Nigel Farndale’s diary: The dread moment when they announce next year’s school fees

Next time I’m in a sauna I’m going to say: ‘It’s like a school sports hall on prize day in here.’ As the mothers fanned their faces with the programmes, one of the other fathers, Her Britannic Majesty’s Ambassador to Uruguay, leaned forward and whispered: ‘Rookie error, mate. Should have worn a white shirt.’ He was right. I was wearing a blue one, which meant I couldn’t take off my linen jacket. My interest in hearing from the headmaster about the school’s successes on the sporting field began to wane after the first three hours. I’m pleased for the Under 11Bs hockey team and all they achieved back in February, but given the humidity I think it would have been kinder if he had stuck to the highlights. He redeemed himself with a rundown of ‘year 8 howlers’. The one that got the biggest laugh was the RE essay which noted that unlike Muslims, Christian men can only have one wife. ‘It’s called monotony.’

A friend has unearthed a letter written to his grandfather by his uncle Bobby, a Hurricane pilot. It begins with an account of a game of golf at the Goodwood course in which he records: ‘I had 8 bogeys and 1 birdie’. In the second paragraph he writes: ‘This afternoon we went a long way into France on a sweep and I scored my first real victory. I shot down a Focke-Wulf Condor, the largest German bomber, about 10 miles east of Châteaudun.’ The third and final paragraph is an account of a game of squash. Clearly he was dealing with the horrors of war by equating them with sport. Equally clearly, he was using sport in the way that fathers and sons have always used it, to express feelings, without the embarrassment of actually expressing them.