It's over 35 years since I left school, but I still get "that feeling" on the first Monday in September. A subtle chill in the air. Leaves and flowers suddenly looking limp and pallid. A deep feeling of foreboding about the frozen rugby pitches and impenetrable maths homework still to come.
But now they have the vape...so they can be miserable yet relaxed. Looking cooool & stupid (sorry dumb) at the same time...๐ค
Itโs the fear of not knowing which coat to wear that worries me this time of year.
I spend every September even more sweaty and flustered than usual. That appalling meteorological combination of quite warm but absolutely pissing down.
I bunked off the whole of rugby for a year. God knows how I got away with it.
My mate used to live near where we did sports. You could opt out of football and just choose to โjog aroundโ the pitch. We could then get through the fence, leg it to his house, eat cake, listen to his dadโs Derek and Clive LP and be back before anyone noticed. Good times.
I had a mate who did the same thing, and when his report turned up at the end of the year, his PE report read simply: "Satisfactory."
My PE teacher would definitely have been satisfied if I'd just kept away for a full year.
My PE teacher was feared by all. The next year I thought โI canโt keep skiving off, Iโve got to go back to rugby this yearโ so I turned up. He called the register. โDredge?โ โHere.โ There was an incredibly long pause. Then he just carried on with the registerโฆ
I'm intrigued, John - where did you go when everybody else was playing rugby?
matron
"a wet, and a weed, chiz chiz"
I hated it. Still do. My only memories of playing rugby are of being trodden into the mud by boys twice my size, and PE teachers laughing at my total inability to understand the rules.
I used to stand on the pitch and hope nobody noticed I was completely inanimate. The teacher did and regularly kicked the ball at my head. This is why I never played for England.
My anxiety peaks in May with the niggling feeling that I should be revising...
Iโve been out of grad school for a decade, and retired for a year, and every couple of months like clockwork I have some version of the dream where Iโm taking a final exam, having never been to class. Iโm over it.
I still get upset by the โback to schoolโ notices in shops.
I don't have kids, so I must admit I get a little jolt of happiness knowing that everywhere else gets a little quieter when they've all trudged back to the learning mill.
Yeah. Except the roads. I think there should be tunnels with conveyor belts to all schools.
School run traffic at 8.30am and 3.30pm every single day, though.
There is that. Apparently there's a pervert in every bush now, meaning that parents are forced to drive their kids EVERYWHERE and park wherever they damn well please.
Where did this idea come from?
I don't know, I'm not a parent, but it seems to be driven at least in part by tabloid hysteria and the rise of social media. There's also the entitlement of the modern age to factor in - if one has a wanky car, one must be seen driving it as much as possible.
Utterly sickening. I'm only a step-parent of a 36 year old, who lives in Scotland.
Ugh, I hate being _that_ person, but I would drop my kids off on the way to work (anything from 10 to 70 miles away from home). It would have been impracticable for me to walk them to school, then walk home to drive to work without my making myself late. When old enough, they walked themselves.
Zero problem with someone having to drive if they're a couple of miles or more from their kids' school. My ire is for the sort I see 'round here driving less than 1,000 yards.
Although in my case, mine were about half a mile away- and I only did it when they were too small to walk on their own (because breakfast club was incorporated into the school building). So it was a safe handover thing :-)
LUXURY!
In my day, etc...
๐
When the exams finished, I still had the foreboding feeling that even if I read a billboard, I should be memorising it... ๐
I know what you mean, but funnily enough I now get the opposite, precisely because Iโm *not* at school! Life is good, especially today!
We live near a school. Six weeks of normal life now turned upside down twice a day because the students all seem to get driven to school by the worst driver in their family.
That's a shame. This is my favourite time of year.
Me too.
Ah, honestly - good for you. It's just riddled with melancholy for me. I'm very much a "long hot summer" kind of person.
No, I'm not a summer person at all.
The Midland Bank school bag which showed your rich Aunty had been round over the holidays.
Come and save with the Shanghai And Hong Kong Banking Corporation kids! Doesn't have the same ring does it?
I was terrible at all sports, summer or winter. The only thing I enjoyed was swimming, and we only did that at primary school.
I was even terrible at that. After a full year of swimming lessons at primary school I could swim 6 feet. If the pool were 6 feet deep.
Yep, same here. Even the 'back to school' signs in shop windows still make me anxious.
On the plus side, I think it's more weighted with promise than any other time of year . A feeling that the supernatural is closer, the thought of dark nights with fire, gloriously pummelling gales, crystalline mornings and before long (if you've been good), a stack of presents.
I'll remind you of that in the middle of November when it's relentlessly pissing down every day.
See I like that, cos I can go out and not be blinded and burned by sun AND there are less bastards out and about to upset me.
Haha! Yeah, I'll be whingeing the moment the heating and big light start going on.
Youโre not one of them Big Light people are you? I only put the big light on when Iโve lost the remote control or my glasses.
I find the big light goes on more and more.
Aye, we're made of money in our house.
Similarly, despite a hatred of maths, I still have a strong urge to purchase a geometry set at this time of year. Perhaps the neat, regimented instruments in their shiny tin will help translate the impenetrable language of algebra for me.
The crispness and stiffness of a new school uniform. A grid of seven hours on five days filled with horrific forbearance.
Itchy trousers.
A shirt about four sizes too big.
God, yeah. "Stop moaning, you'll grow into it".
Autumn and winter were miserable. I hated rugby too. At least summer had warmth. Thing is, when we started doing stuff like hockey and cricket indoors, I actually discovered some things I wasn't bad at, and enjoyed it so much more. Also: whoever invented cross-country deserves scrofula. And piles
I loved playing football, but I loved playing it the most on warm, light summer nights.
I relived that very feeling last week whilst on a campervan break in the Lakes. Me my lads and my mate with his kids played all night until the sun went down and then someone stuck the headlights on and we cracked on playing till about 10:30pm
Things like five a side indoors too, where you weren't just having to deal with meatheads, but you actual had to use technique. It turned out I could pass a ball