Uniformly crestfallen over school demands

OPINION:It's that time of year when new school uniforms and books test the patience and finances of parents, writes Orna Mulcahy.

SCHOOLS ARE perfectly entitled to copy Premier League football teams and change their strip every so often but this isn't a great year to be doing it. We're facing key uniform changes in two different schools, which no doubt were approved at committee level last year before the economy hit a wall - but which now look like wild extravagance.

Crests have been dropped and skirts introduced. Hairy tweed has been replaced by gabardine that won't smell like an old dog when it gets wet. There is new raingear in one school, a swish new tracksuit with hoodie in the other, new socks, new jumpers, and all of it at saucy prices, as my grandmother used to say.

These fresh, bold new designs are naturally not available from the second-hand basket, but have to be queued for in Arnotts. Then there's the bother of sewing on name tapes, which is nothing compared to the bother of buying the new tracksuit all over again after about a week, when the first one has disappeared - stolen! Or, more likely, left at the bus stop along with the new hockey stick and the specially-moulded mouth guard.

Now, in both cases the schools have said that the uniforms are to be phased in, so for God's sake, don't go throwing out perfectly good skirts and jumpers, but still.

The memory of my St Mary's gymslip practically sweeping the floor as I waited to grow into it makes me want to do right by the girls in this one small thing. They will have their new uniforms, in the right size, so that 30 years from now no one can tell me their life is a mess because they didn't have the new skirt, and people sniggered.

Mind you, the designs could be a little more inspired. Have you ever been to Belfast around three in the afternoon when the girls from six or seven schools sashay down the street in the most amazing uniforms - purples and yellows, reds and blues, greys and blacks, all with astonishingly short skirts, berets even, at an interesting angle, narrow ties askew? It's a marvellous sight.

The style could be a Northern thing. My mother's uniform in the Louis convent, Carrickmacross, circa 1940, was a navy velvet dress, with a Carrickmacross lace collar. I swear Dolce Gabbana did a similar dress a few seasons ago, though the lace was nowhere near as fine as the nuns'.

Back in the here and now, a friend is fulminating because "Dubes" have been banned from her daughter's school, which has decreed black shoes only, and where do you find black shoes that a teenager will actually wear, especially as they cannot be elevated in any way? The answer is in a few select shops known to the inner circle of perfect mummies, where the best designs are already gone, so you compromise with a strappy number that gets laughed at on the first day, for - you know - being babyish, and so will not be worn again. Another €90 down the drain.

Uniform time is when we need our European cousins most. We need those neat Spanish shoes, and those pretty French vests with wool content that could be worn on the winter days on which they go out without their new, regulation, fleece-lined rain jacket, whereabouts unknown after October 1st.

Don't get me started on the books, particularly the workbooks that can't be recycled because, oh brilliant wheeze, they have to write the answer into them. In pen. Presumably the genius that thought that one up has long since retired to a yacht in the south of France.

When I tell the children about the hand-me-down books of yore, covered in leftover wallpaper, and with traces of old banana sandwiches between the pages, they shriek in horror. Theirs must be ordered on the internet, and arrive nicely packaged and pre-covered in plastic wrappers.

They can't understand my love of second-hand books or my excitement at finding a great stash in the St Vincent de Paul shop in Wicklow town, rather than the usual rows of Dan Browns and Penny Vincenzis. The lady behind the desk tells me they have a publisher's proof reader living nearby who gives them piles of books.

I get six fashionable reads for €6. "It's buy one get one free day," said the lady, and I dive back into the pile for two Swedish detective novels that I already own, but these are in better condition, I tell her, and I could lend the old ones to people and not worry about getting them back. My 13-year-old daughter stands by, eyes to heaven.

"Why do you always talk to people in shops?" she asks me as we leave. "It's quite embarrassing." Well, if you were to worry about all the times that you embarrass your children in public, you would have to sit in a darkened room and take tablets. It takes SO little to embarrass them. Just existing in certain situations is enough, but obviously complaining about anything in public is excruciating.

"Please don't say anything about the paninis being expensive, like you did the last time," my daughter says in Arnotts' cafe, where we've come to recover from the ordeal of the uniforms. "That was, like, so embarrassing." So I don't complain at all, even though the chowder is like wallpaper paste.