishment (detention, hard labor etc.)
Day scholars could leave for home after roll call or after extra duties. For boarders:
6.30pm: Dinner
7.10pm: First Prep (homework), in classrooms, with a 10-minute break at 8pm
8.10pm: Second Prep, until 9.15pm
Lights out: 9.45pm
If the daytime classroom hours seem to be less than in U.S. schools, remember the two hours’ prep each night, and allow me also to point out that Saturday mornings were the same as weekday mornings, and pupils were only free after lunch — “free”, that is, unless the school sports teams were engaged in matches against other area schools, and attendance was compulsory (roll call again!) at First Team matches.
Boarders stayed in school on Saturday nights, which were taken up with “club” activities such as Bridge, Drama, Chess, Debate, History, Photography, Geography, Literature, Film, Pioneer (nature/history studies) and so on. Membership of at least three clubs was compulsory. Then Sundays:
8.30am: Rising bell
8.55am: Roll call
9.00am: Sunday Chapel & Communion
10.00am: Boarders were excused to leave, with parents only
6.30pm: Roll call
6.35pm: Dinner
7.00pm: Evensong & Sermon, until 7.45pm
8.30pm: Lights out
…and the whole thing would start again the next day.
So when I read about “12-hour days”, I just giggle.
We were so exhausted (endorphins? pah) that we seldom had time to get up to mischief. Officially, that was the theory, anyway. The reality, especially for thugs like the Four Muscadels, was a little different.
And we didn’t even have phones. Wouldn’t have mattered if we did, because the school would have banned and confiscated them.
Just like our Brit headmaster has. In that, at least, we have something in common.
I see that aged author Jilly Cooper has thrown in the towel, so to speak, when it comes to writing her bonkfest novels. Actually, it’s kinda sad:
The 86-year-old, who’s known for her light-hearted take on erotic fiction, confessed that penning her new book, Tackle!, was much tougher than her others because she’s not that interested in sex any more.
The British author, who lost her husband Leo ten years ago, and said writing hot scenes to satisfy readers was harder than people think.
She told Good Housekeeping magazine: ‘I’m 86 now and have forgotten how to do it!
‘It’s quite difficult to write sex scenes – you can’t go on finding ways to do it differently.’
Well, yes — it’s the same thing about having sex itself: once you’ve gone through the Kama Sutra and gone around the clock face a few times, it is a little difficult to imagine new ways of putting it together, so to speak. Hence, I suppose, why people do things like threesomes, sex parties and affairs, not to mention going over to the Dark Side and exploring things like BDSM and bonking those of Tender Years.
Writing it is even more difficult. I once wrote an entire erotic novel, the sex scenes strung together with only the flimsiest of common threads, and by the end of it — after a massive sex orgy — I had the “hero” of the story get married to the only woman he hadn’t managed to seduce. I think he was as tired of fucking around as I was. (And no, I haven’t published it, and probably won’t, even though it did receive rave reviews from a select few beta testers, as it were.)
Anyway, ol’ Jilly’s sex scenes were quite racy for the times in which she wrote them — good grief, over thirty years, it’s a miracle she can come up with a different plot, let alone yet another different way to describe the insertion of Tab A into Slot B (as Sarah Hoyt so delightfully puts it).
But if the old pen is starting to droop with over-use, there’s unfortunately no Writer’s Viagra to come [sic] to the rescue.
Writing about sex is about as ridiculous as having it, at age 86.
…and many thanks to those who’ve donated already.
As threatened a couple of weeks ago, August marks the month wherein I call for financial support from you, O My Loyal Readers, so that I may keep this motley collection of foul-tempered rants, occasional essays, reviews of books and movies, gratuitous pictures of beautiful guns, cars and women, and in general all the things that give pleasure to men (and on occasion, to my long-suffering Lady Readers as well). Also, so that I can actually try to survive Bidenflation and the resulting economic collapse without having to resort to the old-fashioned ways of keeping New Wife and myself alive.
After getting input from everyone, I decided not to go with a begging site e.g. GoFundMe, but rather just setting up sundry means of donations via VenMo and Zelle, as well as the usual PayPal and Patreon methods (the latter for those who would prefer to set up a monthly donation, for cash flow purposes). Of course, those who wish may also go the paper route via the Sooper-Seekrit mailing address. Details of all the above are as follows:
Venmo details: @Kim-DuToit-2
Zelle: [email protected]
PayPal: [email protected]
Patreon: kimdutoit
…and of course, the Sooper-Seekrit mailing address for those of the Paper Persuasion:
6009 W. Parker Rd
Ste 149-141
Plano TX 75093
Venmo and Zelle are two new streams for me, and I have tested them so they should work.
And as a reminder / nag, this annoying graphic will appear inside the top post twice a week or so:
However, to assuage the annoyance, there will also be a pic of this nature right underneath it:
Or: 
Or:
…etc. You get my drift.
Finally: at the end of August, the Top 3 (plus ties) donations will be entered into a Secret Drawing for one of my treasured iron-sighted rifles — which, lest we forget, I can no longer shoot because Old Busted Eyes. The rifles will be legal in all 50 states, so no worries there.
Thank you all for your support.
