Different lives

Oliver went back to school today.

Our visitors are still here, which is nice, because it meant I had company, and could chat whilst I got his school uniform ironed and his shoes cleaned and his new pencil case labelled, which made it all a splendidly sociable experience. We fed him a last lunch of chicken nuggets, and polished him and brushed him and trimmed some untidy bits off, and Mark hugged him and went off to work, and he and I loaded ourselves into the car with some last-minute tuck and set off.

I love travelling across at this time of year, because of the gypsies. It is only a very few weeks until Appleby Fair, and the roadsides are rapidly filling up with beautiful long-maned piebald ponies and little campfires and collections of interesting stuff which it would be rude to slow down to stare at, but which is fascinating all the same. Oliver and I looked at a beautifully painted round-topped wagon, with an over-excited pony bouncing about next to it and thought that perhaps we might like to be gypsies, especially in the summer, and travel along at a slow clip-clopping rumble and breathe in the hedgerows and listen to the birds and think about nothing in particular. The ponies are tethered on the verges to graze them off in careful strips, and men in shirtsleeves and waistcoats were bringing water, and although I am old enough to know that it is a chilly cramped existence with nowhere to plug in the hairdryer or the electric mixer, for a few snatched moments it looks like a glimpse into an older, gentler life.

We were late back to school, because there was a lot of traffic. We threw his things hastily next to his bed and he had to dash down for dinner. We hugged each other hard enough to last, and then he was gone, to spend the next few weeks learning about grammar and fractions and geography so that he will not have to be a gypsy when he grows up, and I left him reluctantly and made my way home.

Coming home was rather lovely in the end, because our visitors had very kindly made dinner for us, which was absolutely magnificent, and smelled good as soon as I opened the door. Food that somebody else has prepared tastes satisfying in a way that my own never can, and this was a mushroom risotto with parmesan cheese, and it was excellent.

As we were finishing it another friend, who recently moved away, rang to say he was visiting, and would call in, and so in the end it turned out to be the nicest evening, with all of us sitting round the table drinking wine and eating things and chatting. We listened to stories about his new life in Dorset, and our visitors’ life in the city, which was fascinating, because both lives are so very different from our own: and he had brought their dog, which bounded around jumping on our dog, which cheered him up, because he has still been sad about the one who he wasn’t allowed to get to know better, and this dog was young and pretty and female and friendly, which lifted his spirits very much.

Mark and I went for a late-night walk around the Library Gardens at the very end of it, to empty the much-improved dog, and talked and thought about it all, and about our life which is always thrown into such sharp relief when other people are here. I find myself listening to stories of their own adventures and comparing and considering and imagining what I might do, and we thought that our friends’ life in the big city sounded very exciting and full of things like nightclubs and concerts and pubs, but that we were glad, in the end, that we had chosen our own peacefully dull one.

It is nice to be us. It might be very much fun to be able to go dancing with crowds of friends in nightclubs, or to harness a horse to a van and plod off into the sunset: but I am glad that we are living our own uneventful existence.

I wouldn’t change any of it.