That David Beckham once did something which endeared himself to me. When he first dropped his son Brooklyn off at school in Madrid, he walked away blubbing like a one-year-old that’s just fallen off a Honda FireBlade. Assuming he wasn’t crying because the £1,300 per term fees meant he’d have to sell a few Bentleys, he was showing himself to be like us. Bless him.
This September, Annabel is going to school for the first time. As a transition from her pre-school, it couldn’t be easier. She’s already in the same building, using the same playground, with the same children, and seeing the teachers and helpers she’ll be with during her Reception year. She’s even had a letter from her first teacher, saying how excited the school is to welcome her as a pupil. As traumatic changes go, it’ll be like emerging from a nice bath to wrap yourself in a warm fluffy dressing gown and sit drinking cocoa in front of a cosy old fire.
When I first went to school it wasn’t like that. Bang. One day I was at school. I knew nobody, the teachers were trained by the Wehrmacht, the buildings was constructed from flaky asbestos, each lesson lasted a calendar decade and we were hit with friction-taped tyre-levers for daring to blink.
But I fear for Annabel – will she understand that she’ll be asked politely to learn? She’s never had to deliberately learn anything before. She just sometimes wants to know things and is told. So far she’s never wanted to know about, say, the Repeal of the Corn Laws. What if she’s the only child who’s never asked about it? Shall I tell her anyway? Will trying to teach her put her off learning? Will she grow up with a life-long aversion to repealing crop-based legislature? Would this harm her if she later becomes an MP and pays off my mortgage with your money?
Panic, you see, is setting in. Oh and there’s the clothes. Rightly wary of sending her to school a) virtually naked or b) wearing slightly the wrong clothes (which would be far worse) we’ve bought hundreds of polo tops, skirts, socks and so on. She’ll be able to wear a brand-new set of clothes every school day for the rest of her years - until she reaches the sixth form and inevitably decides to dress like Lady GaGa.
And food? Will she eat food at school? She’s eaten food at home. I’ve seen her do it. But will their food match up? If there’s the slightest hint of bits in it, or it’s a tiny bit too hot, or it contains so much as a molecule which hasn’t been clearly stamped with the face of a Disney Princess she’ll starve by November - although as I recall, I was fed solely on fragments of red-hot lava smeared in mercury and after a while your body gets used to it.
But will I cry when the day comes? No, I don’t think so. And it’s for this reason: rightly terrified of Annabel not being utterly au-fait with the latest trends, and nervous of her being picked on for not having the best stuff, I shall spend, spend, spend on mobile phones, laptops, games consoles, DVDs, iPODs, digital cameras and more, so she won’t be left out. And I’ll bung her into school, nip home and play with all my new swag. September can’t come soon enough.