Good morning everyone, and a very happy 145^th birthday to us all! How wonderful to be together and celebrating in our traditional way; and I really do love the traditions of the birthday assembly: I love our Head Girl reading to us words from the very first Headmistress Edith Hastings, who’d be very glad indeed that we are still here, doing our thing, 145 years later; I love us singing happy birthday to ourselves – it’s so audaciously self-referential; and I particularly love the oldest and youngest students cutting the cake together. What a joy.

There is something I enjoy less, though, about the school birthday, and that is the rapidity with which it comes around. It truly cannot be a whole year ago that we last celebrated this birthday, and yet it also truly is; and I can tell you that what the oldies have always said is also absolutely true: time speeds up as you get older. So the gap between one birthday assembly and the next has, for me, ever narrowed over the last decade, which also means that the time I have to find one more thing to say on the topic of birthdays gets ever shorter.

And look, let’s face it, we’re well beyond any notion of scraping the barrel here: in recent years we’ve covered birthday parties, birthday gifts, birthday songs; last year we even looked at the significance of the number 144, so desperate was I not to have to talk about birthday cake and use some kind of hackneyed metaphor about the perfect recipe for mixing up a happy life.In my desperation, I did think about reworking the assembly on the magic of 144, but 145 isn’t quite as special a number – and I feel that, I really do, as I am turning 45 tomorrow, which also feels quite unspecial and also quite like the age I remember my mum being all my life, which is a bit, well, unsettling.

So I did something you’re not meant to do, and which I tell you all the time, not to do: I gave up. I gave in to the fact that I have nothing special left to say about birthdays; perhaps, I thought to myself, this year we can just sit peacefully in silence for six minutes and I’ll sell it to you as an exercise in mindfulness.

But as I considered the unfamiliar territory of not talking through every silence with which I am presented, a question popped into my head: why do I have nothing left to say about birthdays? I bet if we asked our reception and Year 1 girls about birthdays, they’d have a lot to say. Wouldn’t you? And I bet that Year Two don’t feel it’s like yesterday that they were here celebrating this birthday assembly. And I bet year 3 aren’t rolling their eyes cynically at the notion of celebrating birthdays or getting older.

Well, I think I feel I have nothing left to say about birthdays because, as we get older, we’re conditioned not to see the passing of time as a celebration; that the gathering of days is somehow something to panic or be in denial about.

And yet, if there’s one thing we can all guarantee, it’s that we will live our lives one day at a time. And, if we’re lucky, that will happen many, many times over; perhaps if we live to 100 it’ll happen 36,524 times  assuming a mix of leap years and common years. And for our school, which is 145, that’s 52,960 days – which is really amazing when you think about it.

And so, rightly, in our youth, birthdays are heralded with great fanfare and joy, as we acknowledge the passing of time with a sense of keen celebration. When we’re in Juniors, we’ll probably proudly add a quarter or a half to our age – 8 ½ sounds much better than 8, doesn’t it? – and as a teenager we can’t wait for the key milestones of 16, 18 and 21. So when do we stop feeling that way about birthdays? Why do we make dark jokes about middle age and aging more widely? We seem in fact to have an obsession with youth and a fear of age– and there’s a multi-billion dollar beauty industry out there capitalising on that obsession – with women in particular being taught to fear aging, and so to underplay birthdays and dread certain milestones, rather than embracing them with gratitude and a sense of satisfaction.

But it’s a trick, and we mustn’t fall for it.

Because the truth is that, getting older, for us all but also for our school, is a wonderful thing. For our school to have grown from 12 pupils to nearly 1100 over almost a century and a half is quite extraordinary and something of which to be enormously proud; and, as a community which values knowledge and wisdom and intellect, getting older is absolutely amazing because you simply have more time to develop all of those things, to make mistakes and to learn from them, as the years go by. Time is our most valuable asset, partly because it is fleeting – if I feel like the years are speeding up, I should be making the most of each minute, surely?

Over the half term break I was lucky enough to meet Harriet Walter at the Wimbledon Bookfest, hosted here. Harriet is a hugely successful actor and writer, who has sustained a varied career over more than 50 years and, at the age of 75, is working more and harder than ever, and loving life.

Harriet’s a good example of age bringing to you all sorts of intellectual and creative opportunities, essentially, the getting of wisdom which only time will bring; but she’s also a brilliant example of the getting of other things which we experience in age:  the getting of mischief, the getting of naughtiness, the getting of caring less what other people think of you, and so making the most of the time you have available to you. And so, on this school birthday, i want to give you two gifts: I want to give you the gift of celebrating your life as the days gather, one by one, not worrying about aging but rather seeing it as the greatest present you could be given; and I also want to give you the gift of this Jenny Joseph poem, which I first heard when I was in Year 5 and which has stayed with me ever since:

Warning
By Jenny Joseph

When I am an old woman I shall wear purple
With a red hat which doesn’t go, and doesn’t suit me.
And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves
And satin sandals, and say we’ve no money for butter.
I shall sit down on the pavement when I’m tired
And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells
And run my stick along the public railings
And make up for the sobriety of my youth.
I shall go out in my slippers in the rain
And pick the flowers in other people’s gardens
And learn to spit.

You can wear terrible shirts and grow more fat
And eat three pounds of sausages at a go
Or only bread and pickle for a week
And hoard pens and pencils and beermats and things in boxes.

But now we must have clothes that keep us dry
And pay our rent and not swear in the street
And set a good example for the children.
We must have friends to dinner and read the papers.

But maybe I ought to practise a little now?
So people who know me are not too shocked and surprised
When suddenly I am old, and start to wear purple.