So Eton, everything I expected and more

[JoanBias]

My DS is at a private school, so I have experience of private schooling, but my word Eton was like another world.

Not just the school, but the people there.

There was one prep school being shown around, all in tweed jackets, and to a boy the spitting image of Draco Malfoy (well there was one Chinese boy, but otherwise....).

One of the mothers doing the tour was not quite right in some respect, I'm not sure how but something wasn't wired up correctly or something. She was immacuately dressed, 6-inch heels (pretty daft considering the confirmation letter warns about having a long walk), but she was just bizarre. The admissions tutor said 'we have a waiting list of 80 boys and typically 35% of these will make it through', and she asked afterwards 'so 80% of the boys from the waiting list make it through?', and it was then explained again, but you could kind of hear the cogs going round and she clearly didn't get it. She had asked several other similar questions; e.g., it was explained that some Houses are catering and others go to a central cafeteria, so she then asked 'so they all eat in the cafeteria'? She pointed at the Fives Court and asked me 'what do they play here?' I said 'Fives' 'Is it squash?', she said. 'No, Eton Fives.' 'So is it squash?' It seemed as if this woman had had the benefit of the 'Finishing School for the Terminally Dim', because she was otherwise every inch the presentable upper middle-class wife.

Another family had a son who looked the prototypical pre-Etonian, and sure enough Daddy spent the tour braying on about his House when he had been there.

The facilities were extremely impressive, although they didn't bother to show us any of the academic parts, and basically the impression was 'if your son is incredibly pushy and self-motivated, send him here and we will teach him to be entitled'. They said 'every year we reject about a third of the highest performers on the test', essentially because they aren't pushy enough. (The House Mistresses seemed quite nice though.)

Fantastic training for future managing directors and whatever, but not for us.....

Well worth it to sign up for a tour, very illuminating. They take about 100 a day from what I can see, so obligation at all....

@happy the newcastle research isn't interested in fads it was, as I understand it, trying to work out if there was an alternative to bariatric surgery which didn't involve, you know, surgery, but got the same rather speedy and decisive results. There isn't 5 years of data on this yet because it hasn't been 5 years since the programme started. But so far, for my family member and for others, the results have been stunning.

And haev a look on Channel4 player at food hospital which a week back or so put a boy who had had epileptic fits loads every day on a high good fat diet (and low calorie) and all his fits stopped. It was what they tried before drugs about 50 years ago. By the way they do say at the end only 20% or something of patients moved on to that diet do stop their fits. however that is yet another illness where we find eating less and eating fat/meat/veg/fish/nuts makes you well and eating processed foods ill.

It just seems to be that for all these modern illnesses, mental and physical we are finding that eating how people used to eat makes them well again.

The sun cure used to be used for TB (and obviously anti biotics is very effective now) but sun still helped.

Diabetes - the type you get when fat - can be totally cured if you just eat like many of the rest of us eat. That is very very difficult though for most people who woudl rather pop a pill.

I am not suggesting it is dead easy to eat my kind of lunch which was salad and stir fry today and very lovely and I eat eggs every day for breakfast. It takes a while to change habits and change what foods you enjoy.

Avoid low fat anything as they pack it with sugar. Avoid all sugar substitutes. Avoid anything fake.

If man made it don't eat it is a pretty good way to go and of course real food is delicious.

One thing I find hard is to find meat with lots of fat on it, laughing as I type. Just above every product says - trimmed or low fat. Perhaps I should grow my own animals.
I often will have half a real coconut...that's lovely too Sadly my island despite being called Cocos has no palms on it which produce the nuts.

Mordion there is not a diabetic clinic in the country which will not tell a morbidly obese/bariatric patient to loose weight all will be seen by dieticians who will recommend a suitable diet whether it be a VLC diet or just a low calorie diet. How they loose this weight is often personal what works for one may not work for another an it is a well known fact that being in research trials of any sort aids compliance whether it is too your diet, taking anti hypertensive or regulating your blood sugar to prevent sudden non symptomatic hypoglycaemias. If by a miracle they do mange to loose weight then most will not need to carry on injecting themselves with insulin many can also reduce their medication like metformin and others. The biggest problem all morbidly obese/bariatric patients is of course keeping the weight off having lost it.

