I did not go to the farm today.
This was not entirely because I was too idle.
It was because when we woke up this morning, Mark was complaining so much about his aching muscles after yesterday’s gargantuan efforts, that he thought he would just do some quiet sorting out and packing instead of major landscape architecture.
This gave me an opportunity both to be irritatingly smug and also to stay at home.
It was brilliant.
I made understanding noises about the effects of hard labour upon the unfit, and generously volunteered to let him get on with gentler activities without the need to worry about me.
What a good job he does not read these pages. You are now privy to secrets that not even my husband does not know.
Somehow he failed to notice that I was hobbling around with all the enthusiasm of a ninety five year old trying to escape from a patronising care assistant.
I agreed that he could go to the farm by himself, and decided to go to Booths for some ethical shopping. This was not because I was feeling especially ethical, but because I wanted cantaloupe melon, and the Co-op doesn’t have it.
He dropped me off on his way out.
He did not notice that I had aged twenty years, even when I realised that I could not face the walk home with a sack full of shopping, and had to ring him to come and collect me again. Fortunately he had been busy getting fuel for his digger and was still in the village. Also he carried the shopping in for me, which he thought was because I was a girl, not because I have become temporarily disabled.
Once he had gone I could collapse into a chair and feel sorry for my backache.
Obviously I did not do this for very long, because of having other things to do. I hung up the washing and baked a bannock and got dinner ready.
After that I got on with a project which has been occupying my spare time for a few days now, which has been the hunt for Oliver’s phone.
He forgot to take it with him when he went back to school, and it has been on his list of Troubling Things, along with losing his swimming costume.
He needs it for Saturday, because they are allowed to have telephones containing unsuitably violent games on the coach on their way to away rugby matches, probably to get them in the mood. They are allowed phones but not SIM cards, presumably to stop them downloading anything unsuitable whilst actually in school’s care, they have got to do all of that at home.
I promised that I would post it and have spent roughly twenty minutes of every day hunting fruitlessly for it ever since.
The day after au took him back to school I searched under his bed and through his drawers and down the back of his loo and underneath the desk.
Before I did the Naughty Motorists’ Course I repeated the same hunt in the camper van, becoming helplessly crosser all the time.
Yesterday, before we went to the farm, I went back to Oliver’s bedroom. I dug Harry’s bed out from behind Oliver’s bed and went through that. I checked his pockets and his rubbish bin and the laundry basket. I found all manner of unpleasant stickiness and dead spiders in the process, but no phone.
I went back to the camper van late this afternoon, for a final attempt at Camper Van Telephone Search: The Sequel.
When I stuck my hand underneath his mattress it actually stuck.
There were some vile melted sticky sweets underneath his lovely new sheets, glueing his mattress to the shelf.
I peeled it off carefully and organised some warm water and a cloth.
As I heaved the mattress upwards I noticed a rectangular object, also stuck to the mattress.
It was the lost phone.
I dashed home without even refilling the jelly babies, and stuck it on charge, because it had got no battery left at all.
It took so long to charge that I left it plugged in whilst I was wrapping it up in brown paper for the post, disconnecting it only when it became necessary to add the last bit of Sellotape.
Mark rushed over to the post office with it, and they shrugged and said that it would probably get there by morning, with a fair wind and fast horses.
I count that as a successful day. I am an adequate parent again.
I took the picture yesterday. It is the view from the field where we were building the road, taken a moment or two after sunset. The big roof is Mark’s old shed.
It is going to be the nicest place to be. It is beautiful.
