School's in

You can't half tell it's back-to-school;I haven't posted a blog in weeks, it's really quite sunny and Waterloo Road is back with a new headteacher. That makes about six in three years-I blame their canteen. I was in our school canteen today trying to score a Rice Krispy square but no-there were dark mutterings about Healthy Eating and 'new guidelines'. In practice this means that our pupils, in the nutritional hinterland they inhabit,are having their sausage rolls for breakfast in the High Street and that there was no discernible sugar in the mealy little tile of shortbread I was forced to tackle. Totally not worth the calories, so into the grey bin it went, only to be summarily blended with the blue bin contents at the end of the day by the cleaners. Our environmental club; the 'Ecowarriors' are ill-equipped for battle against a tribe of ancient retainers armed with big Coronation Street hair, watered-down cleaning products and blue tabards. They mop quite vigorously in the hour or so after the kids have gone home as there are still plenty of teachers about to slip up. Then they repair to the toilets presumably to fling heavily diluted apple-scented bleach about with their eyes closed. No-one knows where these products can be obtained just as no-one recognises or would choose the colours used to paint school walls. Even the most enthusiastic Year 8 doesn't own a felt tip set big enough to include Smacked-Bottom Pink,Chewed Pencil-end Brown or Gob Green.

I think Bert and Alvin are 'in charge' of our cleaners but they are (a)scared and (b)having a prolonged celebration of Alvin's 60th so have been giddy since Monday. Alvin handed round a cake with a photo on it of himself in what appeared to be a saucy postcard-he was leering slightly in a sailor hat. Later that day I clearly heard Bert singing 'I'd like to teach the world to sing' with no regard for the irony of the sentiment when within earshot of the Geography department.He must have been on a sugar high. We don't allow such things among the punters;if one is caught twitching and tapping like something out of Girl, Interrupted after break,he gets his bag searched for 'Boost'. Water has caught on,finally, and is ostentatiously carried about the way celebrities do when photographed at Heathrow.They still spill it on their books all the time but they just dry out nice and hard and crinkly on the giant school radiators. No need to revisit the lurid stickiness of the Sukie Suncap era and you can make them carry on using their concertina exercise book, just for the craic.

The new first years are noticeably tiny yet encumbered with bags large enough to transport dead bodies, skirts which actually reach their knees and gender-specific hair styles. As they go up through the school, the bags and skirts get a lot smaller and the hair bigger and bigger;they start growing it around the time our parents' generation were sitting the Junior Certificate. By the time they reach sixth form the brushed-forward pompadour of their GCSE years has developped into a magnificent Axel Rose or Priscilla Presley in her wedding photos. Some have no bags or books at all and just trail about in a manky little cloud like Linus from Charlie Brown without his blanket. This is just the sort of individual who complains all the time about the smell of the place or its temperature. The latter is highly erratic and never suits anybody; artic in the staff toilets, tropical in the office- everyone is properly scared of the secretary. The former is,given the quantity of adolescent bodies at large in the place and the military junta of the fancifully named 'ancilliary staff', extraordinary.