‘Weird.’ That was the adjective used again and again by Year 12 girls on Friday when asked to describe what was like to be in school again after a gap of something like 90 days. (Mrs Newman puts the number of days under lockdown at 91; I calculate it at 87, but I may have missed a few somewhere along the line.) Whatever the actual figure, it was a joy to see Year 12 girls once again in school and to see them ‘irl’, one says nowadays, rather than via a screen. It was a great afternoon of reconnection.

And of course school has changed in its appearance since the girls were last here. The signage of social distancing is now ubiquitous: corridors are divided lengthways by yellow tape, arrows on walls indicate one way systems and roundels on the floor remind one to maintain a 2m distance. On top of that there has been a blossoming of stand-alone sink units and hand-sanitising sprays. They are everywhere. It is all rather discombobulating.

We gathered in the Memorial Hall, girls sitting 2 m apart with rows of seats folded down between them and it felt strange to fill a large space with so few people; but such is the new normal, as they say, at least for the time being. The joy, however, was in the emotional alchemy that took place over a period of two hours while the session lasted. At the beginning, everyone seemed oddly constrained and inhbited; by the end the connection was there, friendships reenergised and I don’t think anyone actually wanted to leave. The aim was reconnection – reconnection with the school, reconnection with teachers and, above all, reconnection with one another. I do believe we achieved that in some measure.

Fifteen girls attended, the maximum number allowed, so a full house: Bethany Ede, Katie Riccio, Summer Cox, Darcy Gresham, Chloe Drew, Mathura Kathirgamanathan, Tara Williams, Imogen Rafferty, Lily-Rose Barnett, Roya Schallig, Eloise Pulley, Bonnie Hull, Liv Lancaster, Kalina Borisova and Sienna Eades. We wanted to take them on an emotional journey of reflection and reorientation.

Mrs Newman, Ms Taylor and I used a Powerpoint to revisit the key moments of lockdown, from Italians singing on balconies to clapping from the NHS, from learning to Zoom to seeing sun-faded rainbows in house windows, from Donald Trump’s recommendation to ingest bleach to the cultural uber-phenomenon that is BBC’s ‘Normal People’. It was a walk down memory lane with much laughter. The girls had sent in their photos of lockdown which we showed and discussed. Then came the active part: first, the exuberance of the Great Shout Out, courtesy of Ms Taylor, with girls overcoming the 2 m distancing by filling the Mem Hall with their voices, shouting a message of reconnection to one of their friends in the room. The windows rattled: it’s surprising how loud fifteen girls yelling at the tops of their voices can be. Then, we asked girls to complete a kind of placard: ‘The best thing about lockdown for me was..’ Finally, the reflection part culminated in girls writing a postcard to themselves which they will read at the May Ball next summer when all of this will seem a strange memory and we will all look back and wonder what on earth it was like. A mini- archive was created. And while girls wrote, we played music and one particular song Summer recommended stays with me as I write this: ‘Times Like These’ by a compilation of artists. Listen to it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GElP4YdrBE. It’s rather moving.

But then came the best bit – a scavenger hunt with girls sent out in groups to find a feather, an oak leaf (Mathura now knows what one is!), a wild geranium, some silver birch bark… and so on. Reconnection with the physical space of the school itself. Well done to Bethany’s team for coming first. They found them all in about two minutes.

At the end, we sat there and no one wanted to leave. It was all about being together once again. And it worked.

The next one is on Friday, and there will be an online version for girls who are unable to attend in person.