Page 36 - Herioter 2020

Pupils become published writers via Spyglass medium

Spyglass Online – Heriot’s online, below, galvanised a team of Thinking unit in October, encouraging
non-fiction platform – was contributors to create fresh content, pupils to write about things that
rejuvenated in Term 1 under the ensuring that the site was regularly matter to them, with a view to their
leadership of editor Malachy Harris. updated. Spyglass Online was also work being published.
Malachy, whose work is published used as part of a four-week Critical Mr Jonny Muir

Serious McEwan’s literature), or planning day the car, and one of us would always
trips to the beach, and we’re all having
complain that they had been given the
Grown-up Fun Serious Grown Up Fun. wrong sandwich and someone else had
eaten theirs.
Recently, I graduated from the
institution known as the Family Holiday. They were disorganised, messy,
I am now old enough for holidays to After seventeen years, I am now an
become a serious thing. Aged seventeen, alumnus. My future is now my own, and and always extremely off-the-cuff.
Whatever plan my parents had devised
I am at the age where everything is I am free to do what I want in the seven had most likely dissolved by day two,
“just becoming” something: homes weeks between early July and mid- and by day four nobody had any clue
becoming halls, boyhood becoming August. My dad said, “We’re going away, what was going on. By day six, we had
near-adulthood, and the month of May but you don’t have to come if you’ve got reduced to full-on anarchy.
becoming the bane of my existence. other stuff going on,” and that was that:
Holidays are no exception, and while it was over. The most fundamental part They were rubbish, but my happiest
we’re meant to embrace those changes, of the family holiday was gone forever: childhood memories are from that
apparently, that doesn’t mean that they that part, of course, being that it is rubbish. There is joy and honesty in
don’t feel strange: suddenly, a holiday is indisputably compulsory to go. a rubbish holiday that doesn’t exist
no longer a family occasion, but is now My family holidays were always awful. anywhere else in nature: it is impossible
something I’m expected to have with The house was always either too hot, for a family to maintain the facade of
being of high culture or taste as they
friends, or my girlfriend, or both, and too cold, too small, too haunted, shared drag themselves around a modern art
the very idea of cohabiting a Bed and
with another family that owned a gallery for the sole purpose of finding
Breakfast in the Brecon Beacons with my Rottweiler that they let roam free, or in the tea shop at the other end. There is
mother and two younger siblings shakes
the middle of nowhere. The outings were something human about family holidays:
me to my core. Suddenly my friends are always disappointing, and the weather I have a vivid memory of watching my
arranging travels together to Amsterdam would never hold up. Due to the rain, dad capsize a kayak on the Dordogne
(presumably out of a love for Ian we would often eat our sandwiches in and just climb back in, crying with

laughter. Nothing really mattered, in a
way that doesn’t exist any more. Now,
dissertations and assignments await me
at every turn, and even when away with
my friends it’s impossible to run away
from them. I love my friends dearly,
but we don’t create our own private
universe in the way my family did on
holiday. Serious Grown Up Fun isn’t
protective: we are citizens of the world
now. Grown-ups. Adults who Need To Be
Informed.
Gone are the days of wellies, “are we
nearly there yet?”, and three-hour-long
singalongs down the A1. I am older now,
stepping slowly away from the hearth
and making my way into the unknown,
with nothing but some ham and crisp
sandwiches to sustain me on my way.

Heen Shamaz (S6), taken on her family holiday in the Highlands Malachy Harris (S6)

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