The arrival of the chimney cleaner heralds the end of summer

​There are many strange things about being an adult that nobody tells you, and one of them is that you never really outgrow the school year.

You can have children, work, bills and enough responsibilities to make the nine-week summer holidays feel like something that happens to other people. Nobody has given you July and August off for years.

But August always feels like August.

Somewhere in the brain that once measured summer by how many weeks remained before going back to school, you still know when time is running out. The shops certainly do.

They have been advertising “Back to School” since approximately twelve minutes after the schools closed in June. This week, parents all over Tipperary will be engaged in an archaeological excavation of presses rooting out the school uniforms.

The highly organised will discover that the trousers bought in June no longer fit the child they were intended for. The rest of us will be holding jumpers against children saying, “Ah, you'll get another while out of that,” while quietly assessing how much exposed wrist is acceptable in primary school.

Lunchboxes will emerge from the backs of presses. Schoolbags will surrender dried-out markers, mysterious bits of plastic and, if you're particularly unlucky, something that was once edible.

But school uniforms aren't the only warning that summer is slipping away.

Last weekend, our chimney cleaner pulled into the yard for his annual visit.

When I saw him coming, I called over, “When I see you, I know it's the end of summer.”

The sooty harbinger of autumn laughed as he shouted “Sorry to be the bearer of bad news!”

There are signs on the farm too. After a summer dominated by drought and weather forecasts that repeatedly promised rain somewhere other than where we actually live, our attention is already turning towards the months ahead.

We are hoping the scorching summer may give way to an extended autumn grazing season, with an opportunity to make some extra bales in October.

The hedgerows are already heavy with blackberries, which in our house means I’m being lobbied heavily for a Saturday of blackberry picking and ice-cream making.

I'm heading into my fourth and final year studying for a BSc in Agricultural Science and Sustainability.

There is a strange irony in telling your children to get their schoolbags organised while checking your own college timetable and wondering where 12 modules and a Final Year Project are supposed to fit into a life already containing children, cows and everything else.

But that's the exciting part about starting back; September gives us permission to begin again.

We tend to imagine life is linear, a straight road to school, work, family, retirement.

But reality teaches you very quickly that almost nothing works like that. Seasons circle back. Good years follow difficult ones. You learn, adjust and try again. Education, I've discovered, isn't particularly different.

So while the children complain about the end of the holidays and I stare suspiciously at my own college calendar, I think I'll embrace September for what it really is.

Not the end of summer. The beginning of another cycle.