It has been such a nice day. Oliver’s holidays have finally arrived, and now at last we are all together again.
We got up early and went our separate ways. I went off to collect Oliver from school, leaving Lucy in charge of dog emptying and nurture. Mark took Number Two Daughter off to Harrogate to do some last minute shopping, because on Monday she will be leaving for the other side of the world, and we won’t see her again for years.
It is ace to visit school. There was coffee in the dining room, along with a faint smell of school dinners and a distant hum of boys. I like the dining room, it is furnished with sensible wooden benches and tables which have been wiped clean of spills from generations of boys, and a cautionary Victorian portrait of an enormously fat man hanging beside the honour roll of hundred-years-past scholarship winners and the artwork of present day youths.
I didn’t especially know any of the other parents, and didn’t want to make small talk, so I gazed out of the window and watched the boys erupting noisily out of classrooms, flanked by patient masters wearing woollen jerseys and patched-elbow tweed jackets.
It was wonderful to see Oliver, it has been absolutely ages. He bounded out of his classroom beaming so hard I thought his little face might crack. He dived back up to the dorm for Spiderman, and then we could go: and once in the car he talked, and talked, and talked, not stopping until we were almost home.
They have had a Harry Potter day at school, where the whole school, staff and boys, turned into Hogwarts for the day, the Headmaster being Dumbledore, and one stilt-walking member of staff becoming Hagrid. They had a potions lesson which culminated in a small explosion, which was exciting enough to leave dents in the ceiling, and spent an afternoon searching the school grounds and surrounding woodland for Horcruxes.
He has been to Flamingo Land and had a Japanese Day. He has been shooting and playing football and to see a castle and to the Army assault course. He has played Mars Attack in the school grounds after dark and been chased by the deputy head pretending to be an alien. He has played corridor cricket at bedtime, because the new boarding master is young and single and enthusiastic, and believes, correctly, as it turns out, that pizza and cricket are the best possible tools for inspiring small boys to live their lives with energy and passion.
He explained courteously that he would have missed me, had he had time, but unfortunately had been far too busy with important things, and when we got home demonstrated his absence of heartbreak by vanishing upstairs to squeak and giggle with Lucy and his PlayStation.
Number Two Daughter went off to work, Mark and I tidied our lives up and instead of going to work we thought that we would have dinner with the children.
This was cheese and crackers, because of nobody wanting to cook, which was lovely, because we had rye crackers with tomato and black pepper, and some fluffy light ones with seeds. We spread them with butter and some creamy pineapple cheese with walnuts, and balanced chunks of crumbly Wensleydale on the top: and we had a plate of hot sausages, steaming and crisp and fat. Mark and Lucy and I drank wine and laughed until we snorted down our noses.
We talked about Christmas, because of the Father Christmas difficulty, which was an absolute waste of time, and when asked to come up with their best ever Christmas wish list they eventually imagined a pony, and a golden retriever, and a brother.
I suggested that they imagined themselves getting up on Christmas Day, and wondered what would be the perfect thing they could possibly discover waiting for them.
Oliver said: ‘lunch’, and Lucy said: ‘snow’, and Mark said that he would be pleased not to stand in one of Roger Poopy’s accidents, so I am still no further on with my plans, my family has collectively been about as much use as a turnip football.
Still, we have established that they all still definitely believe in Father Christmas.
I suppose any certainty is a start.
