Notebook

Sunday, 25th May 2008

I walk back through the small throng of Etonians, with a sense of rapture I'd forgotten. But something is wrong, too... Maybe this kind of education, which I have, by and large, tried to live by, isn't right. Maybe an experience can be so good that it ends by losing its original function, becoming something distinctly less appealing... [T]he feeling of inappositeness returns when I talk to the writer Adam Nicolson. He recalls an Eton beak who experimented in "de-Platonisation" - this meant going with his pupils to the local playground, getting on the swings and shedding what the beak called "the high-flying, over-intellectualised life of the imagination". Nicholson thinks that this saved his skin. "I was brought to a pitch of great intellectual sophistication at Eton," he recalls. "But it was no more than a crust. There was a vacuum of understanding of people in the world. I had all the analytical equipment I needed and more. But I didn't really understand anything." I ask what happened to the beak on the swings. "Oh, he was fired," Nicholson says. "They got rid of him quickly."

Nick Fraser, "The Importance of Being Eton".