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.