The School Run
By The Mad Man

Well Christmas is over and you should now have the decorations down and packed away. The kids will have worn out their new toys and starting to get a little bored so the best thing for them is to send them back to school.

Yep it is school time again and there are a few things that bug me when the kids are back to school. The first is what most commuters notice in the morning and around 3pm when the kids come out. That is the school run parents.

Now As I have mentioned on some of my rants before I live in a little village and we have a combined Infant and Primary School in the village. To get from one side of the village to the other takes about a 15 minute walk.

So when I go past the school in the morning why do I see half of the village turned out in their cars? Parked on both sides of the narrow road and also across the junctions too. They are also more than happy to drop their kids off within that nice little box that says "Keep Clear, School". Not many of them see it. Maybe it is too far down from their Chelsea Tractors to see. I have heard arguments that people say that they need to get straight off to work or that they have a busy day ahead. OK fair enough but walking your child to school is beneficial for your health, your child's health and the environment. Go on try it. Once a week just to start with then slowly build up. You never know you may like it.

The second thing I find about now that the kids are back is that you see more and more kids walking about the streets during the day when they are supposed to be at school. What are they doing? They are supposed to be in class or if they have a free period are they allowed to just wander the streets? Lock them up in the school if you ask me. There seem to be so many around - and I'm not stupid this is not at lunch time! Aren't the police supposed to make sure that they are in school? But then I suppose the police have better things to do such as sit in a van with a speed camera getting those that are going 2mph over the speed limit than making the towns feel safer from all the hoodied school kids.

I think that there is a simple solution to all of this. To stop parents driving their kids to school and making the kids stay in school. This solution is to turn all schools into a cross between a boarding school and a prison. That way we would only have to deal with a school run on a few days of the year as the kids get dropped and picked up at the end of term. They'd also then have to stay in there with the barbed wire fence and machine gun mounted guard posts. If one did try to escape "ratt-a-tat-tat" go the guns and one less hoodie on the street in the process it also solves a future crime statistic as that hoodie wont be able to mug, steal or just be a pain in the countries backside.