Happy Pancake Day
Just as there is a recipe for pancakes, there is a recipe for life. We need ‘ingredients’ to help us to live a good life.
As you know, one of our school values is ‘do look after property – don’t waste or damage things’. Many of us would like to do whatever we want, in any way we choose, whenever we choose. For some people doing that would seem to be the best and easiest way to live. Rules can seem boring, being organised can seem boring, and having to be terribly careful about things can be boring. ‘Do as you like, when you like, slapdash, chuck it around, who cares about the mess’, seems so much more fun, but it’s not how we should live and it’s not much fun in the long run.
To demonstrate this, we engaged ‘Ms Sugar’ (Ms Williams) and ‘Mr Flour’ (Mr Young) to be pancake chefs in a specially created ‘kitchen’ on the School Hall’s stage. We very clearly explained the ingredients needed and the method required to make the perfect pancake. Whilst Mr Flour confidently executed this, Ms Sugar threw in exactly how much she liked, in the order she fancied, with no thought to the recipe at all!
Once both had cooked some of their mixture, we invited Miss Winson to carry out a taste test; whilst Mr Flour’s pancake proved to be delicious, Ms Sugar’s was declared inedible! It might have seemed like a good idea to take the easy way out and be careless, but Ms Sugar failed in two ways. Firstly, she wasted the ingredients and the money they cost. Secondly, she failed to feed anyone with the food, which isn’t very kind. So we do need rules – they can make the world a tastier place!
We should remember that we are not always right and that rules are there for a purpose. Sometimes we should take advice and not be too proud to do as others advise remembering that if we do as we like, heedless of others, we cannot expect things to turn out well for us. We further reflected that, just as there is a recipe for pancakes, there is a recipe for life. We need ‘ingredients’ to help us to live a good life. The girls suggested some wonderful ‘ingredients’ we could use in our lives, such as kindness, truthfulness, helpfulness, patience and perseverance, to create a caring recipe for happiness and peace in the world, a recipe for success and not disaster.
