There seemed to be an awful lot to do to get Oliver ready for school.
His new trousers needed naming and taking in at the waist. His uniform needed ironing and his shoes needed cleaning. On his own admission he had last had a wash, he thought, probably on Tuesday, and so a detailed shower, incorporating some neck and fingernail scrubbing, was called for.
It was another Indian summer day, warm and mellow. Mark spent most of it in the back alley, doing something vague and oily to his taxi. I fed and polished Oliver and when we had finished his packing I spent a very pleasant half an hour chopping the fragrant lavender and mint that I have had drying for a week or two, in the sunny patch on the stairs.
I tied the dried leaves up in muslin to make our wardrobe smell nice, and felt very pleased with myself for being such a good traditional country housewife, although it took ages to hoover all the bits up afterwards.
After that I went to the bank and then got on with a bit of office stuff, because there is always a lot of that waiting in my Guilt Pile in the in tray, and it is nice to feel it being done, like getting a prefect’s badge at school for being a sensible responsible person. At least I imagine that must be what it is like, since I never actually got one, probably due to not being particularly sensible or responsible at that time in my career.
I am currently having a bit of a prune of unnecessary expenses as part of my personal responsibility ambitions. I have investigated and altered our mobile phone contracts, and have now turned my attention to the taxis.
Over the weekend I had visited an insurance quotation website, and entered the details for our taxi insurance, which needs renewing. I did this with some trepidation: because everybody knows what happens next.
What happens next is that forty thousand emails from insurance companies descend on you, some of them offering car insurance, some of them offering house insurance, and almost all of them suggesting that they have a special offer on which is at least twice as much money as you were hoping to pay in the first place. I left my phone number as well, and wondered if I would get so sick of the nuisance calls that I would have to change it.
You will be as mystified as I am to learn that I didn’t get a single quote. Not one. Not a solitary email, not a single phone call. It would appear that the business of providing taxi insurance has ceased to function altogether.
I am not at all impressed by this, as I want to change my current insurance company, mostly because they appear to have staffed their telephone lines with hormonal adolescents with a grudge against the world. They are almost worse than an Indian call centre for indifference and their lack of capacity to be thrilled by their job of talking to people who are complaining about taxi insurance, I can’t begin to imagine why.
I am going to have to have another go on a different website tomorrow, much to my irritation, because it takes ages to fill in all the bits that they need to know about, like speeding points and things. I can’t imagine that we are such tiresome customers that nobody wants us, maybe our current insurance company has been telling people that I get cross and rude on the phone.
I had to take Oliver then, and we had a cheerful journey across to Yorkshire trying to commit his poem to memory again. He remembered more than I did, but it is such a rotten poem I really didn’t care that I had forgotten it. I shall write to the English teacher and suggest Ozymandias or something.
I think if I had been choosing I would have found something which rhymes and scans properly, as I have to admit that modern poetry is as much beyond my capacity for appreciation as modern art, which always makes me suspect that it has been done by people who can’t draw properly. Even my father wrote a better poem than that the other day, which at least had the merit of making me laugh.
Oliver bounced very cheerfully into school, the next time I see him we will be going for our holiday in France, which makes me feel a quiet thrill every time I think about it, it will be fantastic to have a whole week just doing nice things together.
The picture is the sunset on the journey back.
I thought it was ace.
