transfer tests

On Saturday night, LSB and myself took a trot down the Ormeau. There was a buzz and a busyness in the air. The restaurants were heaving. In The Northern Lights we met a friend out with her family. They were celebrating their child’s transfer test results and the relief on their faces was palpable. The process was over: they could exhale. Excitedly, they popped their coats on to go for pizza. I love meeting these guys- and I know whatever the results had been, they would have out anyway.

‘I want that to be us,’ I said, after we passed on our congratulations. ‘Whatever happens in that bloody exam, we are booking a table the week before. We will tell the girls that we are proud of them, and that we are sorry that they have to do this bloody, farcical test at eleven years of age.’

You may have noticed that I stay away from some of the controversial issues. I don’t write at length about Brexit, about the right to choose, about the chasm in our government. I ruminate instead about the everyday irritations I face, and I find this most cathartic.  There are better, more informed and let’s face it, professional journos out there, who are paid to analyse and reflect upon the big stuff. Feedback from the people I meet and who like the SWB blog, tell me they enjoy the irreverent tone and the lighter things I touch upon. Unfortunately, as soon as one does start writing about tougher subjects, along come the trolls and up starts the abuse. I’ve enough to deal with in life without that aggravation.

You may, discerning readers as you are, have picked up on the fact that I’m a worry wart. I can put a day in rightly, agonising over Brexit, potential nuclear annihilation and getting cancer from the micro-plastics in my tap water. I have now started to stress in earnest about my children, and the transfer procedure. They are children who (usually) want to please. They try hard, and sometimes produce pieces of writing and pictures which make me stop and think ‘Wow. What an intuitive little buddy you are.’ However, does this exam really test what matters? And if they don’t get their desired result, how will it affect the rest of their school lives?

A former colleague of mine confessed that she had a headache, a sharp tense pain over her right eye, for four months. She was haggard by the end of the transfer process. Her daughter is bright and zingy and happily sailed off to her school of choice. But I thought about the impact the whole wretched debacle had on the whole family. A friend who had twin girls said he wouldn’t even let them sit the test. No way he said, what if one got it and the other didn’t? The ramifications seem endless.

When I did the 11+ as it was called, it was 1989. I sat in my usual p7 classroom, with my friends, and a kindly looking man in his seventies was the invigilator. He looked like my grandad. Classmates had brought in little ‘good luck charms’ and I set out a dog I’d made from FIMO and a teeny picture of Kylie and Jason dressed in their wedding gear as Scott and Charlene from Neighbours. There was a second exam a couple of weeks later and I don’t remember being overly stressed. Yes, we had done many practice papers in class, but it must, despite being a highly academic primary school, have been well managed by the staff. On the morning of the exam my mum worried I’d be up to ‘high-doh’, but apparently she found me reading away at Judy Blume novel in the back of the car.

Now, as any shell-shocked parents know, children have potentially four tests to do, trailing from school to school and sitting in unfamiliar classrooms. I’ve personally been an invigilator at the grammar school where I used to teach. All of us were under strict instructions to be as welcoming and reassuring as we could. Still, it’s not enough is it? Our efforts to be pleasant do not compensate for the bureaucratic nightmare that it is. I think the system is wrong- separating kids from their friends and encouraging competitiveness and snobbishness (and that’s only the parents.)

As parents, I think all LSB and myself can do, is instill the best sense of self in our girls as we can. We will encourage them to work hard and offer our help and support. We will share our own stories from school, about times when we struggled and felt sad and lost, or moments when we found real pleasure in learning. I just hope it’s enough.

It’s weird isn’t it, the things that can catch you unawares and upset your balance. Last week it was a surfeit of sausages which caught me off-guard. I’d been down seeing the writer Donal Ryan as part of the Out to Lunch Festival, at which one is treated to a light bite while enjoying literary stimulation. A fine raconteur is Donal Ryan, though I have yet to forgive him for penning ‘The Thing About December’ and the character Johnsey, a good and innocent sort of a cratur who remains lodged in my heart. I still get teary when I think about him despite reading the book some time ago.

Anyway, I spied a rake of sausages languishing in a tray at the end, and asked a kindly woman if I could take some home for the dog. She told me to take as many as I liked, so I wrapped some up in foil and told her the dog would be delighted.

