Highgate Made Head-Dresses in 45 Minutes. We Lasted Four.

Lower stakes, I told the children. Nobody minds who wins.

I believed this until about 2.04.

Highgate has twelve houses, each with a tutor group of around sixteen pupils in every year from Year 9 to 13. We had three children, the recycling box, a roll of foil, last year’s Christmas tissue paper and one glue stick, which was dry. At 2.01 the eldest asked for the judging criteria in writing. At 2.02 our daughter claimed all the foil. At 2.04 the youngest, who is seven, discovered the glue stick and wept.

So I helped him. This is where it went wrong. By 2.20 the eldest had built a spire from a Pringles tube and our daughter had a foil crown with turrets. By 2.35 the youngest’s head-dress was a three-tier structure of cereal box with a kebab-skewer Eiffel Tower on top, and the youngest was on the sofa, watching me finish it.

At 2.45 I called time and made the youngest wear it. It balanced if he did not swallow.

My husband, as sole judge, went along the line slowly. He praised the spire. He admired the turrets. At the Eiffel Tower he paused, then disqualified it on the grounds that it had been made by somebody’s mother. He gave first prize to the Pringles tube.

I had been saving a consolation. A Year 9 pupil in Midgate, profiled in the Highgate Journal in 2025, admits that the house is not the top scorer in house competitions, “but what we lack in points, we make up for in community spirit!” I read it out at tea. The youngest has since moved into his brother’s house. I am now a house of one. What I lack in points, I do not make up for in anything.