Social media this week has been flooded with photos of children on their first day back at school, or indeed their very first day at school, resplendent in their smart new uniform and their shiny new school shoes. The best one I saw was the almost 16 year-old daughter of a friend of mine, reluctantly agreeing to have what will undoubtedly be the last of such photos that she will allow them to take … until, of course, she graduates from university and they take a picture of her in her gown and mortar board. Unless the crisis in university funding and the possible / probable increase in tuition fees (on the television news last night they were talking about £12,000+ per annum!!) makes it all but impossible for the children of teachers to go university.
Anyway, my friend posted the latest, year 11, photo - neat school uniform with a skirt as short or shorter than the mini-skirts we wore in bygone days - with a comparison picture from her starting secondary - neat school uniform with a skirt down to below her knees. You never know, it might well be the same school skirt.
I remember having a bottle green gabardine mac when I started to attend our local girls’ grammar school. Everyone had to have one; bottle green was the school colour. Even our knickers had to be bottle green. The gabardine mac had a hood, useful to hide the fact that you had neglected to wear the regulation bottle green beret. That first year it drowned me, it was so huge. I wore the same coat right up to the end of my O-Level year, year 11 as they call it nowadays. By then it was rather battered, perfect for a 16 year-old determined to look rather disreputable with the waist cinched in as tightly as possible. Then I progressed to sixth form and in honour of my elevated status my mother decided I needed a new school coat, still bottle green, still a regulation style but in the latest A-line fashion. I hated it but I could not disappoint my parents by continuing to wear the disreputable gabardine mac!
Lucy Mangan, who seems to have moved on to a regular ‘Digested Week” in the Guardian, also wrote about her offspring moving on to secondary school - big school! Children will grow:
“on the whole, breaking the news to my mother that I am intending to avail myself of a weekly laundering service for my son’s school shirts now that he has started big school and moved out of cute little polo shirts and into 14 yards of recalcitrant white cotton that he reduces to a grey rag each day, went quite well. Yes, I am abandoning my northern heritage and the principles by which I was brought up and putting the seal on the soft southernness that has long threatened. But – I am doing this. I cannot add this much ironing, which I hate even more than cooking, because you cannot even eat the results, to my schedule without wishing to die. I am going to pay someone else to do it. If this is the beginning of an inexorable slide into immorality and destitution, so be it. Let the fun begin.”
A little bit of North-South divide going on there!
It’s been a very blustery day here. As I ran round the village first thing almost everyone I spoke to declared that we need to be careful not be blown away. But the wind has kept the clouds and rain at bay. It’s been very warm in the sunshine. My weather app tells me that we have better weather today that our son and family have further south in Buckinghamshire - more North-South divide.
We’re hoping that tomorrow will also be fine so that Phil can cut the grass - still rather too wet today, despite the sunshine - before it turns into a meadow once again.
Our daughter and family appear to be celebrating the end of the first week back in school by going out for Greek food in Slaithwaite. She’s posting pictures of a small boy stretched out, almost asleep on a bench seat in the restaurant. So it goes.
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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