The Twelfth Night Game

Dear Diary,

As I told you yesterday, I got picked, at random, to be Lady of Misrule for today. Since I last wrote I looked up the meaning of the Lord of Misrule, here is the history:

The Lord of Misrule, known in Scotland as the Abbot of Unreason and in France as the Prince des Sots, was an officer appointed by lot at Christmas to preside over the Feast of Fools. The Lord of Misrule was generally a peasant or sub-deacon appointed to be in charge of Christmas revelries, which often included drunkenness and wild partying, in the pagan tradition of Saturnalia. The Church held a similar festival involving a Boy Bishop. The celebration of the Feast of Fools was outlawed by the Council of Basel that sat from 1431, but it survived to be put down again by the Catholic Queen Mary I in England in 1555.

Yesterday, I declared a mufti day for today; with an exception... the teachers had to wear our school uniform; which was very funny... though I’m not sure the male teachers appreciated it so much...

Then today, I got in really early to make arrangements for today. The first thing I made sure of was that all geography lessons were canceled and that instead we had Westfield trips. I then decided that we should all do something different in art. Remembering a scene in The Princess Diary’s 1 I thought I would set up the Astroturf with lots of canvases, which all had several paint filled balloons tacked on to them, which we had to hit with darts so they would explode and make a painting. This meant that hockey lessons would also have to be spent doing art as the Astro was being used. I also made food tech lessons a free for all.

Everything was going to plan, and everyone was having fun, when it started to snow. At first I thought this would make things even more fun; and for a while it did. Until, at around 2, the snow turned to hail, and the ground began to ice over, about twenty minuets after the ground turned to ice I got a call from the group of people who were meant to be at Westfield; telling me they were in Harlesden, their teacher had lead them onto the wrong bus, and they were stuck as the roads were now to dangerous to drive on.

Then someone forgot about their cake in the oven in food tech and the fire alarm went off; everyone had to evacuate to the hockey pitch, and in all the commotion a girl in the year above me slipped on the ice and unfortunately landed on the bag of darts, lucky there was only one dart in it and that just stuck on to her shoe so she wasn’t too hurt, but she did hit the ground rather hard and since the nurse was doing her first aid, it was hard to tell if she was really okay, also the fire brigade arrived as they didn’t know if that the fire alarm was only set off by the burnt cake. When they arrived they were extremely confused; the school was a tip, and after less than 2 days of school!

While the firemen were at school, the group that was stuck in Harlesden called, they were coming back, as the roads had been gritted.

In the end, lucky everything turned out OK. Just about. But it was really fun before everything went wrong, though I’m pretty sure they are going to think twice about doing this next year, or at the very least there will be a lot more supervision. But today was definitely a day nobody’s going to forget anytime soon!

Love,
Julie James