and while i'm on pledges, i've decided that if i'm going to reform myself i will do well to have a personal pledge or promise to try to hold to each day. and i think that pledge has already been written for me - the rafflesian principle of honour. yes i know, it sounded rather priggish in school, DON'T jump on me. because when i was looking at the wording of the pledge a few days ago i thought how remarkably appropriate it was for me at this stage in my life. here it is, for those who do not know it:

"In intellectual pursuit, I shall reflect discipline and passion for learning and in personal conduct, I shall live in integrity and regard individuals, groups and the community with kindness and respect, and in so doing, uphold the Rafflesian Principle of Honour."

as with the national pledge, as with all rituals, we stop thinking about the words after a while, but in revisiting it it seems to me really to feel right. the side-by-side development of the intellectual and the personal (i think that was my first encounter with the word intellectual. i was 10.) and the keywords of passion and discipline, kindness and respect, individuals and the community, seem so exactly and so much of what i have and had been, and want to stay and learn once again to be, that there's nearly nothing i want to rephrase in that.**

and i am especially gratified that they wrote "passion" into the pledge. people who write school visions usually put in hardwork and perseverance and rubbish like that (look, i was from a chinese primary school, i know. my school motto included the lines qin mian shi zhong i.e. earnest and diligent from start to end - is it any wonder i hated primary school life?) which other school puts down "passion" as its guiding academic principle? marvellous.

and i don't know exactly that i feel like a wahoo, my intense feelings about uva are personal rather than institutional, and it's too soon to say i belong here, although already i fit in here more than i ever did in virginia, but i feel like a rafflesian all the time, so i think it is entirely fitting that i'm using a guideline drafted for ri. and i do identify with ri as well as rgs, and probably much more with ri-rj than with rgs, because rgs was not anywhere as traditional as ri was. i grew up playing in grange road campus, i went along to support every ri rugby match and miltary band competition. years before i went to rgs i knew ri and loved her. and there was never any doubt even when i was in primary school that i wanted to go to rgs (well, since i wasn't a boy, it was the next best thing.) and at rgs i was happy beyond imagining - i loved her too, it was the dream escape from the conservative, unimaginative and hopelessly dull primary school i was at, and it gave me a new worldview, and a fine education, and laughter and passion and confidence, and it was there i made my closest friends, with all of whom, today, i can still laugh as if it were that first wondrous year at a new school. and then when half my closest friends decided to go off to hwachong i was dreadfully sorry, but i never thought there was anywhere else in the world i could be, wanted to be than at rj. and there too, more fully than before, there was the joy of being in my proper place - i don't think i was ever so happy then when i was in jc - there were the old friends who had come up with me from secondary school, and new friends who were just as vivacious and silly and witty and anarchic and intelligent and who loved me back, and new subjects and brilliant teachers and ecas and founts of shared words and laughter and parties and class spirit and a sense of being alive and young and having all the world before one. oh dear! i'm actually getting so carried away i'm crying a little. oh my dears i do miss every single one of you and i wish i were seventeen again we were still climbing over school walls in impossibly short skirts and writing wildly inane and self-referential dorinda emails and being caught up again with living and laughing and learning. the right school, at the right time, has always made all the difference. right. i'll just make the traditional closing salute to the school and go away, shall i? auspicium melioris aevi, she says, blowing her nose.

** i have to say though, it has the most AGGRAVATING syntax of any pledge i've ever seen, but i can't really think how to repunctuate it without adding in so many puncutaton marks as to make it completely unwieldy.

***was telling dan donoghue that i have loved the word unwieldy ever since i saw milton use it in paradise lost to refer to an elephant.