Prep

Oliver has grown.

He has grown an awful lot, and now, as you can see from the picture, his trousers are now too short and I am going to have to buy some more.

Of course when you have got to buy new things because children have got bigger you do not just have to buy one new thing. I am going to have to buy lots and lots of new trousers, because all of them once fitted him and now they don’t.

This is a despairing prospect, because firstly we haven’t got any money, and secondly Oliver hates shopping. The difficulty is that he is so ridiculously thin that trousers that are the right length in the leg department are so large around the waist that he could fit a twin brother inside them alongside him, if only he had one. Therefore new trousers have got to be tried on, and considered, and inevitably hacked apart and re-sewn by me later, and he finds the entire process unbelievably dull and takes the opportunity to complain for the whole time, until somebody tells him to shut up.

He has come home with a poem to learn for his prep. It is comparing the sea to a dog, which I think is rubbish because I can’t see that the sea is anything like a dog at all and I should know because we went for a swim in it last week, as you might remember.

It certainly wasn’t enough like a dog to confuse a real dog, I can assure you that ours were not at all fooled, it didn’t even make any of us think, ‘gosh, how just like a dog that huge wet place is.’

Also the poem is really difficult to learn because it is just moody ramblings and no decent story to remind you of what is supposed to happen next. I have been trying to learn it with him all morning, and either I am starting to get early-onset Alzheimer’s or it is really hard to remember.

My preferred style of poem has a decent story to it, or at the very least an event of sorts, like being crossed in love or trying to persuade somebody to do sex. Hiawatha is jolly good because it has got lots of everything, and a really clever rhythm that makes you think of Indian drums, and Wordsworth’s probably laudanum-fuelled ramblings about daffodils are just plain dull.

We all spent the morning trying hard to learn the poem whilst Mark and I washed up and tidied up and got ready for work, but in the end Oliver had had enough, and he buzzed off to the park with Harry, who does not go to a boarding school and was in the enviable position of being able to spend the weekend belting happily round the park on his bike without worrying in the least about poetry, or Latin, or practising his flute.

Once he had gone Mark and I tested one another on it, and neither of us could manage four lines together, which is probably why we have both finished up driving taxis for a living. If Oliver remembers it for the test when he gets back I will be astounded, and hopeful for his future.

Lucy has come home staggering under the weight of her sack of prep to be completed, and has spent the day shut in her bedroom doing a business studies exercise in writing advertising for selling shampoo to teenage girls. She is surprisingly ruthless in her approach to making money and may well go a very long way, which would be very handy, because we have spent so much money in school fees that we don’t have a pension plan and will be relying on her financial success and sense of guilt in order not to be poor.

We made sandwiches and learned poetry and all had an unsuccessful go at getting a noise out of Oliver’s flute: and then in the end had to go to work, which was an awful wrench because of the children being at home, and what we really wanted to do was carry on sitting round the kitchen table with them, laughing and talking and thinking about things all together, which is what we do when they are at home.

We do miss them