Good luck to Lewis Thompson from Year 9 who has been selected to compete in the X30 World karting Finals in Le Mans, France. This event will see competitors from around the world travel to France to take part in the competition and this is a great honour for Lewis to be included.

Lewis has had many successes with his karting and this month was on the podium in both finals of the LGM series National Championship that he competes in.

This is an excellent opportunity for Lewis and we wish him a safe and successful trip!

For more information about the event, visit www.x30world.com/iame.international.final/

Monday 26^th September 2016

When his audience heard that his latest novel featured fairies as the bad guys, Peadar O’Guilin quickly reversed our image of these creatures by describing the Irish Sidhe as malevolent human sized creatures.  In Irish mythology they are sinister beings who seek revenge on humans for banishing them to the underworld.  Even today farmers plough around fairy forts, and a motorway was diverted around a hawthorn tree said to be sacred to the fairies.

In The Call, the fairies have been kidnapping teenagers for the past 25 years, and taking them to the grey land, a sinister underworld where they have a whole day to fight for their lives.  They are only away from the real world for 3 minutes, but few of them return alive or unscathed.  Ireland has been completely cut off from the rest of the world, so there is no internet, transport or communications.  The government has created survival colleges where children are trained to combat the violence they will find when they are called.  Nessa, the main character, has to contend with her disability caused by childhood polio.

Peadar loves reading science fiction, fantasy, thrillers, and his favourite authors are George R R Martin and Neal Stephenson.  Lord of the Rings was his favourite book when he was a child.  He loves being a writer, although he works part of the week as a computer programmer.  The hardest part is the redrafting and editing to create a finished novel, as this process often produces new ideas which he then has to find a way of putting in the book.

The dystopian and political elements of The Call should inspire the year 9 boys, who are studying The Hunger Games and Animal Farm in their English lessons.   He talked to a year 7 class about stories and creative writing.  Peadar is soon to visit Waterstones in London, and tour the USA to promote his new book.

Tuesday 13th September 2016 Merchant Taylors’ swimming team opened their season with a home match against Manchester Grammar School. Our new year 7 swimmers proved to be a good addition to the team with many great swims notably from J Carney and A Curd to win their age group 39 points to 37. Joseph Cameron-Mansour lead the battle of the Under 13’s with two fine wins swimming 50 freestyle in 30 sec. Their score was a 2 point lose 36-38. All the under 15’s put in a great effort with George Wyn- Jones winning a great battle in the 5om freestyle. Despite their effort they lost by 6 Points. Throughout the match the lead changed with every swim, but special praise must go to the Open team C Leece, M Johnson, J Spinks and 3 great new additions to the team, S Davies, Issac Lea and Y Cai. Despite all their efforts we were only 2 point ahead going into the last event the open 4x50m Freestyle relay meaning it was all down to the last race. I have never seen an MGS open team suffer such a defeat, the open teams victory took them to a massive win 45 points to 24. Overall the final result was MTS 155 MGS 147 giving only our second win over MGS in 20 years.