School’s out

The school year is all but over and we were invited this evening to a convivial and most enjoyable occasion with a form teacher at the house of fellow parents. I have difficulty in believing that yet another academic year is over. There can be no doubt about it: time is accelerating. How is it possible otherwise to explain the fact that, when I think back to my own school days, the days after exams dragged on and on until we finally got out and away? No sooner did I think about this than the opening guitar chords of Alice Cooper’s ‘School’s Out’ rang out again as clearly as they did in 1972. Cooper has said he was inspired to write the song when answering the question, “What’s the greatest three minutes of your life?”. Cooper said: “There’s two times during the year. One is Christmas morning, when you’re just getting ready to open the presents… The next one is the last three minutes of the last day of school when you’re sitting there and it’s like a slow fuse burning. I said, ‘If we can catch that three minutes in a song, it’s going to be so big.'” Well, to my mind, he did, and it was.