Wellies Should Be Law: A Field Guide to the School Run Weather Lottery

The school run in this country is not a commute. It is a daily game of meteorological roulette, played in the same coat you have worn since Tuesday, with a soundtrack of someone reminding you that they 'don't need a coat actually'.

At 8:02 this morning it was spitting. Not raining, precisely — spitting, that uniquely British assault, a fine mist with menaces. By three o'clock the sky was a postcard. At 3:15, as we hit the top of the hill, it hailed. Hail. Sideways. On a Wednesday. I would like to formally register a complaint.

8:02am: A Fine Mist With Menaces

There is a specific kind of drizzle that only exists between the school gate and the year group door. It does not show on a weather app. It does not deserve the umbrella. It absolutely ruins a fringe and settles permanently into a cardigan like a personality trait.

Every morning, forty parents stand on the pavement having the same silent conversation with the sky. Is that coat weather? Is that 'just a jumper' weather? Is it going to do the thing where it waits until I'm halfway back to the car and then properly opens up? It always does the thing.

The Three-Bag Doctrine

I have accepted that one child cannot leave the house with fewer than three bags. This is not excess. This is preparedness.

• Bag one: the school bag. Book bag, reading record, the water bottle that comes home full and unopened and comes home full and unopened and comes home.
• Bag two: the PE kit. Which has been in there since Monday and will, on Friday, be discovered in a state that constitutes a biohazard.
• Bag three: the weather bag. This is not a bag for the weather. This is a bag for the weather that will occur later, without warning, while your back is turned. Spare socks. Spare jumper. A folded waterproof in case the clouds get ideas.

Bag three lives in the boot. In July it occasionally comes out and gets sniffed suspiciously. In November it earns its keep about four times a week.

Anatomy of the Boot Kit

Somewhere in every mum's car — or under a buggy, or in a hallway that has given up — there is a survival kit. Mine contains:

• Two pairs of spare socks, because a soggy sock is the beginning of a very long day.
• A packet of wipes that has dried to the texture of a plaster.
• Three plasters. One of which is Peppa Pig, despite my children being far too old for Peppa Pig. This is not a bug. It is a feature.
• A snack that has melted and re-formed at least twice.
• Hair bobbles. Never the right colour. Always exactly what someone has suddenly decided they need.
• A £2 coin, which is technically for parking and functionally for the tuck shop.
• One umbrella, broken in a way I have chosen not to investigate.

And wellies. Always, always wellies, crammed in the footwell, on the correct assumption that they will be needed on the one day I leave them at home.

The 'Just a Coat' Child: A Political Analysis

The 'just a coat' child is a British institution. They exist in every class, in every year group, in every part of the country. They will leave the house wearing a sweatshirt, an attitude, and a flat refusal to engage with the concept of November.

'Nobody else wears a coat.' 'It's not even cold.' 'I'll be hot in it.'

There are two possible responses. The first is the coat-on-one-sleeve drag, in which you carry the offending garment out of the house and feign surprise that they will not wear it. The second is to let the natural consequences do the teaching, which sounds good until you remember that the natural consequences arrive at 3:15pm in the form of a shivering seven-year-old who is furious with the planet rather than with themselves.

I have landed, after years of careful study, on the compromise: the coat comes, and the coat lives on the peg at school, and the coat is then lost forever. Which is how we ended up searching a lost property bin in a previous lifetime. If you have ever wondered where all the cardigans go, by the way, they are in a tub by the school office, and I would know.

Why Wellies Should Be Law From October to April

I am not a legislator. I am a woman with a boot full of spare socks. But I would like to propose the following: from the first of October to the last of April, every child leaves the house in wellies. No negotiation. No exceptions.

Think of what it would save us. The suede shoe ruined in a puddle. The trainer with the hole in the toe that nobody mentioned until it was raining. The twenty minutes in the hall with newspaper stuffed into a school shoe and a hairdryer, in a scene that has never once ended in a dry shoe.

Wellies are waterproof, wipeable, indistinguishable from one another (this is both a flaw and a gift), and — crucially — a child in wellies can jump in a puddle for the sheer joy of it, which is at least thirty per cent of the point of being seven.

3:15pm: Hail. Obviously.

And this is the heart of the lottery. You dress for the morning, and you are judged at the gate for the morning. Everyone looks at the mum in the gym leggings and no coat and makes a silent assessment. Everyone looks at the mum in the proper waterproof, the one with the taped seams, and thinks: there she is, the woman who checked the app.

I have been both. I have been the woman in a fleece and regret. I have been the woman with the app open at 7:12, 7:40 and 8:01 and still chosen the wrong coat. Because the school field is a microclimate. The hill is a microclimate. The twelve metres between the year group door and the gate is a microclimate all of its own, and it only experiences rain when I am not wearing a hood.

So here is the solidarity bit. The forecast will not save us. Nothing looks dignified. You will carry a cardigan home that is not yours. Your child will declare it is not cold and will then be freezing.

But if you keep spare socks, a broken umbrella and a pair of wellies in the boot, and you say good morning to the other shell-shocked adults on the pavement, you are doing it right. The weather is a lottery. The kit is the strategy. And wellies, I maintain, should be law.