Blast from the past: School trips

School trips these days are expensive affairs with lavish skiing trips to Whistler or scuba diving excursions to Martinque, but it wasn’t always thus. At one time they were fairly basic outings, but the excitement they elicited was priceless.

Those days were magical. Waiting for the coach to pull up at the school gates and whisk you away to somewhere infinitely more interesting than the classroom - even if it was a plastic bag factory in Donegal, as I recall one particular trip taken by my own school.

School trips are one of those things that end up etched into the consciousness. I can’t remember most of the days I spent learning times tables or, later, the periodic table, but I can remember exactly what I had in my packed lunch (cheese sandwich wrapped in waxed paper, a packet of Tayto Cheese and Onion) on the day my P7 class took a bus to Dublin Zoo.

I can also remember the ill-advised egg and onion sandwiches brought by one of my classmates, and the relaxed, sports casual attire our teacher had opted to wear.

We didn’t go on foreign trips, but we did go to Rathlin, and it might as well have been Bora Bora. We also had an overnight stay at a shabby hotel in Bray, where they served pure orange juice as a starter. To us, it felt like the Ritz!