"It's got skin on, Mum." That was Alfie, outside the Co-op in August, explaining why he wasn't going to eat the Friday fish at school ever again. I asked how he knew it had skin on and he said Zain told him. I said it was only breadcrumbs and he said, in the voice of a man who has seen things, "That's what they want you to think."
That is how the packed lunch started. Alfie's school dinners are free, as they are for every child in Reception, Year 1 and Year 2, and they stay free until he starts Year 3. He ate them every single day in Reception without a murmur. Then in the summer he decided that Fridays were the problem, and that he wanted to be "like Isla" on Fridays, and nobody was going to talk him out of either.
Why I said yes
I thought about it for a good while, because the sums run backwards here. A free dinner is a free dinner. Anything I pack is an extra cost on top of the shop, so the packed lunch costs us money that the school dinner doesn't. Isla's KS2 dinners cost £2.75 a day and I've written plenty about why we pack hers. For Alfie, going from free to not free is a different sort of decision.
In the end it came down to two things. He asked nicely and with a plan. And a Friday is one meal in five, which meant if it went wrong, it went wrong only 20 per cent of the time. I told him it was a trial. If the box came home untouched three weeks running, we'd go back to the dinner ladies and the fish, skin or no skin. He agreed to this as if it were a contract and shook my hand on it.
What a Friday lunch is
It's a smaller, plainer, more predictable version of Isla's, because Alfie believes anything touching anything else is spoiled. Nothing goes in a sauce, nothing has a "bit" in it, and nothing is allowed to touch the cucumber, which I've stopped sending anyway after the first Friday. This is what goes in the dinosaur bag, with the cost of each item:
- A ham sandwich on white, cut into triangles, never squares: 38p
- A cheese portion: 17p
- Carrot sticks, about six: 8p
- A banana: 15p
- A mini flapjack, homemade on a Sunday: 22p
- A little box of raisins: 10p
That comes to £1.10, and there's a bottle of water on top that I'm not counting. It's the Friday treat, too, since the flapjack takes the place of the biscuit. Isla gets her own Friday treat and says Alfie's is "the same but smaller", which is true and which he takes as a compliment.
How it's gone so far
He's had three. The first came home empty except for the cucumber, which I've told you about. The second came home with the banana mashed into the raisins, a kind of fruit crumble I wouldn't have invented on purpose. Today's was the third, and it came back with everything eaten and a scrap of paper stuffed in the bag. He wanted to tell me what he'd eaten and with whom: ham, Zain, "and a girl called Mabel, not our Mabel".
What I notice is that he stands a bit taller coming out of the infant door on Fridays. As far as I know he's the only one in his class who has school dinners four days a week and a packed lunch on the fifth, and he knows it. Zain has school dinners, and by about the second week the two of them had settled on an arrangement: Zain sits next to Alfie and describes the fish, and Alfie says "yuck" on cue.
The peas are another story. He eats peas, but only frozen, straight from the bag, as a snack, and the school's peas are boiled. I'm not about to ask the dinner ladies to supply a bag from the freezer.
The numbers, since you'll ask
There are roughly 36 Fridays in a school year once you take away the holidays and the odd training day. At £1.10 each, that's £39.60 for the year, and it's money we'd otherwise have spent on nothing, because his dinners are covered. It isn't a saving, it's a cost, and I'd like that to be on the record. But £39.60 is about the price of one pair of school shoes for him, and I decided that it was worth paying for a little boy to feel like a big one.
If he asks for Wednesdays next, we'll have another conversation.
