Chick lit

We're in the hall, which is awash with so much seasonal goodwill that you can practically feel the warm fuzzies breaking against your skin like a warm, sticky tide, a sensation that has caused me to slump over the piano stool in an attitude that requires only a half-smoked rollup glued to my lower lip and a used syringe propping open 'Junior Come and Praise' to complete the general air of dissolution that I can't help feeling hangs over me like a cloud.

The children are parading round in their Easter bonnets while the teachers attempt to judge them, something that requires a keen eye to work out the degree of parental involvement that has gone into each hat.

There are three types: those made exclusively by parents - amazing confections of feathers, woven branch nests and papier mache chicks - those still made by parents but in a faux-naif style - cardboard daffodils, shredded tissue grass - designed to add a child-made authenticity, and the real thing - genuinely naif soft toy birds, chocolate eggs and badly cut out flowers inadequately stuck to the hats with vast quantities of sellotape, all apt to shed profusely and continuously in every possible direction.

"It wasn't always like this," says the deputy head, when the judging is complete and the whole school has been rewarded for its efforts with an extra-long playtime and newly hatched warm fuzzies for all, complete with a seasonal beak.

"It wasn't? Why what did you do - name and shame the pushiest parents?"

"Nothing like that," she says. "We used to have an incubator. Each year, one of the teachers would bring in a load of fertilised eggs to hatch and make the children and staff take it in turns to rotate them."

"Was it fun?" I ask, utterly bemused by this idiosyncratic approach to classroom pets.

"Fun?" she says. "It was a nightmare. He had a stepladder and made the children climb up and watch as he cracked open the eggs. If the chicks hadn't made it - and lots of them didn't, he'd make the children work out what stage they'd reached when they died, and then get them to help with the post-mortem. We'd either be trying to find homes for the ones that had hatched, sterilising the scalpels, or trying to square the concept of the Resurrection with the chick corpses."

"He sounds very hands on," I venture.

"Oh, no. That was the sum total of his involvement in the children's education. Every so often he'd come in, smoke a cigarette and catch up on daytime TV - he didn't have one of his own because he didn't believe in them."

"And his title?" I ask.

"He was the head, but he delegated everything to the parents. In September, he'd tell them what he expected the children to do during the year and then leave the rest up to them."

I can't help but sense a distinct note of nostalgia in her voice.