WOULD YOU PASS THE BACK-TO-SCHOOL TEST?

There’s never been a return like it. But as we present the bizarre new rules, SARAH VINE says: frazzled parents will do whatever it takes...

NOt since my daughter’s first day in reception class, all those years ago, have I been this focused on getting ready for school. the fridge is full of lunchbox food, I’ve stocked up on colour co-ordinated subject folders, each child has a new set of pencils/highlighters/pens and, for once, I know where the hole punch is.

My son’s new school uniform (he was a normal-sized 15-yearold when lockdown began but, in the intervening months, he has morphed into a 6ft 1in daddy longlegs) hangs, labelled and ready, in his wardrobe. there are masks by the front door, tubes of hand sanitiser and a digital thermometer.

In short, everything is in place for what I am predicting will be the happiest moment of this miserable year: the day my kids finally go back to school.

Now, I’m aware that this is not a universally popular view. In fact, many parents, I understand, are extremely reluctant to wave goodbye to their darlings. I respect their feelings entirely. Me? I can hardly contain my excitement.

I love my kids, obviously, despite their repulsive teenage habits and complete inability to shut the fridge door. Or turn out a light. Or hang up a towel.

I just don’t want them in the house, day in day out, bored out of their minds, endlessly requiring endless amounts of food (oh my goodness, the food!) and entertainment. I’m just not that kind of mother.

Once again, maximum respect to those who are. to those who have taken advantage of lockdown to ascend, ninja-like, to the next level of parenting — home-schooling, home-baking, maximising the extra family time to teach their children Mandarin or bridge while simultaneously honing their own watercolour skills — I look upon you in awe, I really do.

Don’t get me wrong: we’ve had some great times together, me and the kids.

there was that time my daughter decided to dye her hair and then, for reasons I have yet to fathom, put the bottle of leftover dye on her bedroom windowsill in the hot sun, whereupon it exploded, covering the entire street, including my bike and the neighbours’ car, in Nice ‘N easy Blue Black.

Or the time my son ordered a pizza at teenage o’clock and then promptly fell asleep so that I was jolted awake at 2.43am by a very irate delivery driver brandishing a large american hot (which I ate ... seemed rude not to) and a bottle of tango.

I could go on but I won’t: you get the picture. Most of the rest of the time it’s been me trying to combine working from home with being a 1950s housewife — and failing dismally to do either to any satisfactory degree.

among the majority of my female friends, this has been a familiar lament. any fantasies we might once have entertained of jacking it all in and leading a genteel stay-at-home existence have evaporated as the reality of what that actually entails has sunk in during lockdown.

It’s as though the universe had decided to issue all women with a gentle reminder of what life without feminism looks like. Cleaning, cooking and carping, basically.

that is why I am having absolutely none of this oh-it’s-going-to-be-so-awful nonsense about how miserable it will be for the poor little lambs when assembly is cancelled and Pe is postponed. I. Don’t. Care.

Sneeze screens in front of desks? fine. Partitions in between rows? Great. as for the end of those cosy schoolrun chats, hooray. I never liked them anyway — and the feeling was undoubtedly mutual.

Look, I’ll even wash my son’s uniform nightly, if that’s what’s required. Just please, please . . . take them back.