Rory Fitzgerald
The summer holidays are gone too soon. Our freshly scrubbed children, in their brand-new oversized school jumpers, have been packed off back to school, proud to be elevated a year higher in the pecking order. Gone are the languorous days of summer, where time flows easy.
The kids are happy to be back to school. One of the great achievements of modern education is that most children nowadays really enjoy school.
When I was a boy, as summer waned, there arose in children’s hearts a sense of dread at the prospect of sitting still in starched collars and itchy jumpers for long hours each day, as interminable lessons droned on. Nowadays, uniforms are more comfortable and children get to move about the classroom.
They way they are taught brings interest and life to each subject. Children learn in groups, with work tailored to each child’s ability, and teachers nowadays tend to have a genuine vocation to the profession.
There is a sense of melancholy as we grieve for another summer. At its beginning I sat down with the children and we wrote a list of what we hoped to do this summer.
Amongst the many things proudly ticked off our list by summer’s end were: going fishing, making blackberry jam, going camping, making campfires, growing tomatoes, snorkeling and seeing shooting stars. Such simple pleasures seem to bring the greatest joy to kids.
Many nights were spent under canvas, and our summer holiday involved camping across England, France and Belgium.
There’s a great sense of togetherness about a family camping holiday. We pitch the tent together, sleep together and cook simple meals over a stove.
Above all, we are outdoors from dawn to dusk. As Seán said: “What I love about camping is nobody can tell us to stop playing and come indoors, because there is no indoors!”
On our last night on the continent, we booked a lovely hotel in Bruges as a treat, but the children were disgusted at the “boring old hotel” and loudly proclaimed that they would have much preferred a tent.
As you get older, you realise that we only have so many summers. Childhood summers are fewer still, and so more precious. I hope the kids will keep some magical memories of the few fleeting months just gone.
Apart from these memories, we do have something tangible to show for all our fooling around this summer, in the form of a tree house, which we constructed out of old bits of timber that were lying around the place. The kids were so enchanted with it that they insisted on having every meal in it for days.
Early August saw them breakfasting merrily in the rain in the damp heights of our willow tree.
Time moves past us like a river. It passes too quickly, and we cannot slow it. If I could, I would pause time, and spend a century or two in the warm dusk of a single summer’s evening, just as the stars appear over the sea. Still, the sublime comforts of autumn are now upon us. We can only relish what each season brings.