SO THAT'S the summer gone. The holidays are over (Dumfries and Galloway, since you ask). And the children are having to remember what they're meant to do at school.

Our three each had their own reactions to the return: one was initially nervous, one was ecstatic and the other said nothing much, but he is the boy who was born to shrug.

Then Shrug Boy remembered his mates and smiled. While this is not a scientific sample - those in search of such exactitude might have to park their eyes elsewhere - my unscientifically selected off-spring all enjoyed their long summer break.

The lengthy summer holiday strikes me as something sacrosanct in childhood, a period that lets children forget about school, allows them to cast off all the tests and rigours, escape the social pressures and pleasures of school, and concentrate on being a child.

They can find the child within or perhaps just find the handset for the Nintendo, but whatever they do, they don't have to think about school.

The summer should be long, that's the point of it. Sadly, the modern work ethic seems to be turning against the protracted break. The Local Government Association (LGA) is looking at the design of the school year and is drawing up alternative suggestions.

In a report released last week, the LGA suggested a six-term year, with each of the three terms we now have being divided into two. The summer term would be shorter, ending earlier in the first week of July and beginning earlier in the middle of August. The October break would be extended to two weeks and the Easter break would be fixed, instead of sliding around to embrace this movable feast.

Now it is true that Easter is a puzzle. How odd that a modern holiday should be timed to fall on the Sunday after the first full moon in spring, an ancient Christian rite that has about it more than a sweaty whiff of the pagan. Slippery Easter is hard to understand, yet its unpredictability does have a certain charm.

Summer generates the real heat in this argument. Parental passions are raised by the long holiday. Families with two working parents, or single parent families, can find life difficult. While such family complications are never easy to resolve, we still have to ask whether parents who favour the truncated summer holiday are thinking of themselves or their children.

Some parents argue that the long break undoes the valuable work of school, while believing the long terms we now have exhaust children. There may be truth in such fears, yet I still feel the long summer seclusion is valuable precisely because it lets children shake school out of their heads.

This is not to suggest school harms our children, heavens no. But it is to argue that childhood is too precious, too fleeting to be totally in thrall to school. Our children are just that - children, not mini-adults or wage-slaves in waiting. While we might worry what will become of them, we have to let our children keep hold of their childhood. It goes soon enough.

FRANK Atkinson's letter on grammar, spelling and syntax earned a flurry of responses from readers. Most writers regretted the decline of modern language. Yet my favourite response was from R H Taylor, of Stockton Lane, who quoted from an examiner's report from 1931 which observed: "Spelling will always be a source of much trouble in our language."

So this is not a modern problem. While grammar is fine and useful, those who whinge about our slipshod ways sometimes forget that grammar changes all the time.

We may not always like the new shapes words take on, but a language that never alters will quickly become a dead language.