Let’s go fly a kite for the summer!

Sally Bromley is principal of The College of Richard Collyer in Horsham. Her column will sometimes be about educational matters but more often a random ramble about house moves, house renovations, beach huts, Morris Minors, boxer dogs and keeping chickens.

Ahealth pandemic landed in our laps in March and there is so much anxiety about a virus we know so little about?

Oh, and the hog roast is virtual – it’s get your BBQ out in your back garden.

I decide not to dwell too much on my early years of teaching as is the retirement speech fall-back position.

Most of our staff are under 40 and Generation X remembers Xerox but they’ve never heard of Banda or coped with spidery writing on chalk boards or suffered their teachers smoking while delivering catch up seminars and certainly not corporal punishment. Thank goodness.

A retirement speech is something most people only make once in their life, so I’d better get it right.

My preference would be to disappear like Mary Poppins – job done, position filled, everyone go and fly a kite for the summer.

It was Wellbeing Day at Collyer’s on Monday of this week.

An annual event even more valuable this year as an opportunity to reconnect with colleagues only recently seen via a zoom line up.

A healthy mind and body is more likely to mean settled member of staff and settled student, better able to cope with work and study.

I decided to spend late afternoon until the sun set with some others flying kites.

A whimsical way to spend my wellbeing time but perhaps symbolic of the freedom of retirement.

Still firmly tethered to earthly reality, the kite flies high and is able to get a new perspective on the world while fluttering its tail flamboyantly.

There is nothing shy and retiring about a kite.