It has been an unexciting day, and so you may wish to skip this entry and come back again tomorrow. I wouldn’t like you to get bored and switch me off, and maybe never switch me on again because of my insufferable dullness. Every now and again things do happen to me, and excitement sparks fly from these pages, and so it would be a very sad thing if I had no readers left to share them with me.
Of course, the title includes the advance warning that these are the stories of a quiet life, but there is a limit to the amount of interest even the most patient of readers can summon for tax returns and washing of dishes, which is mostly what I have been doing today.
It was supposed to be a day off, but I am at work. This is because the college has decided to run the GCSE maths course even though there are only three hopeful mathematicians in the whole of South Lakeland. Mark is one of them, and so he has gone off to become educated.
I didn’t think that I wanted a night off by myself and so I have come to work. I am on the taxi rank, looking out at the rain through a windscreen which has become steamed up by several cups of tea. I have got a whole flask all to myself. It is not terribly exciting, but at least it is peaceful.
It is very peculiar to be out at work without Mark. In fact it is very peculiar to know that he is off doing something by himself and I must not ring him up.
Of course we do separate things lots of the time. He goes to the farm and bashes bits of tin about, and I stay at home and wipe dust off things, not as often as I should. The thing is that all the time I know that if I felt like doing something different, like running away to explore Africa, or going to Kendal to get some shopping, I could just give him a quick ring and he would drop what he was doing and come and join in.
I can’t do this because he is busy doing something by himself and it is a strange feeling. I am very excited about it on his behalf. It will be brilliant for him to practice real, formal, disciplined learning again, he wanted to do it very much.
He has been at the farm all day, and so despite a clean jumper, put on in a hurry because he came back late and didn’t have time for decently thorough ablutions, he has gone off looking a bit dishevelled.
I packed him a picnic, because I knew perfectly well that he would be starving and late, and put some pencils and a rubber in a pencil case for him. I had got no idea what he would need so I just included the same things that I did for Oliver at the beginning of term. I did not write his name on everything, because he is fifty, and it seemed a bit unnecessary, so he had better just be careful not to leave it all lying about.
I have been doing maths myself for a great deal of the day, in my case the sort related to the Inland Revenue. I am pleased to announce that it appears to be largely completed, and that I have committed it all to print in a detailed and probably self-incriminating email to our kindly accountant.
Doing tax things is terrifying even at the best of times, knowing that prison or bankruptcy might loom at the merest slip of a zero. The accountant marks my efforts in red pen and does not submit them to the Inquisition until he is satisfied that the stupidest conclusions have been eradicated, and that what remains is a reasonably accurate portrayal of our financial achievements during the previous year. I am very grateful for this.
Mark has just appeared on the taxi rank, exhausted from trying to steer his brain along newly twisting numerical pathways.
It seems that he has forgotten his times tables.
It is a good job that he did not saw his finger right off, because it looks as though he is going to need all ten of them, and his toes as well.
I have promised that I will help him practice, not that my own mathematical achievements are anything to write home about.
There are more sums in our future.
