I am beginning to wonder whether my boys will be properly in school ever again – and I mean full-time at school and with PE and activities and a fully stocked canteen where they can eat food not provided me. Maskless in lessons and corridors would be even better.

Have you noticed that some naturally withdrawn children are using their masks to hide behind? It’s like they’ve almost started adopting the masks as their face – like it’s part of their identity, their security blanket. They want to keep the mask on, even while playing sport, or at lunch they want to eat a bite, put the mask back on, take another bite, put it back on. 

The continued policy of masking at school just to be safe – with no end date in sight – makes me terribly worried that being over cautious has a cost, while the benefits are uncertain. 

Anyhow, I digress. Son2’s year got closed down this week, which is what I’d meant to write about. He – and all his friends – are thrilled. He’d left already on his bike when I got the urgent email from school about the closure. The bus kids had already arrived and been ushered straight into quarantine, sending mums back at work into a tailspin. 

I called Son2 to tell him to turnaround, and, of course, the news had travelled fast. 

“Is it true? Is school cancelled?” he whooped with delight down the line. In the background I could hear quite a commotion, like a party had already started. Cheerful voices noisily hollered to each other. Son2 began to cheer. The only thing missing from the jubilation was the sound of glasses clinking.

“Yep, you can come home,” I sighed. “They’ve closed down the whole year.”

“The WHOLE YEAR?” he replied in astonished amazement. 

“Yep, the whole of year eight.”

“Oh! I thought you meant for the rest of the year,” he explained, because honestly the way this term is going with all the cancellations makes anything seems possible. (He admitted later that this scared him a bit – the thought there’d be no more school all year. It’s actually, hopefully, just for a week – adding to the first missed week at the start of school.) 

He arrived back home shortly after, at about 8.05am.`My other son is on study leave, so was also home, but while he can be relied on to study independently, Son2 needed supervising to make sure he actually logged on to online school.

Later that morning, I heard raucous laughter through the wall – it went on long enough that I had to investigate. As I walked in, he quickly flicked his laptop screen from some software he’d been using to mess around with a friend back to the school platform, where I could see a weary-looking teacher talking in a small box at the top. 

“You WEREN’T IN SCHOOL,” I roared, feeling highly annoyed and at the same time utterly defeated. Because it really seems, doesn’t it, that Covid parenting has passed the point of absurdity?

Reading another email from school this evening about PE and extra-curricular activities returning, but “with a cautious approach” to “ensure our pupil’s safety remains a key priority” (the full programme basically not starting until after half term), I found myself ranting to DH about the insanity of cancelling healthy exercise – not to mention how much we’re paying in school fees for all this.

Still, it could be worse – a friend works in the school’s nursery and they’ve had to switch to online nursery. Those parents have all my sympathies! Perhaps we should all follow in the footsteps of the group of 20 mothers from Boston who met up outside a local high school, to stand in a circle – socially distanced, of course – and scream.