I have had the great good fortune of being twice rescued by grandparents today.
The first was Nan ringing up this morning to get us out of a fix.
Both children have got an exeat this weekend, and both finish at lunchtime on Friday. This is always difficult enough, because there is an hour’s drive between schools, but to complicate the problem, Oliver has got a concert and meeting with teachers which we are obligated to attend, presumably in case we are harbouring any residual doubts about Oliver’s exact academic talents.
Nan rang this morning to make the very thoughtful suggestion that they collect Lucy from school and make the drive between schools and meet us all for lunch in Bedale, which is where Oliver’s school is.
This effectively resolved all of the worries about Friday which have been gnawing at me for days. No longer do I need to feel anxious about being late, or about potentially having to dash off for Lucy without having learned all about his success or otherwise in his efforts to conjugate Latin verbs. We can go to school and just talk to people, without having to keep surreptitiously trying to look at the time whilst his maths teacher is telling us about his algebra.
I was profoundly relieved, and thanked Nan profusely. I went downstairs and told Mark all about it, and he was equally relieved because now I could stop going on about it and talk about something else.
After that I had a second happy rescue when my parents rang and my mother told me that she had posted me two teacosies knitted by my grandmother. Also she refrained from saying ‘because you are an untalented muppet,’ which I thought was nice of her.
My grandmother was an ace knitter. She could really knit, and used to make the most beautiful aran sweaters. I had an anguished relationship with these in my childhood, because they were perfect and lovely and the work of an absolute expert, but the scratch of the wool against my skin used to drive me insane. I would look in the mirror and see a perfect holiday-in-Scotland-advertisement child, and seconds later tear the whole thing off because of the unbearable prickling at my neck.
It didn’t seem to bother anybody else, my cousins wore theirs enthusiastically all the time, and I concluded that I was just an incompetent jumper-wearer, a state of affairs which persists to this day. If I wear wool now it has to be saturated in hair conditioner first, and even then it can’t be permitted to touch my neck, or endless fidgeting results. Regular readers might remember that my own knitting is done in Mongolian cashmere, which is silk-soft, and even that has to be worn over the top of something.
However, the teapot will not mind in the least, and the thought of having an inherited tea cosy makes me feel very happy, it is splendid to have things handed on from generation to generation, most of my favourite things have come to us like that.
In fact on that very subject I spent a good deal of today rearranging things on our dresser. As the weeks have gone by it seems to have acquired more and more inhabitants, and now it is completely full, and I occupied a contented hour polishing and tidying and feeling pleased with life.
I would like to observe at this point that I have just re-read the last paragraph and thought that it is lovely to have readers who actually expect my stories to be dull. It is a bit like visiting a beach-side restaurant in Goa, who can’t possibly mess it up because all of their customers entirely anticipate that they will be sick afterwards and consider it a part of the experience.
In that spirit I can also tell you that once the dresser was tidy my job for the day was to make us some new tea towels.
We have recently acquired a mountain of worn-out towels from the PamperMe Loveliness Holistic Wellness Health Spa, because they were chucking them out and donated them to Mark for him to use as rags in his workshop.
We have been having a teatowel crisis after a couple of accidental infernos when I left them too close to the gas ring, and so I resolved to remedy that with a couple of the spa towels.
Apart from inadvertently sewing through my finger nail and into the finger underneath in a spectacularly careless moment I had a happy afternoon hemming tea towels and pot holders and other useful items that could be manufactured out of old towels.
It is so lovely to be living my life.
Mark has finished the welding on the camper van. It has hardly got any holes in at all now.
I so much hope he will finish in time for Christmas.
