It has been another day in the back-to-school countdown.
Poor Oliver has been obliged to attend to all neglected prep. He has been doing spellings and times tables and writing dictated sentences. He has not enjoyed this very much.
I started the day off with a quick trip to the bank before Oliver got out of bed. This was very pleasant, because all of the normal staff were back, and we caught up on everybody’s news and gossip, and I told them all about the tiresome youth who had been substituting for them in their absence. It got very giggly, and we made such a noise that the manager burst crossly out of her office to see what was going on, and I was obliged to leave in a hurry.
It wasn’t raining, so I pegged Number Two Daughter’s sheets on the washing line, and waxed and polished and sprayed all of Oliver’s shoes, and there are a lot of them. There are wellies and Astro Trainers and Muddy Trainers and Sports Hall Trainers and Rugby Boots and Playing Out Shoes and School Shoes and his new cricket shoes have not yet arrived.
Mark helped me haul his luggage down from the loft before he went out, and I put all of his shoes in their labelled bags and carefully into his case.
After that I turned my attention to his tuck box.
As you know, Oliver’s school does not allow tuck any more: but nevertheless the boys are allowed to bring their tuck box and keep nice things in it.
This imposes a rather awkward obligation on the parent to make sure that their child has got some nice things, since nobody wants their own poor boy to be the solitary term-time occupant of an unhappy desert of nice-thinglessness.
Lucy’s tuck is much easier.
I summoned Oliver and obliged him to put some clothes on. We needed to do a trip round the village with the purpose of purchasing nice things that would make him feel happy and reminded of home whenever he opened his tuck box.
We bought Nesquik, which is allowed, and some comics and some tennis balls, and then neither Oliver nor I could think of anything else that might in any way be described as nice, or that he might want and of which school would approve.
On our way around the village Oliver took photographs of everything for the purpose of a project that he is supposed to have done but has not yet started, called The Place Where I Live.
As part of this process I filled him in with Interesting Details about Windermere, all of which might have added interest to his project, and all of which I am fairly sure he ignored completely, and we made a visit to see the lady in the dress shop, whose dog has just died.
Oliver tried very hard to be as polite as he possibly could be, but when we came out, having composed our faces into sympathetic expressions during the visit, he burst out: “How did she know that white roses were her dog’s favourite, Mum? Do you think they were really or is she making it up?”
This sort of thing is difficult to explain, but as it happened I was saved by the alarm going off on my phone to signal that it was time to go to the dentist.
It was only for a check up, and it is nice to see the dentist, who told me how his children were getting on, and asked after Lucy: but terribly, once the dentist had got Oliver pinned down in his chair he decided that he needed to have a tooth pulled out.
He thought that he might as well do it straight away, since Oliver was going back to school soon, and got out his dreadful little pliers.
It was very traumatic indeed.
There was an abscess, and a great deal of blood.
I took a white and shaking Oliver home and put him to bed. I suggested, by means of consolation, that we would not do any more prep today, but that was so obvious to both of us that it did not provide a cheering point in his abyss of horror.
He would not even look at the extracted tooth.
We will do the Place Where I Live project tomorrow.
In the meantime I have added one of his photographs.
