Last Thursday I was fortunate enough to have a front row seat at the opening night of this year’s school musical – Shrek. I hope that many of you reading this have also had the opportunity to witness this joyous spectacle, but if not, might I encourage you to reflect back to your own time in school and consider your own first foray onto the stage or for that matter, any performance in front of your friends and teachers.

Memories are curious things. Technically, all we sense and all we experience ought to be memorable. However, necessarily, the vast majority of life trickles by without us seemingly hitting the record button. What I am confident of though, is that all those involved in this year’s musical will remember their involvement many years from now. That shared nervousness at the start; the laughter and applause from the audience; the music; the songs, the exuberance and elation at the final curtain.

School life is founded on these sorts of memories. Thinking back, I know that I took GCSEs in History and French but I struggle to recall much of the many hours sat in class dissecting medieval practices in crime and punishment or listening to audio recordings of Jean-Claude’s holiday in La Rochelle. I can however, clearly visualise catching the ball from kick-off and scoring in our rugby house cup final; playing Acker Bilk’s Stranger on the Shore on my clarinet in front of the whole school; racing around the stage dressed as one of the Men in Black with an out-sized water pistol during our final ‘takeover’ assembly. Thirty or forty years on, it is strange how vividly I can recall these relatively inconsequential moments. There is something about emotion which seems to galvanise certain memories and give them permanence. Why do our brains do this? Are these memories somehow especially important to us? The 2015 animated film, Inside Out charts the personified emotions of an 11 year old girl as she moves to a new city, far away from the familiarity of her childhood home. Much is made of the idea of ‘core memories’ and the way in which our identity is interwoven with them. These core memories link up with strong emotions – joy, sadness, fear, anger and disgust. The evolutionary explanation for this is that this behaviour is rooted in survival and it helps us to make sense of the world around us. Importantly, it is not the event which carries the value but the range and types of emotion experienced at the time.

I cannot tell you where the actors, singers and dancers of Shrek will be in five, ten, twenty or fifty years time or what they will be doing. But I can say with confidence, that those of us in the audience were watching memories being made that will resurface again and again for all of them, in the years to come.

Colin Pearson, Deputy Head Academic