St Margaret’s School (school motto Fides in mercato)
Nature Club
By E Truss (Senior Prefect)
Gosh! Hello everyone! I’d just like to say how thrilled I am to have been put in charge of the school wildlife garden! It’s a great responsibility and I shall do my very best to make sure that the running of the garden is put on a sound business footing and does its bit to support the fantastic efforts of our wonderful bursar, Mr Osborne, to sort out the school finances.
Photo: The Guardian
The first thing to say is that we definitely won’t be carrying out the silly ideas suggested by Moonbat of Grauniad House to ‘re-wild’ the school grounds!!! Can you imagine what a mess it would be if we just let weeds grow all over the cricket pitch? Honestly! You’d think that now he’s in the sixth form, Moonbat would grow up a bit but he just insists on continually criticizing and making ridiculous suggestions. No wonder he was never made a prefect!!!
We have made some exciting but sensible plans for the wildlife garden and I can’t wait to put them into action! Mr Monsanto from the chemistry department has kindly agreed to mix up some chemicals for us to bring the weeds under control and we are hoping to produce a bumper crop of sweet-corn using some special seeds Mr Monsanto has provided!!! Some of the nature club members have complained that this will mean that skylarks will no longer be able to nest in the garden but I would like to point out that there are always winners and losers in nature and that the rats are thriving around the school bins so, overall, the school’s wildlife is doing very well.
![Bursar Osborne Photo: M. Holland [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0), CC-BY-SA-2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5) or CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons](https://markavery.info/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/400px-George_Osborne_0437.jpg)
Photo: M. Holland via wikimedia commons
On that subject, I should mention that I have made some changes to the constitution of the Nature Club. Two of the school’s most important benefactors, Lord Tweedie of Moor and Sir Jerry Bilt-Housing, have given a generous contribution toward the running of the club and have asked to approve the membership of the club’s committee
which, of course, I am very happy to agree to!!! I have also changed the remit of the committee which, from now on, will be to thoroughly approve the decisions made by Mr Cameron and Mr Osborne and I am thrilled to tell you that the Head and the governors have said they are very happy indeed with this decision!
The committee will not now be making any response to the essay that the bird-watching section of the club wrote about the use of lead bullets by the school cadet force. The essay has been filed for safe keeping beneath a large pile of old rugger boots, broken desks and disused gym equipment somewhere in the school basements. I should just add that Mr Barking, the Game Master, has assured us that in any case lead is a completely natural material and we shouldn’t worry about it at all.
Happy nature spotting!!!!
[registration_form]
Dear MsTrust,
Now that you’re in charge, could you ask the groundsmen to stop moving the goalposts, it’s making a real mess of the school field and potentially undermining it altogether.
Will you be able to do anything to improve the morale of the Nature Club Officers. Apparently, some big boys keep coming up, ruining all their work, taking their pocket money, and running away.
I would hope you’d learn a lot from your role and help benefit the whole school to benefit from its nature area while it still can, although the governors never seem to be very supportive.
Good luck. We’ll all need it.
P. S.
http://rantsforchange.com/2016/02/09/alex-white/
Surely you remember Elizabeth’s predecessor in the Nature Club, Owen Paterson, showed it was badgers that had moved the goal posts.
Oh and forgot to mention I have moved the bird feeders right out in the open so the lousy Sparrowhawk can take as many Blue Tits as it wants. [until nice Mr Stewart from DEFRA can change the law and we can blow that Sparrowhawk away! Well if he can’t change the law we will do it any way! Hee, Hee]
Sad that this site has become a Labour stronghold that thinks they are so great.
For information I would vote for any party that seemed to have the best all round offer at that time.
Whoever thinks that Labour was so fantastic for illegal persecution of wildlife during all that time in office because they could have put things in place to certainly stop lots of it.
Whoever thinks that lots of Labourites do not go shooting Grouse etc.
Grow up and take a balanced view.
Correct me should I be mistaken, but is this not a dig at the current government? I don’t doubt that, were the same issues to prevail under a red government, this sort of thing would be aimed at them too!
Carl – if onlyI had the chance to prove that! One day…but maybe not soon.
