It has been a terrifically long and busy birthday.
In fact when we had to get up far too early this morning we were so busy dashing about getting organised for Lucy’s Speech Day that we both forgot about it, and remembered in the car halfway to school.
Apart from the usual difficulty of utterly inadequate sleep on weekend events like this it is a jolly nice way to spend a birthday really.
It turned out that it was neither cold nor very wet in Yorkshire, and the thick woollens and boots we had put on in the chilly Cumbrian damp were quite unnecessary in a region which had sensibly arranged some more seasonal weather for itself.
Lucy’s school does a jolly splendid speech day, with the speeches in the morning, followed by family picnics on the vast lawns, followed by concerts and art exhibitions and glasses of Pimms, but since we had got work in the evening, and Lucy had made it very clear that she would prefer lunch in the pub, we only did the speech bit.
This was very lovely anyway, the school has a huge marquee with enormous dangling globules of flowers, and carpets on the lawn. We arrived just early enough to take an unauthorised cup of coffee outside the chapel service for leavers, and then made our way into the marquee to find Nan and Grandad, who had loyally turned up to be family support.
It is a very splendid event, full of gorgeous long-legged upper sixth formers getting ready to fledge into the wide world. The Headmistress makes a speech, the Head Girl makes a speech, and this year the guest speaker was a jolly splendid retired Army captain, telling us about his adventures getting bits blown off him in Helmand and inspiring us all to be brave and try harder. I thought he was ace, and clapped until my hands hurt.
After all of that was the prize giving followed by the formal leaving moments of the sixth form. We all clapped madly as they took their final walk as schoolgirls across the platform, dressed beautifully and with gleaming hair swinging, to be welcomed at the other side by the chairwoman of the Old Girls Association to which they would now belong instead.
It was all very inspiring and cheerful, with the wonderful eve-of-holiday feeling that always pervades these events, and once it was over we hunted Lucy down from among a crowd of identically squeaky teenagers, stuffed her colossal quantities of luggage in the back of the car, and reconvened at the pub for a very happy lunch with Nan and Grandad, who gave me an entertaining book for my birthday that made me laugh a great deal.
It was a nice lunch. Lucy kept us entertained with her stories of school: I was impressed to hear that they had been taken to the races for a day, to do a maths lesson about how to calculate odds, almost as good as the physics lesson about G Force last year which they had at Alton Towers. It is lovely to have her home again, just another few days and we will have Oliver as well.
I blame my status of a person with a birthday for my drinking far too much, and fell instantly asleep in the car and stayed that way all the way home, where I was very pleased to find Elspeth waiting to make celebratory birthday noises, and later one of our very nice neighbours dropped in to give me a bottle of wine: so all in all it was a jolly good day, with work at the end of it which turned out to be so busy I didn’t have time to write this, and if it is reading in a slightly disjointed manner it is because it is now five in the morning, and so far the day has been going on for twenty three hours.
It might be an idea to stop now and go to sleep.
See you tomorrow.