@happy the newcastle trialists who stuck to the VLC diet no longer need any medication. The newcastle results suggest that there is a clear difference in outcome in being placed on a VLC medically monitored liquid only diet and being told to eat healthily by a dietician. However there isn't any point carrying on this wildly off topic conversation since while it clearly demonstrates my original point, it isn't helping anyone or anything.

Once again - I never doubted or intended to give the impression that I doubted your knowledge about MS.

Just out of interest Xenia, are you very slim?

I ask because I also avoid the low fat foods in favour of full fat, eat lots of fish but very few carbs and sugars.

Years ago I knew an old theatre sister in her 90's, she virtually lived on red meat and offal. She was very sprightly and had all her marbles. She once sent me off to buy her a sheep's heart.....I never asked her how she cooked it, I don't think I wanted to know. Likewise my grandfather lived into his 90's eating cheese that was so ripe it was crawling with maggots. Most people would recoil at that but are happy to tuck into a cheeseburger so full of additives it doesn't degrade even after months.

wordfactory, well I'm not perfect but I try to keep everything very concrete and stick to facts.

as adults I think they may conclude they are lucky (if indeed they still are at that point - money obviously doesn't protect against everything) but it's a conclusion you have to form yourself.

I thought it was a low GI diet that was recommended now to people with typeII, I though it was fairly standard. I don't have any family with Diabetes thankfully we are all skinny people but a friend of mine who is a doctor specialised in diabetes. She said many people refuse to help themselves and do not make the necessary changes to their diet/lifestyle.

mini hearts are quite tasty when stuffed with thyme stuffing and packed very tightly into a tray/over proof pan but tight so they dont go dry then roasted.

i have them cooked for me quite often and sometimes like to snoop on how its done.

Give me a bar of chocolate anytime!!

@mini The advice is wildly variable. My family member with type 2 (he still officially has it because the NHS does not officially recognise that it can be 'cured'. It is incurable. Except that many people now no longer have any sign of having it - the bariatric surgery people, and the VLC people, for a start. Maybe others too. But give it 20 years and maybe some of them or even all of them will be back with the bad levels, so continual monitoring is clearly a Good Thing) has been given much different advice over the 7 years since initial diagnosis. I have friends attending different diabetes clinics - in different parts of the country - who have been told definitively by their specialists that the newcastle research proves nothing and the best advice is to follow a balanced diet. One of those has just had open heart surgery. :( He still poo poos the newcastle research because that is what his specialist does. His levels have got rather worse over the 18 months since my family member's levels returned to normal.

There seems to be a similar lack of uniformity regarding kalydeco, the new drug for one variant of CF. I know a young girl who was on the kalydeco trial, and her parents think it is a miracle drug because for her, it was. But apparently not all experts in the field agree. I can see how this happens of course - live trials can only be properly evaluated after many years of study.

This is from the website of Diabetes UK:
"A Newcastle University study, funded by Diabetes UK, examined 11 people with diabetes who slashed their food intake to 800 calories per day for 8 weeks.....Three months later, 7 of the 11 people studied were free of diabetes."
Plenty of clinical research in the early days and in statistically insignificant numbers shows positive findings but when the numbers are increased then sadly and often this research doesn't yield the much hoped for results I know I've been there and got the T shirt. Luckily for all of us doctors are trained in reading statistics and do not change their treatment plans or prescribe drugs until the research has been clinically proven (although nothing can ever be completely proven) on the balance of probabilities to be effective and also in most cases approved by organisations such as NICE. That is how it should because its peoples lives we are dealing with here.

