The assembly I wish I’d delivered.
Just over the road from me there’s a white squirrel – an albino. He’s on the picture above, peeping down a tree at me. It’s so unusual and he’s a cute little thing. Quite often he’s bouncing around the field in the morning when I go over there with my dog first thing in the morning. There are usually a few other squirrels out there too, but this one, being Dulux (other paints are available) brilliant white, stands out like a searchlight. Your eyes are drawn to it straight away. Of course, it’s a grey squirrel. But a grey squirrel that’s different. That makes it exciting. It makes it special.
Lovers of our native wildlife will say the same if they see a red squirrel. They are so rare these days. But when I was growing up, they were commonplace in the wood near me. I first saw a grey squirrel when I was 10, and that was unusual. Now, that’s all I see, except for Albi over the road (The name is my wife’s fault and why I have to assume he’s male!).
When I was head teacher I loved taking assemblies. Give me a couple of hundred teenagers in a school hall and I am in my element. Many folk cringe at the idea, but that was something I particularly loved and why I love my free author visits to secondary schools. It was a time where I could pitch the values that I wanted to permeate the school and at the same time have a laugh with the kids. I wish I’d seen Albi then. I could have talked about him (or her), about him being different and that because he was different, that made our world so much better. I could have showed pictures of him. There would have been lots of oohs and ahhs. I could have linked that to humans and done the same. Pictures of humans of all different kinds. Some funny pictures, some serious, some curious and some that look very radically different. Every single one of us is different. Different hair (or in my case lack of it), different accents, different tastes, different heights, different belief systems, different backgrounds, different abilities and disabilities, different skills and so on. This is what makes the world a special place. A world we should celebrate. A world of interesting people.
I’d ask them to imagine a world where everyone was the same. Where everyone agreed with each other about clothes, food and politics. Where everyone looked the same. Wouldn’t that be incredibly boring? Imagine if everyone looked like me I’d say – and they’d groan I guess. I’d have a joke about who fancied who in the room! More groans and a few embarrassed laughs. About who likes this type of music or that sort of computer game. There’d be chatter. And then I would turn it back to people. People across the world, people in the UK, people who are different to each of us. Even identical twins are different to each other as they have different experiences and independent thought. That in fact means everyone else in the world is different to each of us! All 7.8ish billion of them. To prove its size, I’d show them the WORLDOMETER (https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/), an real time meter of our planet’s population. Mouths would gape wide open as they’d witness births and deaths in real time. Births and deaths of people not like us. But just like us are born and live and die. However, they do it differently, especially the living bit. But I’d bring it all back to the fact that all of these 7.8ish billion people are valuable because they are different.
People who are different to us are interesting. They know different things and have had different experiences in life. We can learn from them and they from us. Like little bouncy Albi over the road, the fact that there are different types of human within our species, makes us all that more interesting. It’s worth celebrating and rejoicing in. I recommend it to everyone.