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Principal's Blog

Radnor House parents receive a Weekly Bulletin of news information, highlights of achievements and details of forthcoming events, as well as additional communications from other departments and individuals as necessary.

Our Principal, Darryl Wideman, also writes a regular blog to share his thoughts about education and the world with a wider audience, which you can read below.

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  • We're the Sweeney, Son, and We Haven't Had Any Dinner

    The death of Dennis Waterman seems the perfect excuse to use a line from what I still regard as the best cop show ever made as the title for a blog.  My brother and I used to beg our parents to be allowed to stay up to watch Waterman and John Thaw in ‘The Sweeney’, with Thaw’s...
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  • In Flanders Fields

      Battlefields Tour – Sunday 3rd April If you want to read a proper trilogy about the First World War, I can wholeheartedly recommend the books of Pat Barker – Regeneration, The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road – which are very well researched and engagingly written...
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  • We Will Remember Them

      Battlefields Tour – Saturday 2nd April 2022 After writing 1,200 words last week about the journey to get to France for our trip to the Battlefields of the First World War, I can now tell you what happened when we finally got there.  In the thirty years since I first visited t...
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  • It Is Better to Travel Hopefully than to Arrive

    This phrase can apparently be attributed to the Scottish novelist Robert Louis Stevenson, with the idea that your focus should not just be your end point, but you should also enjoy the way you get there.  Stevenson died aged just forty-four in Samoa.  He looks to have crammed many journeys...
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  • Have You Fulfilled Your Potential Yet?

    Every now and then a moment comes along that reminds me what is really important and reinvigorates me about why I enjoy my job so much, an enjoyment that I appreciate I sometimes manage to hide rather well.  Such a moment came a couple of weeks ago at a Dukes awayday for principals and heads, w...
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  • Ten Choices

    As well as trying to instil a love of history in my pupils when I am in the classroom, I have always felt it my duty to impart wider wisdom wherever possible.  Having taught all the Year 7 and Year 8 classes for a few lessons in recent months, my top tip just now is probably to avoid saying...
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  • Words of Wisdom

    The wise words of the Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius, to which I referred in last week’s blog, reminded me yet again that there is so much good advice out there, if only we can find the time and space to absorb it.  On reflection, and with all the desperate news filli...
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  • Sticks and Stones

    ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me’ is one of those expressions familiar to all of us, used from early childhood as a defence against name-calling and to build resilience.  The joy of looking things up on Wikipedia is often to find something new, in...
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  • Devil-Land

    A spoiler alert, if one is needed, is that despite the title of this blog, it is about a history book and not about current events in Ukraine, where ‘Devil-Land’ might well be an understatement for what is going on.
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  • Loose Ends

    From time to time, usually in the middle of the night, I remember that I have read things in the last twelve months that I have forgotten to share with you.  This might be because I did not think they were as interesting as other bits of information I wanted to highlight, or it might be because...
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  • Lessons from our German Cousins

    I first heard about the book I referenced last week, ‘A Woman in Berlin’, in John Kampfner’s entertaining contrast between Britain and Germany called ‘Why the Germans Do it Better (Notes from a Grown-Up Country)’, which is not quite the overwhelming eulogy you might exp...
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  • Reading for Pleasure?

    It turned out to be a very quiet Christmas in the Wideman household, with positive Covid tests meaning a lot of enforced self-isolation.  Looking back, I am not quite sure what I did to fill the time, but several hours each afternoon were dedicated to reading Antonia Fraser’s biography of...
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