The weekend.

And perhaps the oddest weekend of my life.

First to the General Hospital for a series of tests to see if I had the toxoplasmosis creature inside me. Blood tests, lots of peering into my eyes with bright lights, and very strangely (or so it seemed at the time), a series of tests asking me what I would do in certain situations. For example I was asked, “if you were driving towards a set of traffic lights with no cars in front, and the lights changed to yellow, would you normally, a) speed up and jump the lights, b) slow down and stop. Lots of questions like that.

All five of us were given the tests, and Havoc Blythe promised us all both a) a full explanation and b) lunch at his expense, when it was all over.

So we stuck it out, and then wandered to the Creationists Bar at the Toppled Bollard.

And this is what Havoc Blythe said:

Toxoplasmosis was found in the kitchens, as well as on the pictures and on the books – so the regime of Ms Bland was using the most obvious approach – put the parasite in the food – and was using the pictures and book approach as a back up for those who didn’t partake of school meals.

The parasite, HB reminded us, perhaps with a little more graphic detail than I really needed during lunch, normally lives in mice. But the second part of its lifespan is inside a cat, so it needs to get from the mouse to the cat. This it does by making the mouse take more and more risks when it approaches the cat. Instead of running away in fear, it will start playing with the cat’s tail. Eventually it takes on risk too many, the cat eats the mouse, and the cat gets toxoplasmosis.

Then the cat starts taking more and more risks – such as running across a road with traffic in it, and eventually it dies, but the parasite survives in the brain usually long enough for the cat to be eaten by mice, and the cycle continues.

In other words, what the parasite does it increase risk tasking. And so, we guess, what the people who had taken over our school were trying to do, was to experiment on the pupils and students in our school and see if they could be made to increase their risk tasking. Ms Bland and others set up a world of control, and then dared the pupils and students to go beyond.

“And not just pupils and students,” said Havoc Blythe. “Half the staff in the school have school food – either in the breakfast club, or at lunch.

“So all the time it looked like they were trying to control, they were actually setting up a situation in which there would be insane levels of risk taking. Discipline, law, order, control – it would all go. As we all know, in the end the school only works when most pupils agree that the teachers are in control. When the ordinary every day pupil stops thinking that, we’re lost.”

“So if 90% of the kids do their homework,” said Binky, “then we can handle the remaining three or four,” said Binky, showing a rare grasp of maths. “But if no one does the homework…”

“It all breaks down,” confirmed Havoc Blythe.

“But why?” I asked. “Why do it? There are lots of schools where discipline and behaviour are virtually dead in the water. We all know them – there’s a metal detector on the gates, and they take everyone’s fingerprints on day one.”

“We’re still guessing up to a point,” said Havoc Blythe, “but consider what it would do to our society if suddenly schools that were previously on the up, working towards what the government wanted, descended into chaos.”

We sat and thought about it for a moment. It still didn’t answer the question why, but it was quite a chilling thought.