Versa: Issue Ten
Versa is a biannual publication and will be published every autumn and spring term. Versa has replaced the former magazine, OA Bulletin and will offer a comprehensive insight into the many facets of alumni life.
Versa is a biannual publication and will be published every autumn and spring term. Versa has replaced the former magazine, OA Bulletin and will offer a comprehensive insight into the many facets of alumni life.
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10<br />
OA News<br />
11<br />
DRILLS<br />
at Sandhurst<br />
We would like to congratulate Felix Turk (OA 2014),<br />
for passing his drill test at the Royal Military<br />
Academy Sandhurst in February 2022. Having<br />
spent the previous five weeks training in the basics of weapon<br />
handling, navigation, and battlefield casualty drills, Felix<br />
successfully passed the test and was allowed a weekend off for<br />
the first time since the course began. Although Felix recently<br />
changed career paths and is relatively new to the course, the<br />
drill test is an important milestone in any Officer Cadet’s<br />
journey to becoming an Officer in the British Army.<br />
Felix said “Joining the army and going to Sandhurst has<br />
always been something I have wanted to achieve. It marks<br />
the biggest challenge I have ever taken on but equally that is<br />
what has drawn me to the military. I look forward to the next<br />
few weeks and beyond!”<br />
Felix is now 16 weeks into his training and plans to join the<br />
infantry and commission in December. Best of luck Felix!<br />
SK COACHING<br />
SK Coaching is a remote coaching service that<br />
focusses on improving mental and physical health<br />
through diet and exercise, specialising in body<br />
transformations. Having been a personal trainer for<br />
over a decade, Saul Katz (OA 2008) moved most of his<br />
coaching service online when realising that his clients<br />
were not struggling with information or knowledge but<br />
accountability in between sessions.<br />
Despite having clients all over the world, most of the<br />
people Saul works with are OAs and he is currently<br />
offering a promotion for alumni of the School. The offer<br />
is for a FREE private training day including lunch and a<br />
nutrition session at a studio in North London.<br />
If you would like to sign up or find out more<br />
about this exclusive offer, please contact Saul on<br />
saul@saulkatzcoaching.co.uk or check out<br />
saulkatzcoaching.co.uk.<br />
RIGHT, FELIX TURK (OA 2014)<br />
SAUL KATZ (OA 2008)<br />
THIN AIR<br />
John Mole’s new poetry collection tackles our troubled times<br />
Dealing with the changes<br />
to all our lives caused by<br />
the pandemic has been<br />
challenging, and people have found<br />
different ways of coping. John<br />
Mole, former Head of English at St<br />
Albans School and Cholmondeley<br />
Prize winner, has inevitably<br />
been ‘hoping that words/may do<br />
the trick’ (‘The Trick’). Writing<br />
throughout the two lockdowns<br />
and the brief intervening freedom<br />
between March 2020 and February<br />
2021, Mole published a number<br />
of poems on Instagram and on<br />
Plague20journal.com. Now these<br />
poems, full of observations,<br />
meditations and reminiscences,<br />
have been collected and published<br />
by the Shoestring Press in Thin Air.<br />
Thin Air is a neat little volume of neat little poems. Each<br />
poem is just a page, usually eight largely unrhymed couplets,<br />
but within their sparse colloquial form, they offer anecdotes,<br />
thoughts and memories, charting how we have negotiated<br />
the changing social landscape. A number of poems note<br />
the paradox of courtesies which have developed, where it is<br />
a sign of care to avoid people, where we keep distance ‘for<br />
health and safety’s sake’ (‘Distancing’), an idea developed<br />
further in ‘Out Walking’:<br />
‘See me perfect my neighbourly<br />
swerve and dip<br />
away from the pavement<br />
or my deft parabola<br />
when exercising in the park’.<br />
By Noel Cassidy, English Department, St Albans School<br />
Out Walking<br />
A writer is always attuned to the shifts and vagaries of<br />
language; it is not surprising that the collection plays with<br />
the new Covid language. Even titles such as ‘Distancing’,<br />
‘Bubbles’, ‘Contactless’, ‘Elbows’, ‘Briefing’, ‘Granular’<br />
and ‘Measures’ employ a vocabulary which has acquired<br />
particular connotations over the last two years. There<br />
is whimsical humour here, as Mole<br />
compares the ‘soapy bubbles’ of Millais’<br />
painting with the pandemic’s ‘bubble<br />
permitted/by decree’, while accidental<br />
elbow-bumping in an awkward dance<br />
has changed from ‘the bump to be<br />
avoided’ to ‘the safest way/to greet<br />
a friend’. ‘Contactless’ begins with a<br />
playful observation about card payments<br />
and social interactions, but ends more<br />
seriously, coming to ground with the<br />
nature of restrictions which weigh<br />
‘authority/against our loss.’<br />
Despite the humour and the wordplay<br />
in this collection, that seriousness<br />
underpins it. ‘Measures’ are not the<br />
paces of walking or the beats of rhythm,<br />
but ‘policy/restrictively laid down’. ‘As If ’ considers the<br />
absence of choice created by those measures, and ‘Our<br />
Ghosts’ gently acknowledges those loved ones no longer<br />
with us who still ‘hauntingly’ attend family events that are<br />
‘grateful for their blessing’. It is those threads of humanity,<br />
like the skirting of people on pavements ‘always with a smile’<br />
(‘Out Walking’) which still offer solace.<br />
JOHN MOLE, FORMER STAFF<br />
Thin Air is published by Shoestring Press at £10 and is<br />
available from Books on the Hill in St Albans and from the<br />
publisher now.