The Common Tomb...I mean Common Room is a privilege every 6th year has a right too, a place of rest, relaxation and utter chaos.

At the beginning of sixth year you're forced to spend your first few weeks and hundred or so free periods trying to find inconspicuous spaces to retire and enjoy this stunning amount of free time. Being relegated to the silence of the library or the cold hard benches of the hall way in New Building until you can finally gain entrance to the one place a sixth year can honestly call his or her own…or his or her own along with the other 75 sixth year you have to have the space with.

Once you've been permitted entrance it's a different story, for the next few weeks those of you not considered popular enough are still left to the cold and silence as there's barely enough room to swing a cat let alone have another couple of dozen peoples cram into the tiny space.

The space in this particular high school is basically a glorified storage cupboard, glorified with the tattered remains of the staff rooms' chairs - which were recently replaced - the lockers which no one has keys too and now have a certain persons (eh hem) hair pin in the lock, two broken doors and two caved in tops, two desks which have bent and incredibly dodgy legs, a coffee table, four stacks of broken down uncomfortable school chairs and a quarter of the space taken up but another storage cupboard in the guise of a radio station which - in my entire time at high school - I have never seen in use…unless you include that two minute tidy up session that the school technicians had.

Painted in the school colours of bright yellow and a shade of blue indescribably bad even after over half a year we've still got the top section of the wall in white, unfinished as it would be against health and safety regulations for school pupils to do it themselves. The windows have paper sellotaped to them and flags pinned to the frame with everyone's mark put on them in order to block out the offensive little idiots we have in the school. The Walls are testaments to our past with a photo montage beginning to take over every available inch, and everyone having scrawled their signatures and comments onto the doors, walls and radiators in indelible ink as not to be forgotten until the class of '98 comes in and redecorates as badly as us.

The Common Room is in fact just like rush our, peak times being Interval (11:10 to 11:25) and Lunch Time (12:45 to 13:35) when everyone has free time and no where to go unless you're a smoker or have interval detention for being late - this being a regular occurrence for certain pupils, but I shall not name names - so everyone crams into one of the smallest rooms of the school, we put the music up too loud, the boys trying to cram as many people as they can into one sleeping bag - in the common room for no apparent reason - or creating human pileups in order to cause hilarity for the masses.

However, during class times there are distinct separations of the year, even though we all seemingly get on far better than in previous years. The people considered, and I use the term lightly, 'popular' are actually the people most often left to sit on the benches outside the Common Room (some people suspect that is so the people considered 'popular' have a degree of power, being able to lord it over the younger years as they go between classes, most people however believe this to be BS) whilst the people considered not as much unpopular but individuals seemed to have taken their claim on the room. More often than not it is punk music heard blasting from the stereo, and these people playing poker or trying to abuse each other with sleeping bags - the reason for a sleeping bag even being in the room is still unknown - or playing their guitars, drawing or even dare I say it, reading and doing school work!

Never in the whole of high school were we told that the Common Room would be a place where work would take place…in fact never in the whole of high school were we told that we would in fact get the Common Room because of the behaviour of the previous years.

It would be a lie to say that the whole of sixth year likes or even cares about each other, but because of the diminished numbers, the forcing of everyone being together during free periods and the fact that we have this space in which we can allow our personalities to come through, people are there selves and we are all getting to see sides of people that were previously hidden. The Common Room has allowed, in our case, a year full of riffs and dislike to in fact become a year that all communicate together, all know each others names and is stronger than anyone would have thought.

If the Common Room hasn't done anything else, it's opened our eyes to what people, who we previous disliked for no apparent reason, are really like and allowed us to make friends with people we previously would never have come in contact with.

So, despite the class of '97s Common Room looking like a small nuclear explosion has happened in it, what does it matter? We don't mind, the school doesn't care and we're made friends despite the devastation.

Sixth Year Formals
Sixth Year Music
Scabby Queen - Card Game