I took Oliver and Son of Oligarch back to school this afternoon.
Mark had buzzed off earlier, over to the farm to mend my taxi, leaving me in charge of feeding and polishing.
I did not do any actual boy-polishing myself, due to the presence of an alien boy, who might not have appreciated being alternately scolded and scrubbed under a hot shower: so I left them to get on with it by themselves, in the certain knowledge that Matron would sort out any truly outrageous omissions later.
They were allowed to request a last meal of their choice, in the manner of those facing a terrible fate, and they both wanted beefburgers, which was fortunate.
I sewed name tapes into Oliver’s new dressing gown whilst they ate beefburgers and shot zombies. The new dressing gown should have been provided for the beginning of term, of course, because obviously everybody starts school with a new dressing gown.
I said this to Oliver during the summer holidays and told him of my intention to take him to Marks & Spencer to purchase a new one. He glowered and grumbled about this, not being in the least enthusiastic about shopping. In the end he said that he didn’t want a new dressing gown, and his old one was quite all right.
I worried a bit about this, and a few days later asked him if perhaps we should buy a new one on line, in order to avoid the shopping experience, and would he like to come and look at a few on my computer.
He got impatient with me and said that his own dressing gown was quite all right and he didn’t want to spend ages looking at stupid dressing gowns on my computer.
As it happened, when we went shoe shopping we passed Marks & Spencer at the end of the holidays, and I dragged him inside and obliged him to try on a beautiful fleecy-soft dressing gown, which he shrugged off impatiently and said that he just wanted to get on with trying on shoes, and to go home and not be shopping any more, an opinion with which I heartily concurred.
A week after he returned to school he sent me an email observing that I must have forgotten to buy a new dressing gown for him, because he had gone to bed on the first night and discovered that he only had his old one, which had got thin and too small.
Hence this week I have bought him a new dressing gown, two, in fact, because he needed one for wearing at home.
I had a last-minute dash of sewing in the name tape and attaching the cord to the back of the dressing gown, because he had only just made the important decision about which one he wanted to take with him.
When we arrived at school, Son of Oligarch dashed off to do boy things, and Oliver and I went up to hang his dressing gown on its hook and put away his things.
During this process I discovered his drawers to contain several very muddy items of clothing, which I extracted in surprise. This sort of practice is not at all the sort of thing I imagined that Matron would encourage.
“Good heavens,” I said, “some of your washing seems to have been put in here by mistake, we had better give it to Matron,”
Oliver went a sort of pasty colour and explained that we couldn’t do that as Matron could be a complete raving lunatic at times, and she would be absolutely guaranteed to go absolutely mental and have a loopy fit.
I quite liked the idea of watching Matron going mental and having a loopy fit, but Oliver assured me that it was not the sort of thing that I ought to see, so in the end I wrapped the muddy things up in his old dressing gown to be smuggled out secretly and promised him that I would post them back once I had washed them.
The incident increased my admiration for Matron a hundredfold, I have only got four children and have never managed to make a single one of them concerned about what might happen if they do not put their dirty clothes in the washing basket. I wonder what she would do if confronted with a dressing-gown refusenik.
I might ask her some time to demonstrate the loopy fit for me to copy.
