I have had to order Oliver an entire new school uniform.
Not only am I going to have to fork out £127.35 in concept sportswear, but I have discovered that he has outgrown his shirts, his pants, his jerseys and even his socks. The only thing that still fits is his tie.
I rang school this morning to order it and then measured him to discover that he has got exactly the same measurement all the way down, he is 23 inches around his chest, waist and hips, like a pole. Like a thin pole, actually.
After that we went to the dentist, who asked cheerfully if he had been cleaning his teeth regularly. Unfortunately Oliver chose to reply honestly, which is one of his more irritating traits, and explained to her in painstaking detail all about losing his toothpaste just before the end of term and sometimes being able to borrow somebody else’s and sometimes not, so sometimes his teeth had been clean and sometimes they hadn’t, and he had been terribly worried about it but helpless in the face of such an insurmountable difficulty to give his teeth the loving care that they deserved.
The dentist and I listened in fascinated horror, after which she gave me a Hard Stare and made sympathetic noises at the poor boy who had been so heartlessly abandoned in a sea of troubles, before she poked his teeth a bit and announced that he didn’t need any fillings, so fortunately no lasting damage had been done.
“Why didn’t you ask Matron for some more toothpaste?” I asked on the way home.
Oliver looked blank.
“I never thought of that,” he said.
When we got home we corralled both children and persuaded them to come and help with the camper van. It made for something of an excursion, because of having ten dogs with us as well. The puppies have just started to open their eyes, a new and exciting world of clambering out of their cardboard box and weeing on the carpet beckons.
The children were dutifully helpful, Oliver soldered some wires and wired a light switch, and Lucy drilled holes in shelves for poking wires through, and on the whole they did quite well, although Lucy dropped the drill with a squeak of horror when she realised what a loud noise it made.
Mark and I measured up the bathroom and started carefully plotting the positionings of the various fittings, including, I am pleased to tell you, a Moroccan archway. This will be most useful in stopping the shower from wetting the loo roll. Mark is considering a heated towel rail, and I want some decorative steps.
In a room which is not quite the size of a bathtub this is taking some careful planning, and we spent a great deal of time making a pretend archway and sink out of cardboard, and positioning the loo and getting on and off it so we could be sure that we were not going to be banging our increasingly crumbly hips and knees in the process.
We were satisfied in the end that we could squeeze everything in, and Mark supervised the children for a while, who were in the process of sawing the end off one of the benches, and I took the wire brush and cleaned all the redundant silicone off the hole where the front window used to be before we sent it to the Kendal glass man. This meant some more ladder-based peril, until we suddenly noticed that the time had flown fiercely fast, and it was time to take Lucy to work.
Oliver and Mark stayed whilst Lucy and I dashed home, and she frantically washed sawdust off herself and changed whilst I hoovered out the taxi, which had acquired a great quantity of somewhat misfortunate adornments of mud and sawdust and dog paw prints during its afternoon out.
Of course then we all had to work, because of paying for everything, which is where I am now. It has been a very happy day, because it is nice to be all together, and we are just a little bit closer to having a beautiful new camper van.
Just a little bit.
