There is something uncanny and magical about a school at night, the windows blazing as you approach in the rain through a patent-leather car park. I’ve been visiting secondary schools with my daughter and every time I walk through the doors of another sprawling maze of linoleum and cubist self-portraits I lose my breath a little. It’s not just the act of entering these buildings, with their smells of piss and pasta and their rickety architecture of adolescence, though it is this a bit. It is this a bit because for all the million-pound immersive experiences where you step inside, I don’t know, the mind of Beethoven or whatever and drink wine from a shoe, there is no faster way to take an adult back in time than by leading them into a suburban school at 6pm on a Thursday.
There we are again, 14, greasy and livid, trying to make decisions about the life we want to lead by picking either French or biology. There we are again, every encounter a humiliation, prickling with lust and allergies, every feeling 100ft tall and made of wax. Visiting a secondary school is like using Ozempic or Botox – on the pavement outside you are large, adult, but when you walk inside you’re shrunk back 30 years. A similar thing happens, actually, when confronted with the new price of things, of train tickets or dinner – a sense of being blown backwards through adulthood, to when such luxuries were similarly out of reach.
