Summer Term Tired

Madeleine Thompson - 18 May 18

One of my strangest memories from my early teens was the time a girl from my school who I sort of knew but wasn’t really my friend, invited me to go to an RSPB evening with her and her family.   Being of a shy disposition and with a very inactive social life, I felt very flattered by this and cordially accepted.    The evening itself was fairly dull and a part of me died when she later told me that her mum had told her to invite somebody from school, and she couldn’t cope with the humiliation of inviting one of her actual friends, so she made do with me.   A bit like rent-a-friend.    Brutal.

Anyway, social humiliation aside, the evening stood out for me for a bizarre reason.   Before we went out, we spent some time at her house with her mum, dad and sister.  And they told me that they had a family love of the Radio Times.  For younger readers, this was the absolute ultimate in TV-guides in the 90s, at a time when there were no decent guides on your actual TV, and at Christmas you had to set time aside to go through the Christmas edition with a red pen, circling all the programmes you were going to commit to VHS.

Their love of the Radio Times was a little bit creepy, given it wasn’t Christmas, but even creepier was that they knew which day of the week it was based on the colour of the page.   So, Wednesday I think might have been orange or green, I forget which, but it brought them great comfort to know they could associate that with the day in the guide.   I found this sinister and fascinating in equal measure and never, ever forgot it.

I am not somebody who tends to split my world in such an ordered way, but I make an exception for seasons.  I see seasons in colours and I see the year stretch ahead of me in great chunks of colourful time.  A bit like a seasonal pie chart.   It helps me to literally see forward when I’m working out what I need to do next and what is coming up.  So, for example, Autumn will forever be the orange season and Winter a kind of pale blue.

It makes sense that I find myself viewing the school year like this too, although the chunks of time are shorter, and the colours haven’t shown themselves yet.

In my school year pie chart, we’re near the end and schools around the UK will be approaching the summer half term holiday soon.

Is it just me or does it feel like these mini-holidays creep up on us?  One moment, you’re happily pottering, safe in the knowledge that there are no school deadlines coming up.  And then you check the school newsletter and realise that, jeepers, it’s next week and you haven’t made sure your kids have completed their term homework yet, or returned their books, or paid the money for the trip, and the sunflower your child is growing for their homework needs to do a hell of a lot more growing before then.

As well as this element of surprise, I find I tend to reflect the disappearing school year in my approach to school prep.   My standards for things become much more relaxed by the time summer comes around.

At the start of the year, I buy posh labels with their names printed on and I label everything I can see that might be taken into school.   By the end of the year, all labels have become stuck in that pit in the washing machine that nobody dares put their hands in, and I’ve started writing their first name in massive capital letters with my Mothercare pen on any part of clothing that will accept ink.

And I start the year getting beautiful, perfectly measured shoes which are expertly polished every Sunday night and  I end the year buying replacements online and resorting to colouring in (with that Mothercare pen) any scuffed bits, in the hope they might see us through to the Summer hols.

Of course, it isn’t just shoes and labels, but I do find myself gently sliding into Summer during this last term, as everything gets taken over by hot and sticky days, sun cream and sunhats, and I see the newness of the school year fading away.

I hope it’s not just me that is like this (say it isn’t so).   I know that the newness will come back at the end of the summer hols, and I’ll go and find those labels and lovely shoes again.   For now though, I think I’ll just let myself slide.

Madeleine Thompson

I am mum to my little chicks, Aisha, 6 and Abel, 4. Originally from Yorkshire, UK, I now live in a little town in the North West. By day, I work for myself as a freelance PA. By night, I indulge my passion for writing.

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