Good morning, everyone.

First, an apology. It occurred to me while shaving this morning that I had made reference to 'the surgical details relating to the extraction of the contents of Teddy's stomach'. I then realised with horror that the parents of anyone who happened to be called Teddy must have had a very sleepless night, imagining what on earth went on in the lodges at Summer Fields! Lest any of you should be anxious, may I hasten to assure you that he wasn't a 'real' Teddy, just a teddy teddy.

Sleepless nights brings me to examinitis. You might imagine that some of our residents had cried themselves to sleep with anxiety and spent the night knocking on our bedroom door. Not so. All appeared to have slept particularly well, without let or hindrance, and all jettisoned themselves with alacrity very early this morning, in order to get a bit of last-minute cramming in! (Incidentally, the only late-night visitor Mrs C and I have ever had in exam time was a member of Mayfield, who had convinced himself that he was going to fail CE, and decided that he would seek solace from the lodgemeister and his wife at 3am! Of course he passed well, and went on to get a good degree in theology from Oxford! Tempting though it is to try and get 'God knows how' into this little anecdote, I will resist it - especially as I hear that theology has little to do with God these days.)

To matters chocolatey. The megabar was broken up yesterday, by Tom Cheater, at our request. It was chunkified and placed into a very large mixing bowl, and, after a short speech from me about its provenance, how it was to be consumed, and how, if anyone was seen feeding the dog they would be subjected to teddy-like measures (no, not really), those wishing to engage in such enriching, exam-calming pleasures were able to take a chunk from the bowl that I was proferring. Mrs C, in her desire to enjoy an uninterrupted night, suggested that two chunks was enough and that the rest would keep for the future. I almost got away with dipping my hand into the trough four times, but such was the sybiline stare at the fourth that I thought that enough was probably enough unless it was I who was to be the recipient of the unaforementioned surgical details.

Finally, just in case any of you should be concerned about your offsprings' performances in exams, take heart from Winston Churchill, whose Latin paper, you will recall, when completed bore no uncertain resemblance to something from the studios of Damien Hirst. Such concealed excellence enabled the authorities at Harrow to consider him sufficiently erudite to enter Harrow.

Where there's life, there's hope.