Colm O'Regan: I painted the cover of Sonic Youth's 'Goo' album on my schoolbag — perfect posing

Members of US noise-rockers Sonic Youth, L-R: Lee Ranaldo, Kim Gordon, Thurston Moore and Steve Shelley, leaving their impressions in concrete during the band's induction into Hollywood's RockWalk August 18, 2003 in Hollywood. Pic: Carlo Allegri/Getty Images

I know I’ll hate them when I get to that stage with our own two children. But let’s pause to remember the gloriously, massively long secondary school holidays. 

For first, second, fourth and fifth year, three months. Not like the paltry holidays they get in Britain. The poor children getting released in mid-July. We were already bored at that stage.

With all the fuss about the State examinees, let’s celebrate those who are in the off-years. 

The May pencil case feeling long dispelled. To explain, the May pencil case is like the hungry months in between harvests.

At some point in May of school, unless you were doing state examinations, in which ‘case’ your mother had bought 35 pens, your pencil case was in a state. A shell. 

The nice eraser you had earlier in the year is long gone. You were using the top of a pencil or an ink eraser that rips every page or flint. 

There were no biros with tops. In fact biros barely had fuselages at this stage. The chewed ink-stem spiralling out of the top.

Your once proud set-square collection was scattered to the four winds. You were using a broken protractor for everything, triangles to a ruler, to eat your lunch. 

Your compass had lost its clamping wheel. It was loose, wobbly. Your compass had literally lost direction.

But it doesn’t matter, you’d limped to the holidays and you don’t need that stuff any more. The stashing of the schoolbag for what seemed like ever. 

The last uneaten lunch found in August like bog butter or Pompeii bread. 

Unless you wanted to put a new drawing on your school bag. Because that last year’s school bag was also next year’s. Because the school bag was meant to go to war. It was an army surplus school bag.

I don’t even know if it was really army surplus. It just had that look. 

Like the parka and green jumper and combat trousers at some point, it made the leap from ‘sold when there wasn’t as much war as expected’ over to ‘teenagers go mad for this’.

The army schoolbag was hardwearing stuff. You couldn’t see the end of it. And unlike the plastic ones, you could draw on it. It was literally blank canvas. For you to write the name of a band to impress someone.

When I was in school, the schoolbag was often the fault-line between newly arrived rave and the more traditional decorations. 

There were plenty of rave smileys, but still the logos of Megadeth, Iron Maiden, Nirvana, and the odd pentangle persisted.

I painted the cover of Sonic Youth’s album Goo on my bag in 1994. BECAUSE OF COURSE I DID. 

A perfect example of posing, with me just wanting to look cool and hope mysterious smoky women would stop me on the street and bring me to Europe.

Slaine from 2000AD was on my tech-drawing A3 folder. I was the sixth or seventh owner of my Soundings poetry book, so it had every band from Human League to Cypress Hill.

I’m told children don’t graffiti their bags and poetry books so much now. iPads don’t take well to Tipp-Ex and biro tapestry.

I hope people are still carving their names and teachers’ nicknames with compasses into school desks, but maybe that’s not possible now due to GDPR considerations. 

And the fact that the old desks, in which you could secretly eat a three course meal during double Biz Org, have been replaced by tables.

Maybe they’re graffitiing elsewhere. They’re definitely still drawing willies. That will never end. 

But are they scrawling Kendrick Lamar diss-tracks in their whatever replaced Soundings? Who cares? 

In the words of another veteran of army-surplus bag decoration, Alice Cooper: School's out, for summer.