[The staff common room] was real boredom, not just modish ennui. Boredom, the numbing annual predictability of life, hung over the staff like a cloud. From it flowed cant, hypocrisy, and the impotent rage of the old who know they have failed and the young who suspect they will fail. The senior masters stood like Gallows sermons; with some of them one had a sort of vertigo, a glimpse of the bottomless pit of human futility... a sere notifier of what is.

Daniel Martin (1977)