@happy The research has been extended. Many more people are now involved, but the relevant point is - Diabetes UK is very opposed to the research. I have heard Diabetes UK spokespeople rubbishing it, and when pressed, falling back on the argument that this treatment wouldn't work for everyone because most people wouldn't stick to the VLC diet. They have an advocacy role for diabetics, they completely rightly actively seek to ensure that diabetics are not portrayed as fat people who if only they would go on a diet would be cured. They also don't support bariatric surgery as a treatment - yet again, results indicate it works.

There really is no point in continuing this - you stated upthread that if there was a treatment that worked (for something else) everyone would tell people about it. This is clearly not the case with type 2 diabetes, because there is something that works, and not only are people not being told about it, the treatment is being rubbished in some quarters. Including in this thread. Which I really don't mind because at the end of the day my family member - who is tested regularly (most recently last week) - no longer has results indicating that he has diabetes. Which was all anyone ever wanted. It's sad for the people who aren't being told about the Newcastle trials and being allowed to make up their own minds of course, but there you go. My family member found out about the whole thing by chance after reading an article in the Guardian, his specialist didn't even know about it, but did some digging of his own and then agreed for him to join the trial. I think he was very lucky that his specialist didn't just take the Diabetes UK approach and tell him not to bother.

It certainly works but doctors have found only about 5% of diabetics can make changes to their diet so they have almost given up trying and just medicate them.

I was asked if I were slim. I'm just a normal size. I have been between size 10 and 12 since I was 14. Well I suppose it's getting not be normal size now that 60% of people overweight I suppose and probably even more than that at my age.

Yes, for 2 million years we ate just about every bit of that which we killed so we'd have the best bits, fat, meat etc and then there would be the kidneys and the rest (I am not keen on kidneys but the traditional once a week meal of the British of liver and onions was spot on - you need what is in there and of course very few British families haev liver and onions once a week nowadays).

If we stick with if man made it don't eat it you can't go far wrong. I wouldn't be too worried about the nuances of whether your water is filtered or not and if you bread or milk or don't as long as you are avoiding the processed foods and even don't worry about having very low calories. If we could just get back to 50 years ago (average british woman 8 stone 7 and not that many processed foods eaten and most of us moving around a bit) we would be a lot healthier. If you go back 10,000 years to the 2m before we did agriculture you probably can feel even better.

paleohacks is a great site if you're interested in this kind of thing as you get a lot of knowledgeable links

Classic tangent on this thread!

Confused. Xenia, I thought you said on another thread that milk was not a good food

I'm unconvinced that money cannot buy you school admission. It might require rather more than a mere £32k/yr though.

I would have thought that Eton should be serving roast grouse and things like that, but it seemed very run-of-the-mill to me.

Haven't quite done the sums on providing a very good lunch and dinner each day using interesting ingredients, but I wouldn't have though it could be more than a couple of grand a year. God knows we spend enough on food at home.

Would like to see a break down on where the £32k yr/goes. I don't know if better-off parents are expected to fund the bursaries (wholly unreasonable IMO), or if the money all comes from Old Etonian benefactors. I would be very if I was expected to fund random strangers' bursaries, it's not exactly feeding the starving, or saving the rainforest, is it.

You are clearly very unfamiliar with the world of endowments, Joanbyers, or how private schools (or universities) maintain their ability to provide a very attractive option for their students.

For DD1's private US university last year, her room and board costs came to $11,700. Her entire bill was over $55K. Over four years, over $200K. Thanks to the university's endowment she received a large amount of financial aid. Alumni, businesses, parents, etc., are constantly canvassed for financial donations. The value of your child's degree depends very much on perception of its value among employers. If a university is not able to recruit the best and brightest but must settle for only those who can afford to attend, then its reputation suffers. Hence the willingness of parents and alumni to contribute.

Turning up your nose at the idea of helping a school maintain its selectivity is very much shooting oneself in the foot. By fundig the bursaries of random strangers you ensure a school retains the ability to recruit the best regardless of ability to pay.

Possibly, but I believe the US schools are much better endowed, for various reasons, than the UK. So I don't think that's entirely relevant to the UK.

