We had to get up especially early this morning because Oliver has a exeat.
I love the winter mornings. We opened the curtains halfway and lit a candle, although when I thought about it I realised that it was actually eight o’ clock, and not really dawn at all. It felt like it, though, we are getting so very close to midwinter now.
We sat in bed and held hands and had peaceful cups of coffee in the flickering candle light, and then realised it was getting late and leapt out of bed and dressed in a hurry.
I dashed about doing the things that I don’t trust Mark to do, like putting the breadmaker on and organising the washing machine, and then left him emptying the dogs and washing the dishes before he went to the farm.
It turned out to be an uneventful drive over, and I walked underneath the tower at school at the very moment Oliver strolled out of his classroom.
We had a joyful reunion.
He was wearing his vest and everything.
We talked and talked all the way back. A lot of it was occupied with Oliver’s description of his current reading matter. He is captivated with this, he talked about it a lot.
I think it sounds splendid, actually, he is reading a series of books about somebody called Darren Shan, who seems to be an undead zombie and who has been fighting vampires in the Hall Of Death. When I was his age I read the Famous Five, and my mother thought that Jackie magazine was unsuitable. I do think that the modern generation are marvellously robust.
In between Darren Shan stabbing vampires and tearing bits off werewolves, I did manage to ascertain that he is happy, well-fed, has lots of friends and likes his life very much. Having satisfied my curiosity on these points I was pleased to listen to blow-by-blow descriptions of a goal that he scored, and what the boarding master said to the boy who kicked the chess board over, the way on Remembrance Sunday in Chapel the Headmaster read out the names of every single dead Old Boy ever, and, of course, the adventures of Darren Shan.
We stopped on the way home to meet Mark and to purchase a Christmas tree. This had to be done today, because when we had the family council on the subject, Oliver wanted to help decorate it, and Lucy wanted to come home to everywhere already decorated and feeling like Christmas.
Regular readers will know that we always get our Christmas tree from the same place, from a chap who keeps reindeer and who spends every Christmas being greatly in demand around local schools. He was down to a single reindeer this year, the other, as the chap explained, having misfortunately stopped getting old.
We chose the biggest tree that we thought we could squeeze into our living room, and when we got home we cut a couple of bits off, and spent the afternoon decorating it.
I think a Christmas tree should be dripping in treasure, so ours has got miniature bottles of rum and as many lollies and chocolate frogs as I can manage to string on its branches. I buy a hundred and twenty of each every year, lollies and chocolate frogs, that is, not rum. These last us long into the springtime, because everybody is sick of them by then. I like the idea of having so much chocolate that you can be fed up of it.
Of course it was the nicest time. We put Christmas music on the CD player, and Oliver and I danced. Mark hung fairy lights down the garden and around the bay tree, and up the stairs in the house, and we unpacked the Christmas decorations from their tissue paper and hung them nostalgically on the tree, filling the house with their stored memories of happy times past.
These are not just happy Christmas memories, we try and buy a new Christmas decoration whenever we do something special. The most recent addition was bought in Edinburgh Castle on our way up to Gordonstoun, which brought back a flood of remembering and excitement about the future.
We had just finished when Number One Daughter sent us a picture of her Christmas tree, looking lovely, and we were all pleased to think that we had spent the afternoon doing the same thing, although Mark said that hers didn’t have enough chocolate on it.
It feels like Christmas now.
Not long to go.
