My son, who is a literal baby, has started school and I am glad. Mostly this is entirely self-interested since, for the past six months, I’ve been taking three hours of my day to do the twice-daily commute to his nursery, which is near our old house and thus a 90-minute round trip. The fact that I did this for so long, in wind, rain and excoriating heat, and without ever writing about it, makes me as brave, and manly, as one of those war photographer guys. His new school, by contrast, is 12ft from our front door, meaning we could probably land him there most mornings with a glancing headbutt, and the joy of this convenience has not left my bones since we learned he’d gotten his place.
We’ve been trying to prepare him for his school days by reminding him it’ll be different, displaying his uniform and, since he has more than a dozen school-age cousins, showing him a lot of back-to-school content in the past few weeks. He has long been fond of seeing updates from the family WhatsApp, which I guess he considers a small, mildly boring TV show centred almost entirely on his cousins, my dad’s dog and blurry pics of his aunties and uncles drinking wine.
