Whenever the school is opened to visitors we councillors have to borrow a scale model of the campus from the Estate Office and move it gingerly up the stairs to the auditorium for people to pore over. The model is largely accurate, but the buildings of the past five or six years are all missing, marked only by labels – Science Research Block, New Library Block, New Auditorium – which we fill in with descriptions, putting the future into the past. The shorter, more merciful visits are those when we tour the school with this model, always beginning and ending with the Old Tower – ten minutes of concise history, and the programme moves on.

The alternative is to actually tour the school. The campus is large, so large that after four decades of expansion the school is still just a white complex in a mostly green space, and I have no way of putting this across to guests. Not that I need to, but even twelve decades of history cannot fill the long walks from one point to another.

Neurons in the brain work only insofar as they are connected, and trains move only when the tracks are laid down. (Well they could move if the tracks aren't laid down, but it'd be detrimental for the train to say the least.) Wherever people settle and concentrate enough of their efforts the anatomy of paths becomes more important than the pure geometry of distances.

Well, here we are. I can come to this blog a reader, click on my automatically signed-in account name and add on to it. (It probably says something about my net literacy to notice such things, come think of it...) Within human scales distance takes on enough definitions and methods to mean quite little. In this light there is probably something to be said about the sobering effect of looking at clear night skies, the drawing of real, very long straight lines of light from some star to our eyes.

This is fine!

Am I supposed to open the blog or something?

(And yes classichaircuts sounds nice!)

So we've come up with this, a respectably named blog that will hopefully be respectably filled with content.

this is the first post. hello wilson!