THERE are no three words guaranteed to strike frenzied panic into the parent of a school-aged child faster than World Book Day.
Inevitable as death and taxes, every year it rolls around at the start of March yet somehow always manages to take harassed parents by surprise.
Cue a late-night dash to the supermarket to see what flammable costumes are left on the rail.
Or worse, the desperate rummage through the recycling bin for items you can fashion into last-minute props.
So imagine my unbridled glee when a tersely worded email from school dropped into my inbox this week informing me that unless strike action by the NEU teaching union was called off, my children’s classes would be cancelled next Thursday.
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This seemed like a blow at first, especially coming hot on the heels of the kids being off for half term, but it took me all of a nanosecond to register that this happily coincided with World Book Day.
Yippee!
At last, a trade union that was on my side and helping make my life easier.
This one-off reprieve from costume shenanigans was perhaps a tiny payback from the universe after months of battling to and from work on the strikes-paralysed train network.
But of course, I should have known better.
Ever since the outbreak of Covid, parents, and indeed kids, are never the winners when it comes to impromptu school closures.
As I read the email further down, I realised to my horror that parents were being reassured that the industrial action would in no way derail World Book Day, which was being rescheduled to March 3. Wait! What?!!
So it is OK for primary school children to miss a day of reading and maths lessons, with no scheduled plan to catch them up.
But heaven forbid parents are denied the chance to fork out cash they don’t have on a Harry Potter cloak, glasses and wand set.
This is a scenario being played out across the country where NEU strikes are causing chaos as working parents — and in particular mothers — are forced to miss a day’s wage, scramble to find temporary childcare or struggle to work while caring for kids.
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To add insult to injury, next week many will have to add fashioning a giant pair of BFG ears out of foil into the equation, while checking, of course, that this said costume would pass muster with new Roald Dahl sensitivity guidelines.
Children have already missed so much formal schooling owing to Covid closures.
Parents have already put in too many hours of tumultuous home-teaching.
I have heard teachers refer anecdotally to “Covid classes” — whole cohorts of pupils making slower than usual progress because of lockdown measures.
On a subtler level, ongoing strikes risk sending kids the wrong message.
Children are creatures of routine and getting up and going to school every day was always one of life’s non-negotiables.
With more strike days planned in March and then straight into the Easter holidays, even the grown-ups don’t know if they are coming or going.
Bribed at home with KitKats to do phonics flashcards
Teachers are fantastic and do one of the most important jobs in society.
Which is precisely why I want my kids to spend more time, not less, being taught in the classroom by them rather than being bribed by me at home with KitKats to do their phonics flashcards.
Of course school staff should be paid well, but as a profession they have successfully campaigned for wage rises in the past without resorting to strikes.
The low turnout and wafer-thin majority in the NEU strike ballot suggests to me teachers themselves are lukewarm about the wisdom of striking right now.
While the Royal College of Nursing has halted planned strikes next week in order to sit down for talks with the Government, so far the NEU has refused to do the same.
Meanwhile, as weary parents soldier on, praying for an end to the dispute, I am thinking of initiating my own vote.
All those in favour of banning World Books Day say “Aye!”
BRAVE WORDS BY JK
JK ROWLING has opened up about her first marriage to now ex-husband Jorge Arantes, which she has described as “very violent, very controlling”.
In her podcast for Spotify, The Witch Trials Of JK Rowling, the author says he tried to prevent her from leaving by holding her unpublished Harry Potter manuscript hostage.
Page by page, the writer secretly photocopied her beloved manuscript so it couldn’t be destroyed.
As is so common in the stories of domestic abuse survivors, JK says her ex became even more controlling when she was pregnant.
Given all this, it is hardly surprising then that the novelist has so vehemently set out the case for safe spaces for women and girls, not caring if she is cancelled or branded a Terf.
As she says without ego in her podcast, she doesn’t care about her “legacy” because she’ll be dead. Instead she says: “I care about now.
“I care about the living.”
A VIRAL REALITY
TELLY classic You’ve Been Framed has been axed after more than 30 years on our screens, killed off by the YouTube and TikTok generation.
In the 1990s the show was pretty much the only place you would see real people pratfalling around on camera.
In those days, watching a woman falling head first into her chest freezer midway through defrosting it was homespun slapstick gold.
But nowadays people willing to serve up every second of their lives on personal YouTube channels or reels for Instagram are ten-a-penny.
And when the unwitting stars of viral video clips such as Charlie Bit My Finger can rack up almost a billion views on YouTube, buy a new house off the ad revenue and launch a range of spin-off merch, it is little wonder people aren’t falling over themselves any more to get £250 for their video.
SHAM’S SHAME ON BBC
THE news that IS bride Shamima Begum will remain stuck in a Syrian refugee camp, at least for the time being, will come as a blow to the BBC.
It was probably banking on the 23-year-old runaway for this year’s Strictly line-up or had a new tea-time gameshow in the works for her to front.
It would be no surprise given the licence fee money already ploughed into Project Shamima.
Yesterday Mr Justice Jay dismissed her appeal for her UK citizenship to be reinstated.
In a rare victory for common sense, the Special Immigration Appeals Commission ruled the Government’s decision to strip her of her citizenship, because she was a threat to our safety, was lawful.
This came as a surprise, given the rehabilitation narrative around Shamima of late.
The BBC dedicated a ten-part podcast series to a woman who fled a safe home in Britain to pledge herself to genocidal terrorists.
She got her own prime-time documentary too, The Shamima Begum Story, to pour out her empty self-justifications and tale of woe.
With her tumbling blow-dry and baseball cap, she looked more like an off-duty celeb about to dash to Starbucks than an IS bride with an appetite for terror.
Her legal team are gleefully settling in for a long and no doubt expensive legal battle – with one of her lawyers, Gareth Pierce, saying there were “no limits” to the challenges they will make.
Plenty more for Shamima’s apologists at the Beeb to go at, then.
THERE’S NO ONE BUT YOURSELF TO THANK, BARRY
CONGRATULATIONS to breakout Irish star Barry Keoghan, who won Best Supporting Actor at the Baftas on Sunday for his role as loveable village punchbag Dominic in The Banshees Of Inisherin.
We are living in a nepo baby era where the offspring of the rich and famous – the likes of Lily Collins, Iris Law and Lennon Gallagher – stalk us at every turn from screen to catwalk.
The idea of by-the-bootstraps success is so rare now it is almost startling to stumble across a character like Barry, now tipped for Oscar glory.
His hard-luck story is like something from Hollywood itself.
The actor jumped between 13 different foster homes in Dublin before he was ten.
His father was absent, his mother a drug addict who died when he was 12.
Eventually he settled with his grandmother and fell in love with films.
He dedicated his Bafta win to “the kids that are dreaming to be something from the area where I came from”.
Let’s hope we will be hearing a few more acceptance speeches from Barry in the weeks to come.
