Dispatches From a Dilettante by Paul Rowson Page B

had individually thanked Annie for her ‘hospitality’.
    One of the worst cars I ever owned was a clapped out Alfa Romeo and this coincided with the period I worked at Ingmanthorpe Hall. It was jinxed in every respect and constantly breaking down. The latest failure to deliver me to my destination had necessitated another visit to the garage where a careless mechanic had turned his blow torch onto the rear wing and burnt the paint off. As they had no match for the specialist Alfa Romeo yellow, they re-sprayed the area with the closest approximate hue that they had in stock. When I collected the car it looked as though someone had vomited on the rear wing and I decided there and then to sell it. All I needed was to identify a buyer as shallow and impressionable as I had been at the time of purchase and that person turned out to be a social worker visiting Ingmanthorpe Hall for a case conference.
    These monthly conferences were to assess progress of individual boys after their arrival and were taken very seriously, mainly because it gave the professional attendees (teachers, psychologists, social workers) a chance to practice professional jargon. At any given conference at least one professional contributor was more disturbed that the boy whose progress we were supposedly scrutinising. They seemed to go on forever and always over ran. This I soon realised was because the attendees, during the course of the conference and cocooned in a stress free environment discussing the theoretical progressive development of damaged young boys, were relieved of the more challenging task of actually interacting with them to effect that development.
    Even though the potential buyer of my car was a social worker and, unusually for his profession an aggressive type, I got over my personal dislike to start the selling operation. I waxed lyrical about the history of the marque, the aero dynamics of the Italian design and the high performance. In reality I had only been able to drive to school for the last five days because we lived on a hill and I could bump start it. He announced that he would come round to our house at the weekend with his wife to fully inspect the car and make a decision.
    Within seconds of seeing the vehicle his wife accurately observed that it would be an impractical purchase that would cost them a fortune to run. Despite the offer of fresh coffee and a newspaper in order to let her husband look at the engine (deeply and embarrassingly patronising and a pathetic example of gender stereotyping but I was desperate to sell), she insisted on staying with him and trying to dissuade him from completing the transaction. Nevertheless I could sense the ‘Alfa Romeo’ name was something that he clearly thought had kudos and when he made me a low cash offer I grabbed the money and waived them goodbye as they bump started their own personal drive towards unhappiness.
    As a firm believer in Karma I should have expected the retribution that was shortly to come my way. The great lawned area in front of Ingmanthorpe Hall had once been a cricket pitch and still served as one once every year, when the school staff took on a team of social workers. It was quite a formal and competitive game mainly because the setting demanded it. The original scoreboard was still in existence as were the rollers and even the wooden pavilion. Add to this the fact that there was no shortage of labour to keep score, prepare sandwiches and roll the wicket between innings, and to the casual observer it would appear that a proper cricket match was in progress. Sadly the standard of the players on both sides was erratic at best, and personal frustrations often led to tensions in a game that was always taken a little too seriously. There is something vaguely disturbing about middle aged men in denial about the loss of sporting abilities they probably never possessed in the first place, when in their so called ‘prime’.
    The social workers batted first and were