As the train comes crawling into the station
Next stop, the holidays. It’s now February and we’re still at school because Chinese New Year is probably the latest it’s ever been. Under normal circumstances, school would’ve finished a week or two ago. Thus, this term has been over five months long (with all the breaks at the start of term apart from a couple of extra days for Christmas and New Year). Next term will feel very short because we’ll have the individual orals and the mocks in March, a normalish sort of April, and then exams across May and June. A possible consequence of a short second term was its extension into July, but that threat seems to have vanished. Such a proposal seems to have been based on the notion that… I don’t know. Has the length of the year changed? No. Would the end of term at the end of June mean that we’d had less time at school? No. I can only assume that because of the rigid thinking which affects the Empire, the aims of the first and second terms are restricted to those terms and their b