House Rules

When I was in High School in 10th grade we had our first school dance known as "The Chanel Ball" named after Coco Chanel - (we were fancy). The preparation for this ball started a long way in advance and for an entire school term we had dance lessons every Friday night with the grade 11's from our brother school, Michaelhouse. This was always extremely awkward - especially to begin with:

All boys migrate to one side of the room and all girls stay planted at the other side of the room. (As you can imagine it is very difficult to attempt to learn the art of ballroom dancing from this distance.) At this point all the boys grow very pre-occupied with their ties and generally avoid eye-contact.

Another thing to note: the number of ladies present slightly outweigh the number of Michaelhouse boys available. This causes the following effect:

Anyway... by now you should (hopefully) have a dance partner. And the dance instructor says

"OK LADIES! TAKE YOUR PARTNER'S HAND"

This is NOT a pleasant experience:

So after nearly fainting from pure nerves and perspiration smell, you begin the dancing.

The partnered dancing commences:

* The end *

Author's note: this post is in no way intended to offend any Michaelhouse boys, you are (generally) very good dancers and perfect gentlemen and i love you all.

Take up dance lessons. It really is quite fun :)

Old School

I love school. I love my high school. When I think about school, I get like this:

In my final matric year of school I was one of the school senior prefects. (This was an opportunity for young school-girls to over-inflate their little egos and exercise the tiny bit of extra power afforded to them by school hierarchy systems.)

Every night at school there were compulsory prep sessions where the junior girls would go to their classrooms in the evenings and do their homework from the day. Everyone knew the rules for these prep sessions:

Any of these devices that were found during these prep sessions would be confiscated for a few days - which in highschool-girl-time is almost eternity. 

One night on a secret scheduled "raid night",  I decided to stay late at school so that I could participate in the ruthless busting. On this particular night, the team:

Armed with shotguns, artillery, mace and weapons of mass destruction, we busted in to the unsuspecting classrooms...

We confiscated cellphones, media players, ipods and mp3s.

Ok, it wasn't a bloodbath. But I did have fun drawing that picture.

* * *

Anyway I have many amazing (slightly strange) memories from school. Here are some of them:

• Our entire school missioning in the boiling sun to the Annual Inter-school Swimming meet, in our school uniforms to sing and chant and support the swimming team as they compete against all the other schools in the area.

• At the end of the year - after our Christmas lunch we all run down to the school pool and jump off the pump house in our school uniforms into the swimming pool:

So, you get BF's and you get BFFE's..... and then you get... BFFFEE'S! 
Now THAT'S the type of friends you make at St. Anne's.

• There's a system in place at St Anne's -  the name of which I am sure is now politically incorrect - so I will refrain from using it (St Anne's girls who are reading this will know what it is... ). This system involved new grade 8 students (2nd formers) being assigned (sometimes on a rotational basis) to one of the senior girls. The senior girls then had lists in their rooms of different chores that needed to be done by the 2nd former. These chores involved "Please make my bed" "Please fill up my water jug" "Please wash my mugs" "Please make me coffee in the morning" etc.

Slave labour, basically :)

• We also had a tradition of having midnight feasts in the boarding houses, involving cans of caramel treat, marie biscuits, marshmellows, soda, cake, donuts and chips.

These were affectionately called "Middi's"

It usually ends like this:

• But we also have a tradition called "the golden mile"... So sometimes these middi's end with us running around school naked at midnight being chased by ferocious imaginary creatures. Like this...

aaaaaahhh... the good old school days. I miss thee.

Send a message to an old school friend.