There is a moment on the French school calender that always sends shivers down my spine; that when the "liste de fournitures" drops through my letter box. This list of school supplies is to be religiously consulted, purchased, ticked off and jammed into the new school bag each September and that to me is fraught with danger.
Since early August, the local supermarkets have been devoting miles of shelving to exercise books, binders, pencils, pens, set squares and compasses. I watch wistfully as very organised mothers march up and down the alleys, unceremoniously grabbing items from the shelves and dropping them into their trolley with an air of triumph, whilst I know that such organisation is way beyond me, and that we will - yet again - have the humiliation of being the last family in the school to have every single item off the wretched list.
"What is she whining about?", I can hear you say, "it can't be that big a deal to buy a couple of crayons and the odd exercise book", but my dears your have NO IDEA ....
First of all take a look at a typical list ..........
You see, it's awful, never ending and that's just for one child, because of course, no two schools require the same things, that would be far too simple. Believe me, when I had all four children in primary education, I needed to triple the Prozac before I could even unfold the lists.
Pens and pencils are relatively straight forward, providing of course you get the right colour ink, and the right sized ink cartridge for the appropriate pen. Compass sets get a little tricky since manufacturers insist on innovating and more often than not, what you though looked like a well designed piece of geometrical machinery, turns out to be a waste of money looked down upon by the maths teacher.
It's when you start on the exercise books that the merde hits the proverbial fan. If you thought that an exercise books was nothing more than some folded sheets of lined paper, stapled together to form a practical sized book then think again.
First of all in France they don't do lines. They do squares, for maths (I think) and weird coloured grids that make your eyes hurt for all other subjects, unless it's 'travaux pratique, in which case you need the weird grid on one side of the book and plain paper on the other.
Next the size. Obviously just one or two sizes would be too simple. No, we have incy wincy vocabulary books (I can deal with that, I am after all a linguist), then we have those nice old square exercise books which remind me of my school days and comfort me, then we proceed to the pitfalls of A4 or 'just a bit bigger', and yes it does matter. You also have to check the number of pages, 96 or 124, and yes it does matter.
I won't bore you with the choice of colours and designer brands. I will mention that "la rentrée" (going back to school) costs a small fortune to French families, and most of all I'll have a final moan about the ridiculous weight of the school bags.
France needs to put aside money now for this generation's back problems. I have seen slightly built 11 year olds carrying half their own weight to school each day - I'm not kidding. A 13 kilo bag (30 pounds) is not unusual.
Enough from me ..... as you can tell, what I actually prefer is the summer holidays. Maybe it's the fact that they are drawing to an end that is actually causing me so much grief.
Thank you for listening!
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