Learn Some Life Skills

I always understood the need for a school uniform (perhaps more so as an adult than as a kid having to wear one). It’s a leveler of society. It doesn’t matter whether your parents are investment bankers or binmen, you all have to wear the same ridiculous garb. You find ways to customize it. Our’s involved pulling the white thread out of the tie, or wearing it small end out

However, in the more expensive private schools in Sydney (of which there are a few in North Sydney), they take the term ‘ridiculous garb’ to a whole new level! The kids get on my bus dressed in grey trousers, tie and blazer (I think we managed to get rid of our blazers in around 1992 at my school), which they wear neatly and appropriately (which I have never seen a kid do in England). But more than this, they have to wear the most stupid looking horrendous straw hats, complete with stripey black and white bands around the sides. The kind that look they might befit a 1920’s butcher. Complete with the tell tale white Ipod headphones they all have, they may as well have ‘mug me I’m soft’ written across their foreheads.

These kids are like nothing I have known, every morning when I get on the bus, they all line up perfectly ready to alight, and wait for the adults (of which I am apparently one now) to get on first – and they always get up to give you a seat. I just want to grab them by the shoulders and tell them ‘have a bit of a backbone! Rebel a little bit. Get on the bus first. You are wasting your childhood – go out a mug a few pensioners at night’. Well maybe not that last one.