“A Space to Digest the Change, With Some Digestives”

Our daughter started Year 7 in September. I was the one who needed digesting.

City’s idea is that delicious snacks are the vehicle, and that the school’s newest inhabitants get comfortable by sitting down with older girls. The older girls, going by what the school publishes, are busy. A Year 9 wrote in February 2025 about months of designing, refining and coding robots for a competition City hosted, with sixth formers organising. A Year 10 team, at its first regional robotics competition in Canterbury, won various matches “despite having a few setbacks along the way.” These are people with diaries. They still find time for the biscuits.

So I started a club for the new Year 7 parents: Thursday, 7.30pm, our kitchen. The invitation went to the class WhatsApp at 9.04pm, and I spent the next three days on the biscuits. Digestives were the obvious tribute, but plain digestives say you have given up, and chocolate digestives say you read it on a website. I bought both, plus Hobnobs, Bourbons for anyone who might look down on Hobnobs, and a £6 tin of Belgian somethings for the mother whose son already plays for the county.

Thursday came. Two parents came with it. One had brought her own oat biscuits. The other ate nothing and asked whether the maths sets had been published yet. Nobody digested any change. After they left I ate eleven Bourbons, standing up, in the dark.

Our daughter, meanwhile, came home on the Friday having made a friend in Year 9 over a single KitKat.

In June 2026 a Year 12 at City reported plans, with the boys’ school, for a pupil-led cookbook to raise money for bursaries, and asked everyone to start thinking about their favourite recipes. If it happens, I have one ready. Buy four kinds, invite thirty people, eat the Bourbons alone.