Learning the hard way thanks to the stress of school run

It’s been a while since I’ve done the school run. In fact, come to think of it, I’d never done the school run before. In those dim and distance days when the trainee Creatures of the Night needed a lift to primary school, Mrs Nurden was the delegated driver or, as we did then, the walker. When the boys got bigger they went to school by bus, leaving their dad alone to go to work and do some blue-sky thinking in the car. So when I was asked to add the school run to my already lengthening list of grandad duties it didn’t seem too onerous. Now, I’d read and indeed written about the school run chaos outside some schools as mums with glazed eyes swung huge 4x4s into dubious positions across pavements and over drivers in a desperate bid to deliver little Johnny or Jemima within seconds of the school bell. But until recently I’d never witnessed the twicedaily phenomenon firsthand or been caught up in the maelstrom of human emotions. The nearest I’d come was queuing at the bar waiting for two pints of lager and a packet of crisps. I guess it’s still a relatively relaxed activity if you live near enough to walk. You can just stroll through the other anxious mums, dads and grandparents who are searching for a place to drop off the kids. But if you have a car it’s a completely different ball game. There are many reasons for using a car. You may live a long way away. You may not want to get wet. You may just be lazy. Or you may need to be somewhere else afterwards, say at work. So a car becomes a necessity. They don’t teach you how to do the school run in the Highway Code or on your driving test. Having just encountered one I believe it should now become mandatory. For a start, it

‘You need eyes at the back of your head as you approach the school gates, hunting for that elusive gap to safely deliver the children’

would make far more sense than the dreaded three-point turn. You need eyes at the back of your head as you approach the school gates, hunting for that elusive gap to safely deliver the children. Everyone else is doing exactly the same. There are a number of factors to take into account such as double-parking (no) and stopping on drives in front of gates which have ‘Don’t park here otherwise you will be killed’ notices hammered on them. There is also the logistical nightmare of parking on the correct side so the junior inhabitants can be ejected safely onto the pavement and not into the path of oncoming traffic. But parking is only the first of many factors. The newly-qualified schoolrun operative must also be able to swiftly release the child-proof car seat-belt (a work worthy of Houdini, surely) and with seconds to spare round up the assorted bag of tricks which will have a selection of school books, a letter to parents which should have been read last night and the compulsory water bottle which may or may not have sprung a leak. I think I’ll stick to lion-taming in future. It’s much less stressful.