Easter Holidays

I had to collect Lucy from her ancient and distinguished seat of learning this morning, so I put on my good-as-new boots to mark the occasion.

Fortunately nobody else seems to want to go to Yorkshire before they have had their breakfast on a Saturday, so the roads were quiet, and the journey passed very easily and pleasantly indeed.

Almost all the snow has gone now, except on the highest peaks, and the first daffodils were out, nodding and golden in the March breeze at the roadside. I had put a blanket on the back seat for the dog, on account of the smell, but once I was fully occupied with driving he quietly transferred himself in to the front where he could stand on the seat and bark at things out of the window all the way, indifferent to my helpless flappings.

I had sent Lucy the usual list of threats of dire consequences if she was not ready at the entrance to the Scarborough House corridor, and to my astonishment she was actually there. It is a peculiarly challenging experience to attempt to identify one’s own offspring from a distance amongst a crowd of absolutely identical blonde milling teenagers in plaid skirts and grey blazers, so I approached slowly, and to my relief one of them – a rather taller one than I was expecting – detached herself from the throng and flung herself on me with a shriek of holiday happiness. Close inspection confirmed that it was, indeed, Lucy, and we were happily reunited.

It took several trips to and from the car to load her luggage. Oliver manages everything he needs in a single bag which even when fully packed could still contain him as well if necessary. Lucy has a trunk, a large bag, some small bags, her tuck box, a couple of other boxes, a rucksack, an assortment of loose shoes, some of which got lost on the way home, her hockey stick, her lacrosse stick and her laptop computer. She and the delighted dog squeezed into the remaining tiny space and we set off.

The first holiday event was a pub lunch with her grandparents, which has become a bit of a ritual. They don’t live far away from school, and so we organise our diaries to meet up when I collect Lucy. It is always nice to see them, they are chatty and friendly and have plenty of their own stories to tell.

We had rather a splendid lunch, what it lacked in delicacy and elegance it more than made up for in quantity and conviction. I had some chicken which was topped with a rather surprising but nevertheless satisfactory combination of barbecue sauce, melted cheese and bacon, which I enjoyed very much. Lucy enlivened the meal with an entertainingly smug reading of the highlights from her improbably brilliant school report, which was perfect material for captivating grandparents. Less brilliant but certainly no less entertaining were her chatty descriptions of things she had learned, if only she had stuck to Geography and Mandarin it would have been fine, but I am not sure that even her grandfather’s career in the Marines had prepared him for her account of her Sex Education classes and how to install a Femidom.

We drove off feeling very full and sleepy afterwards, and Lucy wriggled out of her uniform and into her jeans with a sigh of relief, and we talked all the way home. At the moment her plans involve a gap year and then a degree: she thinks she might like to spend her gap year lying on a beach and taking drugs, which I thought might need to be edited a bit in its entry on her CV, especially if she is serious about wanting to go on to Oxford afterwards. She sniffed at that, and pointed out that Oxford would know perfectly well what she had been doing, she was quite sure they had had enough students to understand everything about gap years. I didn’t really have an answer for that, if anyone else does please note it in the comments at the bottom.

We got home and unloaded, and shortly afterwards Mark got home and unloaded as well, our kitchen looks like the platform on Delhi Station. We didn’t have time to unpack and sort it all out before Mark and I had to rush off to work, it will probably take a couple of days and then after that Oliver comes home.

Later on in the evening a customer handed me a pair of discarded school uniform tights from under the front seat, and wondered if they were mine.

The holidays have started.