Envelopes play an unreasonably large and unwelcome role in my daily life. Once I became an elected representative, the vastly increased number of letters I began to receive took time to adjust to.
In the initial period it is rather flattering to come home to a pile of letters all addressed to you, but it rapidly becomes a chore when you realise that most of them are general circulars and of little interest. Invitations inviting one to every opening, unveiling and launching happening in Dublin City become commonly cast aside, and you subconsciously find yourself opening the hand-addressed envelopes first as they come from an actual person, not an addressing machine.
It’s the same scenario in school, where the level of garbage sent to primary and secondary institutions is quite phenomenal. Unfortunately there always seems to be one incredibly important piece of post which is buried beneath the mass of brown and white, usually from the Department of Education and usually in the most uninspiring envelope you can imagine.
Of course, most suppliers and floggers of junk mail have databases that stretch back to the early 1930s and so inevitably have the wrong name or address. For instance, there are actually four schools named after the same famous Dublin saint in our parish, but this has escaped the notice of at least 60 per cent of those who are hit with the brainwave of sending an unwanted circular to every school on his or her mailing list.
Normally the maximum negative reaction that each piece of unwanted mail gets is an angry and repeated tearing and exaggerated slamming into the ‘circular file’ also known as the bin. But it was one such piece of mail I received recently that received a higher level of animosity from yours truly. It was a letter from a well-known fitness centre inviting me, my staff, parents and – wait for it – students aged 12-plus to get a free ‘figure analysis’, presumably in order to encourage them to join the gym. The biscuit had now been taken, and I decided that the circular file wasn’t good enough for this particular piece of literature.
I eyed up the fax machine and decided that a quick mobile call to a journalist at a national newspaper was in order. This was quickly followed by the offending item being faxed over, and a telephone conversation filled with phrases such as ‘appalling’, ‘exploitative’, ‘disgraceful’ and ‘manipulative’ taking place with the interested reporter.
A week later, the item appeared in the paper, RTÉ News followed up and, sure enough, the fitness centre in question ran for cover, stating that it was a once-off offer given by one branch of their business. It was satisfying from my perspective to expose the highly-questionable practice of this company in such a public way, and I’m quite certain that they will ensure no future circulars are sent to primary schools any more.
But it shouldn’t take a principal with a bit of media savvy to expose this sort of practise. Surely fitness centres are making enough money out of insecure teenagers and overly weightconscious twenty- and thirtysomethings without having to resort to sucking children into that world of self-obsession and unhappiness. Surely there is some internal code of practice that dictates that children are absolutely off-limits?
However, the oft-quoted ‘obesity crisis’ is a ready-made excuse for the behaviour of fitness centres in targeting children. In my view, childhood obesity is absolutely something to be concerned about, but it is more a symptom of a child’s daily routine and parental influence on that routine.
Visits to a fitness centre at age 12 are completely unnecessary if a child is eating a proper diet and is exercising the way children naturally exercise. There are experts in marketing who have ingeniously convinced some parents that a ‘breakfast bar’ is a genuine substitute for a breakfast, that a kids’ club in a gym can replace a run around in a local park, and that computer games are oh-so-educational, even more so than a common-or-garden book, it would seem. We need to defend childhood against those who are determined to complicate it and destroy it in the name of profit.
