I am writing on the taxi rank fresh from the swimming pool.
Once again I am bursting with newly experienced health and well-being due to a renewed acquaintance with the joys of exercise. I have become fat and lazy over the last week on account of drinking too many cocktails and eating good dinners. Also there was the trip to Hotel Chocolat which has not helped.
Just to rub it in, Number One Daughter spent her weekend competing in some terrifying contest involving dashing about and leaping on and off things, and lifting enormous weights above her head. It was some sort of international championship, which she didn’t win because of some of the Eastern Europeans being genetically modified, or something, but she came sixth, which pleased her very much, being sixth in the world at anything is pretty good I think, and more than I am likely to manage at my swimming even if I practise really hard.
I told her that I was very pleased and proud, and tonight I guiltily sloped off back to the BeautifulMe WellPerson Holistic Spa to puff up and down the swimming pool for half an hour until I thought I had done enough to keep my end up and could go back to the taxi to eat egg and bacon bake with home made mayonnaise, and banana-and-carrot buns.
This is where I am now.
I have taken Oliver back to school today. I shall have to wash his dressing gown tomorrow because he has worn it for the whole of the exeat and it is looking a bit limp and sticky.
It was nice to take him back. We had a long talk all the way back about all sorts of philosophical things, and I told him that he must not care what anybody else thought of him, but must be himself and know that he was perfectly good enough.
Unfortunately I had an almost immediate failure at listening to my own advice when we got to school, and one of the other parents was there dropping his son off. He was immaculately dressed in plus fours and a tweed waistcoat and jacket, and glanced at me as though I were the Downton Abbey kitchen maid escaped from polishing the range.
This was not entirely surprising. I had regrettably neglected to give any thought to my own appearance in the rush to get Oliver polished and scrubbed and neatly attired in freshly pressed uniform, and was wearing my elderly jeans-and-T-shirt combination, my nicest comfortably worn sheepskin boots, and a burgundy-coloured scarf. Mark bought this at a motorway service station once in an emergency when his car heater packed up on the way to Aberdeen, and I like it because it is really soft.
On top of this I had put on my favourite bright red fleece jumper which I bought on the Disney visit that the whole family had to celebrate Lucy’s seventh birthday, and which is several sizes too big, because that is exactly how I like my clothes, and has got a picture of Winnie The Pooh on the front.
I know that the whole lot clashes dreadfully, because one of the children pointed it out at Christmas, but forgot, and worse than that, I own to it now: I was scruffy.
I considered touching my forelock on the way past, but didn’t, of course, just smiled and said: “Good evening,” in my best middle-class voice, which he ignored.
I said good evening to the headmaster as well when I bumped into him on the stairs a minute later, which was all right because he is far too polite to betray even by the twitch of an eyebrow that he thinks you are a scruffy oik.
We have got to go back to school tomorrow to discuss Oliver’s dyslexia. I shall have to do better. We had thought we might drop Oliver off and stay overnight in an hotel tonight but decided that it was too ridiculously extravagant to have yet another holiday and anyway we were supposed to be at work, so I came back here which is just as well because of the swimming and not being fat and idle.
Mark would look ridiculous in plus fours. Even when he goes shooting with Oliver he wears jeans, and they must work all right, because he seems to manage to hit things.
All the same we might have a bit of self-improvement before we go.
