SO that’s it for the summer holidays. For some they will have sped by like lightning (certainly for anyone savouring the traffic free roads on the morning commute) and for others they will have slithered along like a dying snail (for anyone desperately struggling to keep their kids occupied for the six-week duration, no doubt).

And now, already, the kids are back at school and we’re into that slightly soul-deadening period of the year marked by the return of X Factor and Strictly Come Dancing to Saturday night TV.

That pretty much puts us on the home straight to Christmas, not to mention delivering three months or so of drearily repetitive primetime dross (can we not have these programmes put out of their misery yet? They’ve been on for a good decade now, for goodness sake).

But regardless of rubbish TV that we are told we all want to watch every weekend (oh, that’s right, it’s a journey isn’t it?), we are already back in the midst of a school transport row.

This time it is parents from the Stokenchurch area who, after applying back in April for a paid-for place on a bus service from contractors Amey, which operates for Buckinghamshire County Council, have been left waiting until this week to find out if their children are able to use it or not.

Taking children to school is a bit of a pain – for both the people doing the dropping off and for those who have to share the roads with them.

Many working parents have little choice but to drive even primary age kids at least part of the way to school just to make sure they don’t roll into the office the best part of an hour late (of course that is no excuse for so much of the insanely bad, inconsiderate and downright dangerous parking – or sorry excuse for it – that blights the areas around so many schools at around 8.45 every morning).

But this is the reason why school transport for kids old enough to use it is such a great thing, not to mention vital for our bursting-at-the-seams roads.

So – while it may well be an understandably difficult job to administer the way such transport is administered (getting 16,000 kids to school is no simple task) – it seems completely unacceptable that parents aren’t able to adequately prepare for how they can get their kids to school so close to the day they have to be back.

It is, after all, a service they will be paying for.

Aside from the simple inconvenience involved, some will have to reorganise their working day to allow for that morning school run they hoped was behind them once their children hit secondary age.

And for youngsters who may be making that leap to big school, knowing how they get there those first few days can be a big thing in itself – whether they can share a bus with friends or not, for instance.

And this issue is before we get into the latest on the whole debacle of the bus-sharing plan that caused such anger among the likes of John Hampden, Wycombe High and the Royal Grammar Schools last term.

I suppose, like X Factor, getting your children to school in the morning is just another journey, and it’s no less tortuous, overheated and headache-ridden than the one on ITV every week.

Still, at least you can switch that off.