Lucy and I have been putting the finishing touches to her packing.
When I say the finishing touches, actually what I really mean is that I untangled lots of horribly crumpled garments out of her bag, folded them all up neatly and put most of them back in again. I put the rest of them in the washing machine.
It seemed that she had dragged all her underwear out of her trunk in the loft where it has all been nastily festering in the heat whilst I have failed to get my act together to investigate it: and then just shoved it all in her suitcase for the school trip, without remembering that it needed to make a visit to the washing machine in between. We had a little look and decided that clean pyjamas would be better to take with her, and so yet another load of washing was born.
We had taken her to Asda to furnish her with a packed lunch for the enormous journey down to the South of France by coach, and whilst we were there somehow finished up with George flip flops and some more shorts, and various other bits and pieces that she thought might be desirable and I thought were cheap enough not to matter when they failed to make the return journey. Then there was insect repellent and sunscreen and insect bite cream and the lady on the checkout looked sternly at her and said: “I hope you appreciate what a lucky girl you are,” and we grinned, and she said airily and untruthfully, “Oh yes, lucky me, absolutely.”
Mark is worrying about the whole thing. The last time she went out with her friends was the Pizza Hut trip with school at the end of term, when it appeared that her table had a competition to say the rudest word they could think of as loudly as they dared, which sounds awful, except that somebody called Millie won with ‘penis’.
I have helpfully told him all about the nights they are going to spend sleeping on the beach and the disco and the lovely times they will all have with lots of new teenagers to get to know. The weather forecast says that it will be about thirty three degrees all week, so it is a good job her clothes are so airy and cool, she will hardly want to wear anything at all. Poor Mark is trying not to think about it. He asked me tonight if I had, you know, talked to her, about, you know, that sort of thing.
He has clearly never sampled any of her reading matter. My understanding of the subject as relates to Lucy is that her grasp of the whole issue is very detailed and thorough indeed, although with rather too many adjectives for my taste, and more of a predilection for biting and coffins and bad poetry than she might be likely to encounter in a youth who hails from Liverpool rather than Transylvania.
We left Oliver in the general care of the rest of the street when we went shopping, because he is not greatly keen on trips to purchase clothes and shoes for his sister, and also because he was determinedly trying to escape in the direction of the park with a crowd of other small scruffy oiks.
When we got back there were several of them in our back garden. They had constructed a barricade and a checkpoint and armed themselves to the teeth with squirting weapons and Nerf guns, which made unloading the shopping a decidedly hazardous activity. They had got the music for Black Ops Two playing on his iPad and we’re having a marvellous time threatening passers by.
We unpacked the shopping and fed them all on sausages and Doritos and in the end they abandoned the checkpoint with all the commitment of the Syrian army expecting Islamic State to drop by, and buzzed off to Harry’s Dad’s house and we went to work.
Harry’s Dad called us later and yelled over an awful lot of background noise that all of his sons had got friends staying overnight, and maybe Oliver could as well since he already had to cook their dinner in a bucket one more hooligan wouldn’t make much difference.
We accepted gratefully. Oliver didn’t even bother to collect his toothbrush, but settled down happily for the night in the nest of boys, tumbling over one another like puppies in a cardboard box.
Hurrah for Harry’s Dad.
