This is a short entry.
Due to the depressing absence of customers we have had a night off.
Due to the night off I have had a glass of wine.
Due to the glass of wine I have been very late in starting this.
It is almost midnight and I am longing to go to bed.
I have spent the day in last-day-of-the-holidays activities, mostly writing IBBETSON on footballs and so on. I have not been able to find Oliver’s cycling helmet and have had to go to some trouble to erase the word “Lucy” from the one he is taking to school. This was bought before I completely understood that the only way to do nametapes was to stick with the surname alone.
In consequence of this policy it seems that every towel, every pillowcase, every facecloth, every sheet in the entire house is firmly marked with the word IBBETSON in indelible marker in the corner, or bears a name tag stitched to the hem, or sometimes both. This is useful although not terribly dignified. It means that in desperate end-of-holiday crises I can grab virtually any linen in the house at the last minute, but it also means that I can’t pretend to be a middle-class sophisticate when we have visitors. I bet the Queen doesn’t have this problem even though all her children went to boarding school as well.
The picture is Oliver doing the last of his homework with Mark supervising. Actually Mark was snoring when the photograph was taken. It has been a terribly cold day, and he has been wiring the engine into the camper van and fitting the exhaust. By the time he came home he was exhausted and frozen, I do wish spring would come. He ate an enormous dinner and instantly fell asleep in the chair.
Oliver has completed all of his homework. We are rather pleased about this, because when we looked there was lots of it: but he can go back to school with his head held high, which is more than I ever managed. I am fifty one and I confess here that I have never, ever understood long division, so it is a jolly good job that calculators have been invented in the meantime.
We sat together around the table and he finished his homework, explaining the difficult bits to me as he went along. We are going to miss him so much when he is gone. I shall miss his awful jokes and endless philosophical pondering. This is a contemplative line of questioning which appears a dozen times a day, and which makes all the household groan.
“Which would you rather? Be eaten by giant bears or stung to death by wasps? Which would you rather? Have a private jet or a private yacht? Which would you rather? Knowing when you will die or how you will die? Which would you rather..?”
Just one last night.
