It is so absolutely lovely to have the children home.
I went home early last night to get enough sleep before crawling out of bed at some terrible early hour suitable only for birds with noisy chicks, one family of which seems to have taken up residence just across the road.
Mark was not coming with me to get the children, and so hadn’t had the early night. He kindly got up to make coffee and be helpful anyway, which was nice, and originally planned to go back to sleep after I had gone, but one of the dogs got on the bed and left some vile stinking substance that left a mark on the quilt so he thought that he would perhaps get up and wash the sheets instead.
We have made and remade the arrangements for collecting the children several times this week. Originally Mark was going to get Oliver and I was going to get Lucy, so that Oliver wouldn’t have the extra long drive, but a couple of days ago Oliver telephoned us in the middle of the night, having had his breakfast and having a few spare moments on the way to Chapel.
He wanted to go to some small-boy Laserquest party this afternoon after school had finished, and not being awake enough to think clearly of course I said that would be okay.
This meant that a very great deal of messing about had got to happen. I had got to collect Oliver, dash down the motorway to collect Lucy, dash back up the motorway to the party, hang about for an hour with Lucy whilst Oliver shot lasers at his school friends, and then come home.
So this was what I did, and apart from utterly and unspeakably ghastly bank holiday traffic, actually it turned out not too bad.
It was, as always, absolutely brilliant to see them. They are taller and covered in freckles, with bright eyes and broad grins. Lucy told me that the school doctor had said she was anaemic and given her some iron tablets, probably because of her truly dreadful choice of diet at school, and my hopeless parenting practices at home. She said that she had been told to eat vegetables, and wondered if Pringles counted.
Oliver told me that he had found a nest of baby birds behind the cricket pitch, and that somebody called something like Smith Minor was an idiot, and that the houses in the village next to the school were Anglo-Saxon in their design.
Lucy told us about somebody in her dorm who had got upset because somebody else had given her a death stare in class, and then her dorm wasn’t speaking to their dorm and one of their dorm sent a text to a boy that somebody else liked, so that upset them, and Oliver said that girls were mental.
They were in complete agreement that French teachers, as a species, were also quite bonkers, and they both said they had got a stack of prep to do, and it was ace to be going home.
I told them about the things we were doing to the camper van, and they both said that it sounded cool. Then I said, with my heart a bit in my mouth, that we had wondered if perhaps they thought they were getting too old for family holidays in the camper van now, because they were almost grown up and perhaps might prefer to do grown up things and not be dragged around building sand castles and eating ice creams on the beach with Mummy and Daddy.
They both looked at me as if I had suddenly turned into a French teacher.
“You can’t be too old for having fun,” Lucy said. “I can’t wait for it to be finished and we can go on holiday all together again.”
“It’s the thing I like best,” Oliver agreed. “Going on holiday in the camper van is brilliant.”
Of course this was what I thought as well, going on holiday in the camper van is absolutely ace. However, for weeks we have been nurturing the secret anxiety that teenage sophistication might have hit them and made them too grown up and independent for riding on funfairs and eating hot dogs and doughnuts and cycling along the promenade with the dogs belting after us. All of these are my absolute favourite things to do on holiday, followed by settling down in the warm beds in the camper van and listening to the waves crashing on the shore until we all drift off to sleep.
We will have to try and get it fixed in time for the summer holidays.
What a glorious relief that we all feel the same.
