Rabbit Foot Spasm Band frontman and devoted working class dad at odds with Oxford . . . and the world

A child’s first day at school is bound to be stressful. For one thing I can’t figure out how to use the camera on my smartphone.

The NHS website offers a “First Day at School” Help Page. But at no point does it proffer advice on how to line your terrified offspring up against a wall in their new uniform, take a few snapshots, and post them on Facebook.

I’m participating in this vanity operation so I can later look back at his smiling face and say ‘here is the little person I love more than anything in the world‘. I can think ‘here was my main companion for four precious years‘. And I will have captured the last moment before I had to share him with a world of teachers, classrooms and corridors. Because once he crosses that threshold I know a part of his life will be lost to me forever.

I remember my first day at school. How we were cramped around desks at the mercy of our shouty teacher who, had she ever made it to university, could have gained a First in halitosis.

Such teachers are now a thing of the past. My children’s teachers are smart, clever and clean. But the trauma hadn’t entirely dissipated when I recently attended my first Parents’ Evening.

I press the buzzer and am lead through to the brightly coloured classroom. I’m invited to crouch down on to a green plastic chair. This reduces me to roughly the height of a garden gnome. The teacher congratulates my child on his brilliance and pulls out a folder filled with his artwork and photographs.

Here are whole episodes in his life that I have no knowledge of. There’s a charming photo of him holding a washing up liquid bottle in the air above the caption “Exercising Curiosity”. It’s so sweet that I could melt. And it’s at this point that his teacher begins to talk about his “Targets”.

I feel my jaw drop. The teacher may be as cynical as I am but her face remains a model of professional seriousness.

What sort of world have I led you into Son? Where at the age of four people are already setting you “targets”? Since when was your world of playfulness and imagination reduced to this grim list, grooming you for a future of offices and disappointment?

On this list of ‘successful outcomes’ there’s nothing you can’t handle. You already know your alphabet. Hanging your coat on to a peg is going to be a doodle. It’ll be a bit like learning to ride a bike, once you know what that’s like.

By now there are other parents queuing at the door, waiting to hear about their child’s “targets”. I’m embarrassed to find myself switch off. On my gnome chair I’m suddenly back in my own classroom. It’s as though the past 30 years hadn‘t happened.

Once again I’m ignoring the teacher. And I cannot stop myself from staring out of the window.