Thirty Boys, Borrowed Skirts and the World’s Ugliest Dog

The skirts were borrowed from girls at the school. The transcript does not say on what terms. I would pay to read those terms.

I keep the PDF on my desktop. ITV’s reports from that week fill in the rest. One boy said he had worn his skirt the day before and liked the breeze. The school said it would consult pupils and families before changing the uniform, and meanwhile let shirts come untucked in lessons as long as they went back in afterwards. The next day it announced shorts for the following summer, after consultation, because a change halfway through the year would put pressure on families. It added, again, that nobody had been told off for wearing a skirt.

Then the BBC adds the vocabulary box. Learners worldwide were taught “humorously”, defined as “amusingly”, with a practice sentence about a boy called Brian who was humorously known as the class clown. Thirty boys in Exeter had committed to a joke harder than most comedians, and the BBC filed it under adverbs. Underneath them, a Neapolitan mastiff called Martha won $1,500 for her face.

I needed all of this last July, when the thermometer on our back door said 31 and our eldest, fourteen, came down in his school trousers looking like a boiled ham. His school does not do shorts either. I offered to email. He begged me not to email. I emailed, attached the PDF and highlighted the bit about regulation skirts, which I meant as precedent and which the school, reading it, may have taken as a threat.

The reply was kind and short and said the uniform would be reviewed in consultation with families. I knew that sentence. I had read it in the transcript. I wrote back to say so, with page numbers. Our daughter, eleven, then offered to lend her spare school skirt to anyone in her brother’s form at 50p a day. She has had no takers and one enquiry.

The eldest has asked me never to mention Exeter, the PDF or the breeze again. He has told his friends his mother is obsessed with skirts. I am, as of this summer, humorously known as the class clown.