And delighted she was too, with her tasty morsel, but the cats looked on in disgust, so I had to plate some up for them as well, in appropriate cat-sized chunks. Slovenly creature that I am though, I left them on the counter while I scarpered upstairs, having done a yoga class prior to the reading, and it, coupled with my heightened emotional state hearing about wee Johnsey again, that I needed a lie down.

MUM! I heard the Older Child yell, rousing me from my slumber.

Down I came to find her filled with opprobrium. ‘I came into the kitchen and stood on a sausage,’ she said indignantly, ‘and I was pulling it off my sock when the dog came in, and ATE IT.’

As she puffed out her cheeks in a show of wanting to vomit, I spied remnants of foil on the floor and surmised that an opportunistic cat had deemed her portion of sausage inadequate, and taken matters into her own paws by helping herself. Later we found more sausage under a chair, which suggested the cat had batted what was left around the floor. (We don’t usually just leave half-eaten pork products on the carpet. Honestly.)

This sausage business  reminded me of sitting in ‘We Are Vertigo’ in November after the bastard transfer tests, chatting with other mums about the kids growing up so fast and how soft play areas would soon be a distant memory. ‘Phew,’ I said, ‘ghastly places.’

‘It’s the smell of sweat mingled with disinfectant that turns me,’ opined one mum, wrinkling her nose. (Cue vigorous nodding from the rest of us.) ‘And there’s always a child with half a chicken nugget stuck to their sock,’ said another. But then we went quiet, thinking how we’d miss seeing our children this way; faces red from the exertion of swinging and sliding and climbing out of the ball-pit before the kid who looks old enough to buy a carry-out lands on their head as he flies off the freefall.

And I thought again of this on Saturday, when the Older Child and I walked the dog. My quads were burning from a run, and I was clad in baggy track bottoms and a puffy jacket. It didn’t make for a flattering silhouette. Impatient, she strode ahead, legs long and lean in leggings, while I shuffled behind, tugging the dog as she stopped to sniff every flipping lamp-post.

And I know the Child’s only twelve, but the image seemed to echo the future and Heaney’s words from Follower popped into my head: ‘But today/It is my father who keeps stumbling/ Behind me, and will not go away.’

Never mind The Thing About December, January does it to me every time; the reality of life too keenly felt after the froufrou of Christmas, and I turn to introspection and self-scrutiny. And all this prompted by a sausage.

Wait til you hear what I was chatting about with Frank Mitchell on Monday. A new love tonic, that you take as a pill or squirt up your nose to put a bit of ‘va va voom’ back into your marriage, or fan the flames of a flagging romance. I tried explaining it to LSB. ‘Do you mean Viagra?,’ said he, but I explained that this isn’t medication for malfunctioning penises, rather for malfunctioning relationships. ‘Hopefully we’re all right then,’ he said, still looking rather wary.

It all sounds a bit like a dystopian fantasy if you ask me, but apparently some struggling couples in the US have already undergone trials to see if it can help them, so it could be available here soon too.

I’m skeptical, of course. Surely if one needs to self-medicate in order to feel kindly disposed towards their partner, then they might need more than a pill? Big pharma would have us believe otherwise. They suggest that we already take a cocktail of chemicals for a myriad of issues- be that the contraceptive pill, HRT or anti-depressants. They are purporting that within a few years ‘love potions’ will be available over the counter to put a bit of fizz back into relationships which have gone a bit stale: it’s being likened to a glass of Prosecco on date night- to inject a wee bit of oomph.

I would posit however, that there could be more traditional methods to keep a partnership alive, without having to visit your GP for a miracle cure. Long-term relationships take proper graft to keep them going, which is just a rather depressing fact. One could argue though, that anything worth having is worth chipping away at. Relationships need compassion, kindness and a hell of a lot of compromise, especially if there’s children involved.  Sometimes, you have to bite your tongue, take yourself out for a long walk or meet a friend. I don’t think a pill is going to negate the rage which sticks in your throat when the frigger leaves a wet towel and a pair of sweaty jocks on the bed.

The journalist Judith Woods argues that 21^st century problems require 21^st century solutions. She reckons that if you need something to get you in the mood for some Friday night nookie then what’s the harm? Now you’re going to think I’ve gone all conspiracy theorist on you, but is this not another way to anaesthetise ourselves against the trials of modern life? Think about it: childcare costs, soaring energy bills, petrol bills. We’re not automatons- it’s not easy to come home, switch off and bring your ‘A Game’ into the bedroom when you feel like a pile of reheated shite. Having said that, if I thought LSB had to  spray some oxytocin up his nostrils before he fancied getting jiggy with me I’d be affronted.