I wouldn't have thought that Eton would have any problem getting good applicants, with or without bursaries. But then maybe none of that is coming out of the £32k, and it's coming from their donors.

If there are bursaries there are endowments. If there are endowments and if a child attends a school it behoves you to contribute as what you are doing is enhancing the reputation of the school, And I seriously doubt whether the bursaries are funded in part by the 32K. That would go to paying excellent teachers and staff, providing room and board and maintaining facilities, insurance, etc. Bursaries tend to be funded by donations.

" By fundig the bursaries of random strangers you ensure a school retains the ability to recruit the best regardless of ability to pay."

Which of course is their raison d'être!

It reminds me of the time many years ago ( in the days before John Paul 11) when I was talking to a nun about the process of selecting the pope. "The Holy Spirit chooses the best person to be Pope" she said, then, with perfect comic timing, "it's just coincidence that the best person is always a rich Italian"

Depends on the school. The average English private day school charges about £10k - £12k a year. I believe about 80% of that goes on teacher salaries and the rest on buildlings etc. Virtually all of them are charities so nothing goes to any shareholders. They tend to have fund raising activities to pay for buildilng works. Some own properties and have investment portfolios, but not most of them. I would imagine £20k - £25k is about teh cost of a boarding place because you need the buildings to put the children in, pay for more staff time, pay for staff accommodation etc. Richer schools may provide more in terms of facilities and have costs associated with those. I doubt even Eton is creaming off £10k a year into scholarships from each pupil.

(milk - milk is better than diet and sugar drinks for sure. I am not a milk supporter particularly but in terms of what most people eat - absolute junk - it's heaps better than that).

Ironically, epidemiological research shows that MS is more prevalent in warmer countries.

No mental health pro would ever say that fresh air, sleep (biggest tipping point to relapse can be deterioration in sleep quality) and good diet is irrelevant. We have always promoted these- Our younger patients with severe and enduring mental health problems have a geocaching group, play tennis once a week, badminton and go on hikes. Recent research discounts a link between exercise and improvements in mental illness symptoms although we see it as having strong benefits regarding role modelling and other social skills. It also helps to control the problems of weight gain caused by medications such as Olanzapine which are notorious for it.

However, the wholesale bashing of antidepressants (yes, YOU Peter Hitchens) by people who may be 'reading about it rich' but actually lacking in any informed objective overview annoys me. Try spending years working with people with psychiatric conditions, seeing the effects of medication both good and bad- using subjective experiences and 'skewed' evidence- of course many people who commit suicide have been on antidepressants, Peter Hitchens. They were already experiencing suicidal ideation when they presented for treatment. he doesn't seem to understand that when depression is at its worst, one lacks even the volition to commit suicide. The first weeks after prescribing meds are a higher risk time because as one starts to feel their effects, the resultant rising levels of energy and volition can cause suicidal plans to be enacted.

Sorry to derail but presenting a Paleo life style as some kind of evidence of best mental health in our ancestors is a joke. Historically, suicide was illegal so one cannot even be sure from morbidity/mortality stats, what was suicide or mental illness and what was not. People have always used euphemisms for psychiatric illness or muddled categories due to ignorance however it is clear that poor mental health is not a recent evolutionary, cultural and social phenomena.

Can I ask mignonette, why you never comment on the mental health board?
It is left to people who only know parts, or very little, to help those people.
I am not complaining, I just dont understand.
Are you not allowed to?
Yes I know this is not about Eton,but while we have been on the subject, I thought I would ask.

I am wary of specific advice to people I have never met. It is too unsafe. I have given general advice in the past. It alarms me to see people merrily diagnosing and recommending medications etc to people they have never met, based upon very subjective or theoretical/read online 'knowledge'.

When anybody who works in mental health objects to this on these threads they get accused of professional protectionism and of having too reductive/medicalised a focus or of not 'seeing the individual person'....

Yet I've never diagnosed or treated somebody without meeting and developing a face to face rapport unlike some of these well meaning posters who are happy to make far reaching recommendations without ever knowing the person.