Schools are like women: they are fickle; they will make you wait and wait; they will sleep with all of your friends starting the fucking second you leave town to go to Boise on business for three days, the slag. ("Slag" is British for "Slut" and "Hag" combined, except when followed by a prepositional phrase. I'm assuming. I've never actually heard that term used by anyone British, but you read a few pamphlets and watch a few episodes of MI-5 and you're willing to say anything that smacks of United Kingdomness, even if it has no basis in their actual linguistic practices. It's jimmy-sine gobsquattle, what what!)
So: Schools. I'm looking at some. They seem, without exception, fabulous. Each of them is housed in their own historical manses and abbeys and they each have their own wood, which is Brit for "forest." So, to repeat, each school in Great Britain comes with its' own forest. Many of the academies that I've been googling have their own Ents,who operate the canteens during 8th-year Girls' Rugby home games. Also these schools have a pool, as a matter of course. Some of the less-fortunate village elementary schools have to share the heated outdoor swimming pool with the village darts club, but each school I've looked at so far has listed a pool amongst its' facilities, much the same way one of ours might enthusiastically list girls-and-boys toilets. Their libraries are imperial, and if I were casting someone to stand in one of these libraries for, say, a fifteen-second public service segment on the telly, I would cast no none less than Dame Dench to stand there. I might have her read something aloud for that fifteen seconds, and no matter what outmoded reference book about mid-nineteenth century tulip bulb technology she'd be reading aloud and no matter what reform school's holding cell/cafeteria she were standing in, it would be classy beyond any American measure. The reform school libraries here have armchairs. Because when you are reading, you need armchairs. The Brits know this, and provide.
Also their applications are relatively benign, with simple questions and easily-translatable initialised abbreviations and forward-thinking lines to fill out that actually match the questions... Getting to said applications is proving to be not as civilised. There are a great many cross-referencing web pages and almost inaccessible links that lead to completely inaccessible other links, as is only proper on any government-run website. I got on a page that told me to begin an application by putting in a birthday (not necessarily my child's) which then told me I had to log in, so I logged in and it told me in order to create a log-innable account I had to begin an application. All of that brings about a warm glow, much like the glow of an abuse victim who's found that new, special, abusive someone. Oh, you think. Look, they wrote some enraging code right into the program so that I could spend hours trying to trick the website into letting its' guard down and taking me to one of its' mysterious links. How sweet! Those British people are so polite they thought of all the aggravations of home. I didn't even have to ask.
And so these schools are like women. No, wait- I mean men. Boys. They are like boys at camp on Sadie Hawkins day, before the dance, when it was the girls' humiliating job to find dates by outrunning a boy- at first it's the Populars, those who's hair has been bleached in the sun by all the volleyball playing and joshing around with other boys in a completely non-sexual way, then it's the future Counsellors, made so by their reflexive naming of plants they pass during their walks to the Mess, then someone's brother, then the quiet freaky guys who only burn and peel and refuse to talk to anyone- and then tackling him like he's in the midst of stealing Gemmy's antique brooch and they the only one who can stop him. The schools dodge and weave and sometimes let you get close, but not get them. The bastards.
Who made that up, anyway? Who thought it would be good fun for us to desperately sprint around the football field until someone took pity on you and let you get their sleeve? I don't know who did, but I know this: it wasn't the British. Or if it was, they would have the decency to hide the smirking behind a book in one of their red-velvet and stained-glass libraries.
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