So I have a suggestion. What you need instead is a good night out. It had been a while folks, since LSB and myself had the craic and danced like we were in our twenties again. But last week, it actually happened, when one of our favourite bands The National played Botanic Gardens last Tuesday. We booked a babysitter, ditched the car, (mid-week be- damned!), and off we hopped.

For nostalgia’s sake we stopped for a drink in The Jeggy Nettle as when we met we were both living in rentals in Stranmillis. Almost all of our dates were in Zinc, as it was then, and he’d have a Guinness and I’d have red wine, so it was only right that we stop there to reminisce. It was absolutely rammed, and when I asked the server what the wine was like she said they had a terrible selection but the sauvignon was better than the Pinot Grigio. It wasn’t great. And it was warm. But it  didn’t matter. What mattered was that we were out, together, and at a gig. The National came on stage a few minutes after we arrived in Botanic. We high-five friends we hadn’t seen in ages, beetled our way to the front and sipped pints, singing along to BloodBuzz Ohio and Fake Empire. It was magic.

We don’t need love pills; we just need conversations which aren’t about transfer tests, and who’s taking the kids to gymnastics and football. We need to remind ourselves why we got together in the first place and feel that buzz again.

I think the pills are a short-term fix for a long-term problem which if one were continue to neglect, might only grow worse. So forget the chemicals and get the f**k out of the house. That’s my take away from this.

‘I always feel that autumn officially begins on the first of October,’ opined the Older Child this morning, (and again at tea-time) and I agreed that she was probably right. She’s a nice wee thing, now almost eleven and facing the horrors of transfer test, but she’s coping well with the ordeal and just takes issue with the profanities I utter when I see the papers. This week’s clanger was when I exploded, ‘A Bird Came Down the BLOODY Walk?’ when I saw that some clampet had chosen an Emily Dickinson poem that’s used to be featured on the CCEA GCSE syllabus for a comprehension. For ten and eleven year olds.

Anyway, I won’t dwell on the matter, aside from to say that it’s very stressful and I’m not the sort of the individual who can thole stress easily. This, I demonstrated, when I had booked a massage for my banjaxed shoulder at 3pm on Friday, at which time I was standing in Wyse Byse on the Cregagh Road weighing sweets from the Pick n’Mix with the children as a treat. That’s right, I completely forgot about my OWN treat, and there I was, blithely discussing the merits of Gummy Bears over Midget Gems when I was supposed to be on the table having a go going-over so I was fit to run this weekend.

Appointment missed, I thought feck it, and instead fired a hot water bottle onto my shoulder when I came home. Happily, I was fit to do my parkrun on Saturday, and I have to admit, it was MARVELLOUS. I have not been feeling good about myself of late. I’m still carrying weight gained in lockdown, which is going nowhere fast given my penchant for a Nico’s Pizza (Spinachi, is my current favourite). This delight is further improved when one dips the crusts in mayonnaise. The size ten clothes in the wardrobe may well be consigned to an ‘aspirational box’ to be stored under the eaves until I catch myself on.

But the thing about parkrun, is that weight doesn’t matter. It’s just about getting yourself, (and your lardy ass) around the course, and chatting as you go. The girls do it too now and fly on ahead. Yesterday The Small Child said she’d had enough after two km, but on went the Older one, and sailed through to come in three minutes in front of her wheezing mother. I’ve tried never to be an annoyingly smug parent, but I couldn’t help pointing and announcing to fellow runners, ‘That’s my daughter!’ as she flew by.

The autumn term is long and can clean knock the stuffing out of you. The dark nights always catch me unawares and my endorphins don’t just dwindle, they seem to plummet. The Guardian featured a lovely article last week on ‘How to Feel Awesome’ and I was like, ‘Yeah right,’ but some of the advice was sound. It mentioned how joy can be found in unlikely places, and I felt a little bit of awe as I ran through copper leaves this morning, and equally thrilled when I picked up a red and pink scarf and knee length boots in Concern on the Ormeau too. The boots were displayed aloft and spotted by a fellow charity shop enthusiast who kindly passed them my way. ‘You must always look up!’ she told me. How very true, and one of the points Anne Lamott makes in her Ted Talk. So keep looking up and the world may look brighter when you look down again. I hope so anyway!

More on charity shops here.