Baker’s Beacon Blog – Week 28

Dear Parents,

What a party that was last week!  An enthusiastic, playful and often raucous Beacon parent crowd in great spirits as we raised over £17k for our charities and the Cooking and Nutrition Room.  Thank you for your generosity and excellent company – here’s to next year.

Certainly less raucous but lots of enthusiasm and praise from all boys, parents, governors and visitors who attended this week’s truly outstanding Art Exhibition.  Always keen to welcome the wider community to our fine School, two of our visitors came from Mulberry Court, a care home in Chalfont St Peter.  Betty, aged 91, was full of awe and wonder at the boys’ work and said that it was way better than anything schoolchildren could have produced in the pre-war era. She said the exhibition, ‘Sums up what makes Britain great!’ – what lovely feedback.

With fitness preparations well underway for our epic Beacon to Paris Bike Ride next month and my ever eagerness to try new things, I accepted an invitation to join a ‘four’ for Padel at Chesham 1879 Tennis Club last night.  I knew little about this (clearly growing) sport until last night but what a great game, particularly for the older gentleman possibly past his prime when it comes to racquet sports.  A softer ball, smaller court and padded racquet make for a less power focused game and certainly a lot less running.  The aim is not so much on raw power, more on strategic placing of the ball yet this is tiring in itself as I always feel with tennis that the urge to resist simply hitting it back to the opponent (rather than open space) is such a difficult one to overcome.  My pair lost the first set 6-0 – not a great start and I was getting my body into all sorts of contortions trying to get set to play once the ball had bounced off the wall, but second set, I was getting better (and more than a little carried by my playing partner) and we levelled by securing the set 6-4.   Third set wasn’t going too well and as I was running out of puff, we found ourselves 3-0 down, until fortunately our hour booking was up and in rather unceremonious style, the floodlights suddenly switched off and we were left to find our way back to our cars with our phone torches.  A great sport and workout and as it turned out, perfect inspiration when wondering what I would write about in the blog this week…

Have a good Bank Holiday weekend,

Nick Baker

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