Stupid

I have done something so unbelievably embarrassingly stupid that I am not going to tell anybody about it ever.

If it were not for the fact that it is not the first time I have done it I wouldn’t quite be able to believe that I am such an idiot.

I got up early this morning to go and get Oliver from school.

I drove to North Yorkshire.

                                                                     It was the wrong day.

I thought when I got to the  little village where the school is that it was very quiet. Usually on end-of-term days the place is made terrifying by enormous four by four vehicles driven by anxious looking mothers all tearing through the village because of course you never manage to get through the traffic in time: and today there was nothing.

Everywhere was quiet.

I pulled in and looked speculatively at the school.

Nothing seemed to be happening.

There was not an excited boy to be seen.

In the end I dug out my computer and hunted through until I discovered a missive from the headmaster, which was when I learned that despite the confident scrawl across the pages of my desk diary for today, Oliver does not finish school until next week.

I was horrified. Really horrified, in that dreadful cold way that happens when you suddenly realise that all your confident striding masterfully through the world with everything efficiently organised and planned is all a facade, and underneath it all in fact you are just a feeble lack-wit.

Of course I set off for home straight away, in a dejected failed-human-being sort of way. Let me assure anybody who has not experienced it, it is not brilliant to find yourself accidentally on the completely wrong side of the country at nine o’clock in the morning, knowing full well that you will be an object of amused ridicule on your return.

In the event I called Mark on the way back in order to get the worst of the humour out of the way quickly, but he was not nearly as entertained as I had expected him to be, on account of being in the middle of the almost equally horrifying discovery that one of the dogs had done a wee in his favourite shoes.

I think I can say that we have had better mornings.

When I got back we had a cup of coffee together and commiserated with one another, and Mark laughed, but not too much, and I gave him some new insoles that I had stopped to buy in Kendal on my way home, and then things started to feel better.

The dogs were traumatised by having been in such terrible disgrace, and were very pleased to see me in case I might take their side. Mark had not exactly forgiven them, but was not quite as cross as he had been, so we took them for an extra stroll around the Library Gardens by way of reconciliation and stood for a while in the sunshine, feeling the Vitamin D soaking pleasurably into our faces until we had restored our contented souls and could look peaceably upon the world again.

It turned out that Mark had taken advantage of my absence to shove his very dusty overalls in my washing machine, because he has not yet got his plumbed in at the farm. He bought this set of overalls second hand from somebody on eBay in America, because they make wonderful blizzard-proof overalls over there, although for some reason presumably comprehensible to an American the colour is described as High Vis Cammo: and they have always billowed clouds of dust whenever he has moved in them, and the pockets were inexplicably stuffed with feathers.

This led to a creative morning which did not include washing the pots or hoovering. Instead, since he was unsupervised, he unearthed an old compressor that he once rescued from a scrap fridge and which he has kept hidden from my periodic clear-outs of tiresome clutter ever since. He spent the morning restoring it to life and then employing it to blow air through the American overalls to remove the dust.

I was not in much of a position to complain about people not making a productive use of their time, having just come back from a completely pointless hundred and fifty mile excursion. So I smiled and said how pleased I was that he had now got clean overalls, and wondered if he might take the filter out of the washing machine later and check it for any stray feathers and enormous lumps of muddy dust.

We packed up our picnic for work.

I suppose it could have been worse.

It could have been Gordonstoun.