When I get to school on Friday morning, I am handed a plastic sleeve with the day’s events spelled out. These include: an itinerary complete with a colour-coded risk assessment for the entire day; an itemised list, collating each parent’s immediate responsibilities; and a map of our journey, including the tube stops we’ll be using, and another of the Natural History Museum itself, with its prime areas of import handily circled. Under my name is listed a group of four children – my son and three of his friends – so, all things considered, this should be a reasonably light load. But as we set off for the tube, I feel mounting trepidation.
In my son’s three-and-a-half years at this school, I’ve never volunteered for any of his trips, which has long given me a sense of ambient guilt. So much so, that I did volunteer a few months back, before sadly having to cancel due to work. This had the unexpected consequence of making my son extremely upset, turning my mild sense of detached guilt into something like burning shame, once I realised I’d never considered that he might actually want me there.
This is partly because I’m self-obsessed and, moreover, guilty of treating his school as a place I send him to so I can get some work done. But it’s also because the idea of my dad coming on school trips simply never occurred to me. Seeing my father within any school environment would have been like getting on a coach to the Ulster American Folk Park in the company of the Sphinx, or the old Channel 4 logo.
I don’t think my dad was even aware of these things. In any case, and I quote, ‘I saw enough of yous at home’
I don’t think my dad was even aware we went on these things. The telltale sign would, of course, have been all the permission slips he was asked to sign but, since he had 11 children, I remember long stretches of weeknight evenings during which he would listlessly scrawl his signature on sheafs of mounting paper, each proffered by us in the manner of scheming viziers presenting proclamations to a distracted king. Intrigued by such memories, I call my dad. He initially maintains that parents going on school trips wasn’t a thing in his day, before immediately admitting that it was, and that he never took part because, and I quote, “I saw enough of yous at home.” (This conversation also reminds me that, by the time I was in secondary school, he’d begun abdicating even his light admin responsibilities, by avidly encouraging us to forge his signature ourselves).
I regard such moves with slight envy as we embark on our trip into the city. My four dependents snake in front of me wearing the trademark hi-viz garb shared by both primary schoolers and young offenders. Whenever I’ve previously passed such trips on the tube, the sprightly tots in their reflective jackets, barked into obedience like a tiny, misbehaving airport runway crew, I’ve thought “poor bastards”, not sure if I meant them or their teachers. Thankfully, I can confirm that the kids and teachers themselves are truly delightful company, it’s just that I find it increasingly difficult to keep them within said company. It’s a counter-intuitive canard of quantum physics that, mathematically speaking, individual particles of matter can theoretically pop out of existence in one part of the universe and reappear a billion lightyears away. Having now spent seven hours in the company of 40 of them, I can confirm the same is true of seven-year-olds.
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When we arrive at the museum, we gasp at the blue whale, steady ourselves in the earthquake machine, take pictures by the rhinos – my son’s favourite – and marvel at the roaring, animatronic T-Rex which has been garbed in a Christmas jumper and Santa hat for the occasion.
And I learn so much. Magma is nine times hotter than boiling water. Japan gets so many earthquakes because it sits between four tectonic plates. The tail of a diplodocus contains 80 bones and scientists think it may have been used to make a cracking noise like a bullwhip. I learn none of this from reading things directly. Instead, my fugitive charges dispatch themselves to every wall and screen they can find and report back with as much information as their bulging little brains can hold.
Astoundingly, they’re all present and in one piece by the time we head home. My son is beaming. “What was your favourite thing you saw today?” I ask him. “You,” he says, after a long pause designed to cause maximum psychic damage. “Well, not really,” he laughs, “probably the blue whale.”