Some would probably suggest the dreaming spires but for me the most uplifting educational sight around Oxford is early morning at the M40 services. Here, if I stop on my way to work, I get to see the elated and expectant faces of young coach parties from the Midlands, Manchester and beyond, scurrying excitedly in small huddles around the shopping concourse. How children relish that 20-minute comfort break, how they love the whole communal coach-trip experience. In fact, the coach journey is often the bit of a trip the students enjoy the most. Which is just as well, given that I have known some trips where the traffic has proved so awful that we have had to head home almost as soon as we have arrived.
Love in the air
The long journey together is a way of deepening old friendships and discovering new ones. Sometimes there is love in the air, though the seeds of romance are not always scattered in a particularly sensitive way. With so many hours on board, a secret passion quietly shared in the morning with a seemingly trustworthy confidant will inevitably be known to the world and his bus before the day is out. In fact, the kids will probably be singing a song about it on the way home.
The coach journey usually follows a familiar pattern. It’s sleepy for the first hour but then the volume picks up and eventually a party spirit overtakes several on board. On trips involving younger children, however, this is often tempered by other issues being, er, thrown up. Or as the radio presenter Simon Mayo once put it, “Basic rule of school coach trips: eat your lunch by 9am and be sick on Mrs Tooley by 11am”.
It’s also easy to predict where everyone will be sitting. As has been the case for decades, the most posturing of the boys will feel they have a divine right to occupy the back row. However, this century, the poseurs’ early-morning tardiness can often mean that they have been beaten to it by some equally up-front party girls. Whichever way round it is, the other lot won’t be sitting far away - noisy neighbours, ready to exchange “pleasantries”.
Listening to music
Meanwhile those sitting nearer the front will quietly and contentedly pass the time in pairs, listening to their music, playing screen games and sharing those oddly contorted photos of each other’s faces.
At some point, a growing sound of social upheaval from the back will prompt a few cautionary stares from those of us sitting at the front. Then, when the hilarity-cum-hysteria finally reaches a pitch suggestive of a possible human sacrifice, the party leader will feel obliged to set off on the classic teacher walk down the aisle.
It’s a notoriously perilous path. It has caused many a reeling teacher to be thrown off their feet completely and sent plunging down towards a student - nowadays not only meaning a loss of dignity but a possible loss of job, too. It usually turns out that the hysterical yelping was merely owing to someone breaking wind in a particularly merciless manner. The party leader sniffs the air and withdraws rapidly. More helpless laughter. More everlasting memories.
Stephen Petty is a head of department in a secondary school in Oxfordshire