Also, before you go, I need the names of all of you who are going to join me on our jolly day out on the moors when we will be blasting away at those nasty, lice ridden mountain hares. Now that will be a fun day out!
Dear Liz,
Your nature club is a bit crap. I’m off to play ‘demoralised doctors and nurses’ while Mr. Hunt is at dance classes. See ya!!
P.s. Bonner, my local fox, ate my ‘Why Pork and Cheese Aren’t Everything’ essay. Apols.
Used to have respect for you Mark as a conservationist but now you have gone for your own gain. Bad arguments and I don’t see you actually doing any conservation.
Jack – nice to see you resurrected after over 20 years but being snide under an assumed name is unworthy of most people.
Dear Liz
I cried all evening after reading your report! (with laughter behind your back to avoid the real tears as we watch the demise of our beloved nature club)
I have felt moved to share your report with other nature club members and possible members who are now reviewing their club affiliations in light of your unenlightening update.
Hang on a minute – I thought the school motto was “#haveyouseenhenry”?
May I congratulate Miss Truss on her appointment and take this opportunity to give an update on some of the exciting landscaping plans we have for the school.
May I also say how incredibly grateful we all are to the school bird club and the school natural history society for all the incredibly valuable work they do and the contribution they make to the life of the school, without which we wouldn’t have the incredibly important job of completely ignoring their views.
As you all know we have had to make some difficult decisions in the last few years. We recently had to convene the school’s emergency committee to respond to the imminent threat of ash dieback and had to take the incredibly difficult decision to fell all the ash trees in the school grounds immediately. I know some of you were concerned this was an overreaction but we can’t be too careful in these days of health and safety (I know!) and so we remain convinced it was the right thing to do, even though there hadn’t at that point been any disease reported anywhere near the school and even if there had been the effects were highly uncertain.
I should also stress that all the evidence points to this being a natural wind borne outbreak and the cheap saplings I bought back from a nursery in Holland a few years ago to plant near the school pond were nothing to do with it.
Let me also make it clear we are looking very seriously at options to replace our sadly lost ash trees as a matter of urgency, of which more in a moment.
Next I should turn to another point which I know has generated a lot of discussion, our proposal for a new school bypass and the effect this will have on the small area of ancient woodland in the school grounds. Now I know some of you are very concerned about this. However it is important to stress that these sort of infrastructure projects are vitally important to the future of the school and to creating jobs in the local economy. Furthermore, in order to meet the latest emissions regulations coming out of Europe (I know!) it is vitally important that when dropping off children at the school in their cars that parents can maintain a constant speed of at least 40mph and engine revs of at least 1,750 rpm for as long as possible in order to regenerate their diesel particulate filters.
Furthermore the recent bad weather has prompted us again to review the safety of all the trees in our grounds. We simply can’t have a repeat of the unfortunate incident during the October 1987 storm where our late and much missed school caretaker Mr. Ridley had a large pine tree fall on his brand new Vauxhall Cavalier while he was away on a conference in Germany! In particular the ancient pollard hornbeams on the school drive, having survived the storms of 1987, 1990, 1991, 1997, 2000, 2002, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2014 and 2015 completely intact must now be considered highly dangerous and vulnerable and may, sadly, have to be removed and replaced.
To that end I’m delighted to confirm that we shall shortly be awarding a contract to replant many of the trees in the grounds with over a million saplings imported from across Europe and the Far East sourced through our excellent Consultant Horticulturalist Mr Blight. This will more than offset any small impact on the school’s woodland of our plans to completely remove it.
I’m also pleased to confirm that we have recently renewed our contract with our neighbouring farmer Mr Scrumpy to trim our hedges for us again for the coming season. Mr S is quite a character as you know and is nothing if not thorough in his application of the mechanical flail! I’m sure you’ll appreciate that any more than a year’s growth in a hedge has no place in a modern dynamic school such as hours and a hawthorn hedge is more than capable of handling a bit of rough treatment now and then!
Finally, let me be clear that we have no plans to renegotiate the school’s environmental objectives – we will simply continue to ignore them. I can reassure all of you that we will continue to but the needs of the school first – after all, we’re all in this together – except the trees in the ancient wood which are all in the way!
Yours, ever so nicely, & c & c