I had foolishly booked Oliver a riding lesson at eleven o’clock this morning, and of course we overslept.
Hence he was still stuffing chocolate brioche into his mouth when we finally set off, much later than intended, for the stables.
I had in mind a quiet recovery in the sun with a book but Oliver wanted me to watch, so I had an entertaining hour watching him joyously bouncing around on the broad back of an enormous reluctant grey creature, which came to an abrupt halt every time he took his heels out of its ribs.
In fact the hour passed very quickly. He is learning the correct way to bob up and down when the horse trots, it made me feel weary just watching him, but the girl teaching him said that he has got very good core body strength for his age.
This amazed Mark and Number Two Daughter when I relayed it to them afterwards, who consider that he is a bit of a weed, largely because he has got a frame roughly reminiscent of the later stages of anorexia, I can still close my finger and thumb around his upper arm. School used to fill him up with extra ham sandwiches between meals when he first went there, in case his lack of body fat had been brought about by some sort of terrible domestic neglect. Eventually they gave it up when they realised that it didn’t make any difference whatsoever, and that he remained resolutely skeletal.
After riding he went over to the farm with Mark, to shoot things and drive the car by himself, and help Mark with some repair work to the suspension. They took the dogs with them, which gave me a peaceful couple of hours to make mayonnaise and hang washing in the glorious sunshine, and wander around the village buying fruit and cheese and soaking in the warm sunshine through a skin desperate to blot up absolutely any Vitamin D on offer.
When they came back he had got to be scrubbed, because he had got to go back to school this evening, and he was covered from head to toe in a sort of oily grey sticky, enlivened by horsehair. Also he smelled peculiar. Mark sent him upstairs with a scrubbing brush and we had a quick coffee before we had to set off.
The original idea had been for Mark to take him back, because he complained yesterday that the gears on his bike were sticking. Of course his bike was safely parked in the playground at school, so Mark thought that he would do the return journey and do some on the spot repairs with a can of WD40 when they got there.
Oliver, however, thought that he would be too traumatised by a return to school without me, so in the end we all went.
When we got to school of course everybody was outside. The catering staff were busy creating barbeque food and lemonade, the headmaster was beaming and being welcoming, and there were boys everywhere, charging about on their bikes and practising cricket and jumping off things and yelling.
The head directed us over to the back of the summer house, where an Old Boy had come to show the boys a telescope. The telescope was an enormous ancient black and brass creation which had belonged to his grandfather, who had himself been an Old Boy, and it was beautiful and magnificent.
The object of the exercise was to view Mercury passing in front of the sun, which as we all know was happening today. Of course you can’t look at the sun through a telescope, so we looked at a piece of paper behind the lens on to which the sun was shining, and it was absolutely ace.
The sun was huge and brilliant, and the Old Boy showed us sunspots and explained what they are, holes in the sun, for those who don’t know, which I didn’t: and then we saw Mercury, a tiny dot the size of a pinhead in front of a football sized sun. He explained that it was travelling at 50K every second, and we thought about that by counting four seconds and realising that it had got from school all the way back to our house in that time.
He was fascinating and I could have hung about all night listening. A grim-faced teacher had been stationed next to him, who explained to Mark that his function was to stop boys looking through the telescope at the sun, because no matter how much you told them not to obviously as soon as you turned your back for a fraction of a second then some tiresome oik would do exactly that.
Indeed he was proved right, whilst we were there three boys got their ears bent for waiting until the Old Boy was showing interested souls his book of astronomy and then sauntering up to the telescope to see if it really would burn their eyeballs out.
We abandoned Oliver to beefburgers and contemplation of the Universe, and made our way back.
We miss him, but school is such a Good Thing.
Anyway, it is almost the summer.
