It is ever so late.
We have been frantically busy.
We didn’t wake up until lunchtime, and it turned out that this was a jolly good thing, if we had got up early I would have been in an exhausted heap by now.
I made chocolate, some of which has turned out to be too sticky, but we are eating it anyway, and pegged out washing. Mark helped for a while and then buzzed off to go first to the farm, and then on to work.
I set off to Manchester airport to collect Oliver.
It was a gorgeous warm evening, and I liked having time to drive quietly by myself and contemplate things. When I got to the airport it had been such a clear run that I was almost an hour early, and I sat peacefully in the car park and watched the sun going down and bought a new iPad on eBay.
This was an excruciating expense, almost two hundred quid, and my fingers shook as I pressed the Buy It Now button: but I can tell you that without it these words would be no more. This one is now fading to black roughly every five or six minutes. I have got to turn it upside down every few lines in order to get the keypad to work. I have become so frustrated with it that I have stopped wanting to be a diarist any more. I bet Samuel Pepys didn’t have this problem.
I reassured myself with the encouraging thought that it would probably be all right. Of course we would manage to make enough over the bank holiday to pay for it, because Mark was in Windermere working even as I was busy splashing cash about.
I went into the airport to wait for Oliver.
I like this sort of thing very much, it is even better than school, because at school events people see you standing on your own and come to talk to you to make you feel better. At the airport nobody thinks you are sad because you are on your own, and wouldn’t care if you were. Hence I leaned on a pillar happily and completely undisturbed, and watched people coming and going, busy with their own little lives.
I could have stayed there all day, because it was fascinating, but very soon a tall young person with a great deal of make-up and hair clearly borrowed from Barbie appeared, leading a grinning, freckled boy.
He seemed to have become taller over the weekend, and I hugged him a great deal, before having to prove to Airline Barbie that I really was his mother. I did not do this by revealing childbirth scars and stretch marks, but by showing my driving licence. This was all I could think of that was suitable for a crowded airport, but it seemed to work, because she allowed him to come home with me.
He has had a brilliant time.
He was happy in the sort of inside-thrilled way that people are when they have discovered that some perfect being, or possibly God, loves them back. His eyes were dreamy and his smile reached practically round the back of his head.
He likes Gordonstoun very much indeed.
When pressed for details, he explained that it was because everybody trusts each other. Further than that I could not elicit, but he was adamant on that point, the teachers trust the pupils, and the pupils trust the teachers and one another. It was, he said, the most brilliant place, and full of brilliant life, and brilliant in every way.
He had not enjoyed having a cold shower, but his admiration for the place was such that he thought that he would like to get used to it.
I recall the Head saying that they didn’t do cold showers any more, and suspected that he hadn’t managed to work the controls properly.
He said that there were girls there, but admitted that he wasn’t always quite sure which ones they were, not until they buzzed off to their own dormitory, which was the giveaway, but he had danced with some who had seemed promising. He has played squash and tennis and been in the gym and done a treasure hunt and had another interview and an exam and was so tired that he slept all the way to the airport on the bus.
He said that he thinks Gordonstoun is his place, his right place, and he is longing to go.
When we rang Mark to tell him that Oliver had arrived he was not very interested. He was not at work earning lots of iPad money. The taxi had broken down and he was frantically nailing it back together in the shed.
Eventually we both got out to work, but it was very late.
We will just have to stick at it. Sooner or later we will have made enough for a mortgage and an iPad.
