Sending your eldest child to secondary school is an emotional experience - and it puts a strain on your purse, writes Ailish Connolly
THE CHICKENS have arrived, fine fat bantams, and have settled beautifully into their suburban courtyard where they now lay away to their little chicken hearts' content.
The 13-year-old daughter of a friend charges €3 for a half dozen guaranteed organic, freerange eggs. She has studied chicken husbandry all summer with a ferocity and intensity that would make Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Mr Freerange Chicken champion, proud. She can horrify you with the gory details of a battery hen's life till she has you convinced never again to purchase a supermarket chicken fillet.
Her mother innocently tried to throw some kitchen scraps to the new arrivals and practically had the head eaten off her. "Only if it's organic, mother." She'd wither you, that same young lady but you get the feeling she'll do well in life, taking egg money to a whole new level. There's talk of a cockerel next and there's much fun speculating on what time "mother" will be crowed out of the bed at and what will be flung in the general direction of this mythical cock.
There's also talk of ducks and I'll be down for a gawk when the live action craic begins. The Good Lifeis happening in a suburb near you. We're stretched to a kitten, living on the edge like we do.
She arrived last night and the poor hound almost had to be tranquillised, such was his terror (we have long ago decided he has the tender soul of a poet), and reassured with much love and fuss that he is still the main man. "He'll get used to her," the husband declared.
There's a lot to get used to in this season of mists and mellow fruitfulness; new schools, new beginnings, the revving up of the educational attainment merry-go-round in preparation for the academic new year.
The eldest son has just started secondary school and I'm trying, rather badly it has to be said, to let him take his own run at it. What I want to do is whisk him up into the car, cover him in kisses, squeeze him with hugs and drive him right into the classroom.
Mind him and cosset him and fix him till the husband chides wearily: "No, he's a big boy now, he'll get used to it." Yes, but he looks so young and vulnerable and long-leggedly adolescent. I did drive him the first day and he hissed "don't kiss me" at the gates and when he got out of the car my heart screeched and every fibre longed to claw back at something, time maybe, to hold back on his inevitable move away from me. I've never felt this way before, not even the day he or my daughter started junior infants. I've a chance to again as the younger whelp starts junior infants. I can wail and flail and take to the bed, but I won't. There's something about the secondary school wrench.
It could be the empty purse feeling - €400 for the secondary school books alone and many schools advise parents to get a second set of school books as they are so heavy for the youngsters to carry. Some of the books contain the complete Junior Cert curriculum,ie three years, in one volume. One mother discovered her son's bag weighed the same as her suitcase had on a flight two weeks earlier - 15kg.
Wave the magic wand, get another lot. That's dandy for those who can afford it and even those who can might baulk at forking out on the double, but for many parents, it's stretching it to get the one lot of books. The lists seem to change every year, so handing them down between siblings is rarely possible.
Even kitting out the kids for primary school may be difficult. The back-to-school allowance is €200 for each eligible child aged 2 to 11 and is €305 for each eligible child aged 12 to 22. €305 wouldn't even cover the books for a first-year student, not to mention uniforms, sports gear and equipment, shoes, school bags, stationery, photocopying and the great illusory "voluntary" contribution, a contribution demanded from parents on the first day of the new school term, whatever their circumstances. There are school book rental schemes and book grant schemes operational in some schools, but they are by no means nationwide and are run at the discretion of school principals and management.
Has the Department of Education ever considered operating a non-profit website where our schoolchildren could download their books on to a laptop or home computer, chapter by chapter or topic by topic, for a small fee? Downloads that they could print off when needed, cutting back on waste and saving our darlings from a bad back later on in life.
September continues the bank busting summer refrain of "gimme", "get me" and "I want", with "I need" and "can I have a tenner for . . . " Wouldn't you just love to say "no" the odd time? Shock them into an appalled silence. "No, no, no. No, you can't have another fiver because you spent the last one on chips and Fanta", "no you aren't getting money for another lock, look for the old one".
Then there's the after-school activities list. Mums and dads read it and weep. You'll do well to get away with a bill for €2,000 in the annual bunfight also known as back to school.
Me, I'm thinking of getting into eggs. Aside from publishing, it's where the money is these days. "One mother discovered that her son's bag weighed the same as her suitcase had on a flight