To be fair, not many people who died in plane crashes in the 1990s believe in much.
Named Sally.
I've done some research and apparently it was a two-month-old Pied Montes cross.
My favourite Welsh rugby player is Tomos Williams because he looks exactly like a policeman from 1982 who is undercover as an agent provocateur in a radical trade union but about to be given away by his nervous disposition and regulation moustache.
Lichen.
Rustic ciabattas - from West Lothian.
I don't know, sorry.
I found a picture of Bruno. I don't know why he was advocating food denial. Most kids at our school ate sweets for lunch though (via an ice cream van that was allowed to park on school grounds every day) so they would probably only have missed out on Wham bars & Marathons in any case.
Via a note in the brandy barrel on its collar?
I don't know. They went outside too. I think they lived outside. A lot of what happened in my younger years, accepted by me at the time as the natural order of things, is with hindsight unfathomable.
Bonus bonus pic.
Bonus photos (none of them mine) taken at my school.
There was also an official school dog, Bruno the St Bernard. He had his own stable building and was, so far as I remember, 97% malodorous drool.
patiently at a set of double doors to be let through. You'd hold the door for them and Dan would make brief appreciative eye contact and then they'd trot off down the corridor to who knows where. Secret school dog business, I suppose.
We also, and I swear I'm not making this up, had a pack of feral dogs that roamed the school corridors, led by their leader, Dan, a black sort-of-retriever mongrel. Dogs can't open fire doors so, if you were out of a lesson on an errand or a toilet trip, you'd often find these 5 or so dogs waiting..
Distinct memory of liberally applying louse powder to the donkeys, my friends and I cheerfully breathing in billowing clouds of highly dangerous pesticide, and looking up to see we were being full frontal flashed by a man in a window of one of the houses adjoining the field. The 1990s were NOT SAFE.
If it helps your envy, it was in all other regards including league tables a terrible, terrible school.
You leave Casper alone. My first love. I wrote his name in my diary. I shared my packed lunch with him. I applied louse powder to his hairy flanks (no PPE for these children!). I played Nothing's Gonna Change My Love For You by Glenn Medeiros into his ears via my Walkman (he didn't like that).
The toggle dangling down from my anorak in that picture was later eaten by an angora goat.
I do not have any photographs of Harry the llama but this is one of me on the school farm, cuddling my pal Casper the donkey. The middle class housing estate visible in the distance.
So this is how I know for a stone cold fact that I can chivy a llama through a 1960s housing estate of interconnecting avenues & back into his paddock, & how I also know I could sort out a llama in a bookshop. 🦙
Now I have never been overencumbered with social skills and at age 14 I was more a mumble in a Carter USM t-shirt than a functioning human being, but nevertheless with eloquence and economy I brought her up to speed.
'That's Harry,' I grunted, pointing behind me. 'I'll take him back now.'
Her expression said 'there is a weird fucking animal in my garden and I don't know what it is and I don't know why it's there and I can't imagine where it's come from and now a strange child has rung the doorbell and what the hell kind of Saturday is this?'.
Briefly pausing to say hello to Harry, I ring the doorbell and a woman answers the door with an expression I had never previously seen on anybody's face but which I could nonetheless immediately parse.
It's maybe 5 minutes past our school when I see Harry. You will remember Harry. He's the llama who escapes. He had escaped. I spot him in the front garden of a nice detached house, insouciantly munching on a clothes line. And with an urgency appropriate to sighting an illicit camelid, I alight.
And then continued on a loop around the middle class housing estate. (I didn't live there. I lived a mile and a half walk further away. We had no bus route. We had nothing in our neighbourhood. We didn't even have a bench. It was a suburban wasteland of matchless tedium.) Anyway, the bus!
It was a Saturday, circa 1992, & I had been into town to do what I did every Saturday in 1992, which was: walk round Our Price, HMV, Woolworths, the Body Shop and Athena without ever buying anything, then get a 20p mix from the sweet shop and catch the bus home. The bus home went past my school.
Often, these panicking neighbours would phone the police. I don't know which emergency service is best suited to the remediation of rogue rhea but I don't know that it's *not* the police, so no judgement here. Other times the neighbours would not know who to call at all. Which brings me to my crux.
So when escapes happened, neighbours would panic. They would find, for example, six or seven peacocks on their driveway, or a medium sized pig by the door, & not know what to do. Would you know what to do? It's 10pm. Do you know where your children are? Do you know why there's a rhea in your porch?
So anyway yes, urban comprehensive school: Victorian terraces hard to one side, middle class housing estate to the other, the frequent egress of multiple beasts, & yet somehow lots of locals had no idea at all there was a strange repository of livestock on their doorstep.
