Another short post, I am afraid, this time because I have spent the entire day driving to the Deep South and back to return Ritalin Boy to his mother, who rang up tearfully yesterday to tell us that she was missing him.
We thought that we could probably cope very nicely with the pain of his absence, especially after he walked oil all over the carpet and did a poo in the corner in the sort of emergency where you don’t make it in through the back door and up the stairs in time.
So this morning we packed all of his things and shoved him in the back of the car with the portable DVD machine and six packets of crisps and I set off with him, a bit bleary eyed because of working all night.
The battery on the DVD machine ran out far too soon.
He talked to me after that, probably from round about Preston.
He needed an urgent wee at one point, but we were twenty nine miles from the nearest service station and the traffic was fairly slow moving, so I will just have to wash the taxi seat in the morning. Fortunately the bottle of blackcurrant juice he split on it afterwards has probably rinsed a lot of it away, but there is an unpleasantly tacky glaze over the place where he was sitting, nicely studded with firmly stuck fragments of crisps. I thought about it when I got back home but it was beyond my capacity to resolve so I came in and had a glass of wine instead.
Number One Daughter called and we agreed that when she left work she would drive up the other side of the motorway and meet me at a service station. Eventually we met up at Oxford, which was wonderful as it saved me the whole M25 adventure. It was nice to see her, and Ritalin Boy was very pleased indeed. He was in his pyjamas by then, because he had got no other clean clothes left but I thought that I would leave that as a surprise for when she opened his suitcase, and pretended that I had helpfully got him ready for bed to save her messing about when they got home.
The journey home went quite quickly really, if five hours’ driving can ever be said to go quickly, but since nobody else was talking or singing or trying to unfasten their seatbelt or thrusting packets of crisps under my nose to be opened, I could hear the radio. This was an absolute pleasure, and I turned up the reassuring tones of Radio 4, and the journey seemed to sail by in a blissfully solitary paradise.
When I got home Mark had tidied everywhere up and scrubbed the horrible sooty oil off the carpet and earned some money and fed the children. The house was tranquil and welcoming, and, most noticeably, quiet.
I sank into a kitchen chair and Mark kindly put a glass of wine into my hand, and the dogs jumped about happily, very pleased to discover that I had come home unaccompanied, and I felt the ease of the returned traveller wash over me.
I have showered away the day’s sticky, and I am going to go to bed.
