David Elston (FS 65-70) recalls a magazine and a climbing trip:

“In 1967/8 I was in the Lower VI Arts studying English under David Marshall. Four of us, Michael (Jonah) Allan, Mike Hope, Paul King and I set up an ‘alternative’ magazine called Opicus (so named for reasons which now escape me). It lasted for two or three editions then inevitably petered out, but it was great fun running it with a selection of articles, poems, stories etc from those whom the four of us (the Editorial Committee) could cajole or pester into producing something. Unfortunately, I don’t now seem able to find the two or three copies I kept, but I well remember the first few lines of a poem I wrote and published (if that’s the right word) in it during the Easter Term of 1968. On the face of it, it looks the sort of pretentious nonsense that made up quite a bit of Opicus:
‘Cliffs
 Calling
 From far away,
 Islands,
 Surf
 Always pounding their shores…’
And so it went on for eleven more lines; however, the first letter of each line spelled out ‘CCF is a bloody farce’, which I thought to be an amusingly subtle and intellectual bit of sport and a vaguely dissident slant, which duly gave me a certain amount of cred amongst my peers and was thought to be subversively rather pertinent, this being of course the era of ‘flower power’, Paris student riots, and anti-Vietnam marches. As it happened, during the subsequent Easter holidays I went on the school’s climbing trip to Torridons in North West Scotland, lead by the redoubtable team of Alan Francis, Martin Lamping and Tom Rice, and in part funded by the CCF. I had enjoyed that so much that I was asked to do the report for the proper school magazine and enthused about the whole trip (which was the start of my life long love of Western Scotland and hill walking). During the summer term, the poem being a distant memory, I was collared by Tom Rice one evening who had spotted the hidden message in it and took me to task, albeit in a most reasonable fashion, for what he felt was a fairly ill-considered judgement on something which had given me a lot of enjoyment. I didn’t dare enquire of Tom who else on the staff had noticed (getting on the wrong side of ‘the Major’ was never a good move). In 1971, the year after I left, I went on the last of the High Atlas trips also lead by Alan Francis. One evening he and I fell into discussion about Lawrence of Arabia and the post first world war peace conference (amazing what the high mountain air does for one’s conversational scope) and he suggested that the conference descended into ‘what you might describe as a bloody farce’; he said so with a perfectly straight face then laughed, but I still don’t know whether that was a subtle dig or just a coincidence of expression and, since we were getting on so well, I didn’t feel it sensible to bring up the subject of the long defunct Opicus.”

(If by chance anyone has any copies of the ephemeral magazine Opicus which they do not want, they would be welcome in the school archives. Ed.)

 

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