The British kids are going back to school today, and if it seems as if they have just begun their summer school holidays, that is because they have.

Compared to their colonial cousins, British school kids get a paltry amount of time off for the summer. Granted, they make up for it during the rest of the year—the British school year seems to consist of a few weeks of classes, a few weeks off, a few weeks of classes, etc. I’m sure there must be some advantage to this system—such as not allowing time for all of the knowledge the teachers struggled so hard to cram into their pupils’ heads to leak out of their ears—but I still prefer what I grew up with, even at the risk of returning to school more ignorant than when I left.

In the States, when school is on, it’s ON. They call it the school year because that’s what you do during it—School. In September and October you’re settling into your new life; you used to be a 5th Grader, now you’re a 6th Grader, and at the top of the Elementary School food chain. You make do with Columbus Day and Halloween for diversion, and in November you look forward to Election Day and the mini-break (not to mention the turkey) at Thanksgiving.

December brings the Christmas/New Year ensemble, with its full week off and the opportunity to ride your new bike when it’s minus 17 degrees Fahrenheit outside. Then, I must admit, winter and school just drag on. And on. And on. And there is nothing for it but to hunker down, get to work and look forward to better days. It’s good training for adult life.

Even so, spring does arrive eventually, with muddy fields, blooming lilacs, cautious warmth and the Memorial Day weekend. Summer cannot be far away.

When I was a child, summer arrived in three phases, and the first was Memorial Day. It might be May, it might still be cold and dreary, but the Memorial Day weekend was the official starter’s pistol for summer. That was when the seasonal businesses reopened and people with swimming pools cleaned them out and got them ready for the coming season and people, like us, without swimming pools made the inaugural trek to the local swimming hole to test the waters. They were always freezing, but we didn’t care.

The second, and most important, was the middle of June when, after sitting in sweltering classrooms taking end-of-school tests for five days, you at last heard the clang of the final school bell. There is nothing to compare to the feeling of stepping out of school and seeing the whole of the sweet, sunny, sultry summer unfolding in front of you.

 And finally, with the official summer solstice unnoticed and in the past and a few weeks of leisure under your belt, the Fourth of July would arrive. This was not a harbinger of summer so much as a confirmation that summer was here and in full swing. Picnics and fireworks—what better way to affirm your freedom?

During the summer, my friends and I would swim at the creek, ride our bikes, camp out in the woods or just enjoy lazing around in the hot, humid afternoons. The days stretched on forever, the world was benign and welcoming, and the possibilities for adventure were endless. We had no Internet, X-Box or iPods, but we were never bored.

I consider myself especially fortunate, as this long and languid period, for me, was punctuated by the Chatham Fair—the annual agricultural event held over the Labor Day weekend. We would go to the fair, look at the animals and exhibits, eat fried dough, cotton candy, candied apples, and then head for the main event—the rides. The Tilt-A-Whirl, the Ferris Wheel, the Scrambler, the Octopus—we would ride them all, repeatedly. Mostly without throwing up.

There would be car rallies, horse races and some has-been celebrity would put on a show in the grand stand and we would notice, as dusk settled around us, an autumnal chill in the air, signalling the end of this marvellous and magical season. Then the fair would pack up and leave town. We would have the next day—the first Tuesday in September—to find what clothes still fit us, get new hand-me-downs and steel ourselves for the coming year, where we would be back—on the bottom of the food chain—in Junior High School, to repeat the familiar cycle.

Now I just get a day off at the end of August; it’s not quite the same.

We’ve all had a Tardis Teaser fantasy. What moment in history would you like to be transported if you had a time machine?

One point in London’s timeline worthy of consideration might be the opening of “The Palace of the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations” or as Punch nicknamed it the Crystal Palace. Covering 19 acres with room inside to accommodate four St. Paul’s Cathedrals it was at the time the largest building on earth.

Started 160 years ago on 31st August 1850, a year earlier it had not even existed as an idea, until Henry Cole more famous for inventing the Christmas card conceived the idea after visiting the Paris Exhibition.

An open competition attracted 245 designs all were deemed unworkable. A design committee was formed having amongst their number Isambard Kingdom Brunel, and between them they produced a vast low, dark shed of a building, needing 30 million bricks. Now with only 16 months to go desperate times required desperate measures and Joseph Paxton was approached.

Paxton, born into a poor farming family in Bedfordshire, he was at the age of 20 running an experimental arboretum for the Horticultural Society. There one day he made such an impression on the Duke of Devonshire in that his strong, clear voice could be heard by the near deaf Peer of the Realm, he was offered the post of Head Gardener at Chatsworth House.

Paxton really was a boy wonder, he created one of the great gardens of England at Chatsworth with the Emperor Fountain’s raising a jet of water 290 feet into the air, a feat only exceeded once to this day in Europe; built the largest rockery in the country; designed estate villages; became the world’s expert on dahlias; produced the country’s finest melons, figs, peaches and nectarines winning numerous prizes; he ran two gardening magazines; a daily newspaper; he was on the board of three railway companies; built the world’s first municipal park, later copied to form Central Park in New York; the hot house at Chatsworth he built was so vast that when Queen Victoria visited the Great Stove, as it was called, she toured it in a horse drawn carriage.

Learning of the committee’s struggle to design a building for the Great Exhibition he doodled plans while chairing a meeting and had completed drawing ready for review in two weeks. The design broke all the criteria stipulated for the competition, but desperate times required desperate measures and after a few days of hand wringing the committee accepted them in their entirety.

Nothing, really absolutely nothing, says more about Victorian Britain and its capacity for brilliance than entrusting this iconic building to a gardener. No bricks, no mortar, no foundations, prefabricated from standard parts away from the building site it was simply bolted together. The build time was phenomenal in eight months, one million square feet of glass, 18,000 panes a week (one third of all the glass produced that year); 20 miles of guttering, 33,000 iron trusses and tens of thousands of planks of wooden flooring, this being tested by a battalion of soldiers marching across it. The finished building was 1,851 feet long (in celebration of the year the exhibition was held, now copied by the new World Trade Centre whose height matches in feet the year of their independence), 408 feet across and 110 feet high and spacious enough to accommodate a much admired avenue of mature elm trees.

Queen Victoria opened the exhibition on 1st May 1851 describing with some justification that it was “the greatest day in our history”. Open for five and a half months it attracted six million people at a time when Britain had a population of only 20,959,477. Almost 100,000 objects went on display; a knife with 1,851 blades; furniture carved from coal; a 4-sided piano; a bed which automatically tipped its surprised occupant into his morning bath; an enormous lump of guano from Peru. Newfoundland for some inexplicable reason devoted its entire stand to cod-liver oil, and the highlight of the day was a use of the elegant “retiring rooms” the flushing toilets, a novelty at the time. During the exhibition, 827,280 visitors paid one penny each to use them, this is often given as the origin of the British euphemism “to spend a penny”.

Unlike its successors the Great Exhibition cleared a profit of £186,000, enough to buy 30 acres of land south of the exhibition site where the Royal Albert Hall, Victoria and Albert Museum, Natural History Museum, the Royal College of Art and Royal College of Music were later built.

After the Exhibition was closed the Crystal Palace was moved to Sydenham were we managed to burn it to the ground in 1936. All that marks its passing is the Colebrookdale Gates originally made to stand at the entrance to the north transept of the Exhibition, now moved to the entrance to Kensington Gardens beside Alexandra Gate and behind which Albert sits enthroned in his memorial, on his lap he hold a book: The Catalogue of the Great Exhibition.

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