Schoolgirl error

Oops. My boy was almost humiliated by his useless mother who was convinced that he went back to school tomorrow, but was helpfully disabused of this impression by some helpful school mum friends. Trouble is my boys' school loves to play musical chairs with inset days in order to bump up its attendance figures.

Don't get me started on quite why the teachers can't train during the aeons of school holidays they already spend out of the classroom, but if we are to accept the argument that teaching is so arduous that you need at least six weeks off to recover from a term of managing primary school children, which now I come to think of it isn't quite as preposterous as I first thought, the school regularly snatches back inset days from us parents chomping at the bit to return our beloved offspring to the classroom.

Quite what inset days are for I am not sure, perhaps the teachers simply sit around knocking back neat vodka and having a calming smoke in preparation for the new term. Well I know that is what I would need if I were subjected to a class of 30 under-10s day in day out. I am a jibbering wreck after just six weeks in the company of my four small boys.

Whatever it is they get up to, the school has decided to get smart and match up inset days with the days with the days their pupils are most likely to skive off anyway. In our area of North London that means that the we have two inset days booked for the end of next week, that conveniently match up to the Jewish New Year.

However, there is another inset day that is to be held tomorrow, thereby delaying the start of school by a full 24 hours. Not sure what the purpose of this one is, other than to make all of us who paid through the nose for full price holidays gnash our teeth. For if all three inset days had been tacked on to the end of the holiday, the children would have had this (infinitely cheaper) week off school and I could have gone to a tropical island paradise instead of having a wet week in Wales.

Ah well, at least my son was saved from walking up to a closed school gate tomorrow, and at least I am all up to date with uniform, thanks in part to the kind donation of a school uniform pack from the lovely people from Clothing at Tesco. In return for their generosity I have posted a picture of some of my goodies below and I am nominating fellow mummy blogger Adventures of a Lady in Training to receive her very own pack of school clothes.  Enjoy.

Oh I do like to be beside the seaside

Driving rain, howling wind, grains of sand painfully whipping your face, toes dipped in the waves instantly blue with cold and the temperatures shivering in the low teens. The joys of a British seaside holiday.

As my boys huddled in wetsuits, shrouded in towels to keep out the cold. As we crunched on sandwiches gritty with sand, licked ice creams that were only marginally colder than the air temperature and watched as the black clouds above opened up their bellies to pour cold water on all notions of a sunny day beside the seaside, I vowed never to darken the shores of my native land again.

The thing is Britain may be beautiful, with is verdant fields, rocky cliffs, pretty bays and acres of sandy beaches, but it is also bloody cold and wet, particularly during the summer holidays. You might think that in August you would have an outside chance of good weather, but you would, of course, be wrong. We had to put the heating on during our week in a cottage in Wales, and I was more interested in ordering warming hot chocolates than a Flake 99.

This is not a summer holiday, this is an endurance test. My poor children can make the best of anything, and my eldest was happy to swim in the frozen waves, lips turning a scary bluish tinge after a few moments in the water, while the twins loved slinging pebbles into the icy stream that ran down the centre of the beach. But this is definitely not grown up fun.

For me a beach is about lying on a cushioned lounger, powder white sand hot between my toes, the sea azure clear and bath water warm. If I take a dip it is among flashes of bright tropical fishes, not at the risk of severe hypothermia. I want to drink cocktails, not a hot mug of tea, and I want a beach picnic to be charcoal grilled fresh snapper, not greasy fish and chips.

I think that our perception of holidays squews with age. The reason we found ourselves shivering in Wales at all is thanks to my dewy-eyed memories of childhood holidays spent on the very same beaches, walking along clifftops decked in wild flowers, endlessly hunting for marine treasures in the myriad rockpools, diving under the waves as we dared ourselves to swim ever closer to a creepy shipwreck. All these memories are bright with sunshine, but surely this can't actually have been the case? It was Wales after all.

I just hope that when they are older their memories of our Welsh holiday will blot out all the rain clouds and simply recall the one perfect sunny day that lit up our week of freezing rain.