Team Newton was in full swing tonight, what with shoe-cleaning, custard creams, hot chocolate being served, fruit and Cadbury's Celebrations for those whose footwear warranted such reward! All accompanied, of course, by the music of the 80s blasting through the mighty (well, not really that mighty, but they do have a good bass on them) speakers of the Clubhouse.

Many congratulations, by the way, to our new Follower, who's managed to weave her/his way through the maze of this blog's idiosyncrasies so that s/he can join the swelling band who can comment on anything that might arise in my nightly ramblings.

Did you know that three of my former pupils are now my colleagues? Mr Edwards, who was my tutee in the 80s, Mr Corry, who was in my form when I was teaching at Papplewick, and whose youthful features feature in a team photo, also from the 80s, have often been used to raise the odd smile. And now Mr Hawkins, our 'super-gapper' (he's a graduate, you see, so he's not just a gapper) has joined us, and he was a member of my 3C here in the 90s.

I received another 'LOL' from the HM in an e-mailed response this morning: he was(quite rightly) getting annoyed with us for taking mugs of coffee into form rooms. I sent a response, saying that yes, there was indeed a mug in my room, but it was nothing to do with me. I labelled the message 'No mug', which, as I say, resulted in 'LOL. D' (For the unitiatiated, and those not up to speed with text-speak, LOL stands for 'laughing out loud'.) (Btw means 'by the way' and atm means 'at the moment'. There are others, like ROFL, which means 'rolling on floor laughing', and then they get rather rude, so I'll stop there.)

Some Followers have been enquiring about Newton's other channel, namely its Twitter account. It's very simple: just log on to www.twitter.com/newtoniannews and there you are. Or rather, there it is. If you're feeling very techno, you could add it to your RSS feeds and then you'll automatically receive any updates. Please don't imagine, as one Follower did last term, that no tweets means that the parrot has fallen off its perch; it just means that either that I haven't had anything of note to say, or I've forgotten that I have a Twitter account.

It does occur that parrots seem to be featuring in this blog rather regularly: I wonder if there's anything significant about that. I know another stupid joke about parrots: man walks into pet shop to buy a pair of parrots. (Is that the right collective noun?) He sees one pair and doesn't really like them, but then spies two more much higher up. 'Can I buy those?' he asks. 'Well, yes, but they're on higher perches'.

ROFL. (Having fallen off perch.)

Goodnight.