Change of plan

It has been a frustrating day.

We got up and did the school runs this morning, fortunately none of the children leaked: and then thought that we would take the boiler out.

The boiler needs to be serviced. Actually it needs to be welded up, because unlike the schoolchildren, it does leak. At any rate, it did last winter, which was the last time we used it.

It will be nice to have a fire lit again. It is lovely to have hot water and not to have to boil the kettle to wash the dishes. When the fire is lit the kettle is hot anyway, because we keep it on top of the stove and just put it to boil on the gas hob when we want some coffee.

We are going to need it soon, and so we dragged all the dry wood out from around it, and Mark disconnected the taps and balanced it on a skateboard to put it in the garden so that we could start cleaning the soot and rust off in a place without a carpet.

Whilst he was thus occupied I turned my attention to some end-of-holiday boy polishing activities, and we went off to the dentist for a last check over, and to the barber, to be made to look less wild.

By the end of the holidays Oliver has a fairly feral look about him which needs to be rectified before he returns through the hallowed portals of Aysgarth Prep. His fingernails and toenails are overgrown and filthy, his neck has changed colour and his ears are filled with a mysterious but repellent brown substance that I am itching to take a cotton bud to. His sisters used to call cotton buds Ear Bogs when they were small, an error which seemed so linguistically fitting that I never corrected it.

I pre-warned Oliver that some unpleasant times and some shampoo were in his near future, along with encounters with several types of brush. He muttered and grumbled and said: “Stop sniffing my hair!” – which is an unfortunate habit that I have whenever he comes into range – and then the barber trimmed it all off to an acceptably military length, because I like to get my money’s worth out of haircuts, and after that he belted off to the park – Oliver, not the barber, obviously – to make the most of his last days of undisturbed grubby freedom, and then it was time to go back and do more school runs.

This irritated us enormously, because we were halfway through doing some interesting things, and I wanted to make a curry and some biscuits and scrub the soot off the stove glass, and Mark wanted to take the boiler up to the farm and start poking at it with his welding things, and we couldn’t do any of these things, because we had got to go to work.

We did the school runs, which actually was not at all bad, despite the vexation of having to leave our interesting lives behind. So far I have had two children on mine, neither of which seemed to be anything like as revolting as my own son, possibly because their parents have already done the end of holiday buffing up: but we had a regretful meeting with one another on the taxi rank afterwards and realised that we just couldn’t sustain the whole school run business: because we had got too many other things to do and because we needed to work at nights and get some sleep. Then we sent a long email to the people in charge of school runs to ask if we could be let off.

This was ghastly behaviour, because they are nice people, and were our partners in badly behaved Karaoke night adventures, and school runs are an absolute nuisance to cover, and we had agreed to do it. I felt so guilty that I was embarrassed even to catch sight of myself in the driving mirror, but then they sent a kindly email back which promised an undeserved forgiveness in exchange for alcohol. I liked that idea very much, and cheered up apart from a guilty awareness of not being a very good sort of person after all.

We are going to do the school runs tomorrow and then we are free. Slowly it has dawned on us how wonderful that will be. We can sleep as long as we need to every single night, instead of having to get up after three hours and then go back to bed later.

I can hardly believe how nice that sort of life will be. Even in the summer it was a bit rubbish, because we were working until four and going to bed at five, and then having to get up to take Lucy to work at eleven, and now…now we will be able to get being asleep over and done with all in one go, and have a life again.

We felt bad about the money, but if Mark is not asleep all day he can mend people’s cars. There are already some people who have asked him to mend theirs: and so it is sensible for him to work at that and perhaps have a garage one day if he likes doing it: and he has promised that he will earn enough to look after us all.

I don’t have that ambition, or indeed any ambition at all, and am just a rubbish human being who can’t even hold down a job for two hours a day.

I don’t think I care.