I am writing from the kitchen at home.
I am not at work.
I have not been able to get to the gym.
We have got Ritalin Boy staying, and Mark has gone to his maths class.
I am feeling a little frayed around the edges.
Ritalin Boy is a lovely child. He is full of enthusiasm for life and a raw energy with which he approaches everything. He bounces and chortles and leaps off things and can get all the way up to the second floor of the house via the bannisters without touching the floor even once. I have never tried this but it looks quite difficult. Even when he is sitting quietly he is still wagging about.
He talks a very great deal. He has currently disappeared to bounce on the trampoline, and I thought that I would make a start on this early, whilst there was no chirping noise in my ear. It is a loud chirping noise and it has been going all day. The thing is that because I do not see him very often I am not up to date with things in his world, and hence much of the time I have not got the first idea what he is talking about. Pokemon figures in it quite a bit.
We have been to the Post Office and to walk the dogs and he and I have done some painting. I painted my wardrobe door and he painted a volcano on the wall of my office. The volcano is sad because next to it somebody is vomiting water on it. It would not have been my first choice of subjects for interior decor, but it is interesting all the same.
We had a family get together over dinner late last night when we applied our hive-thinking to getting the new electric collar to work. It had got some complicated instructions and lots of buttons to press depending on which mode you think you might want. Oliver and Lucy worked it out in the end, and then obviously we all gave one another shocks, and fell about laughing.
We put the collar on poor Roger Poopy, who wriggled about anxiously quite a bit. We did not try out the shock bit, because he was already very worried because we had all been laughing so much, and he thought that perhaps we were laughing at him.
Oliver took the remote control with us on our walk this morning, but we need not have bothered. Roger Poopy knows that there is something to worry about, even though we have not tried it, and he is being as good as it is possible to imagine that a tiresome ginger dog might ever be.
He might have experienced it now, actually. There was a rather terrible moment this afternoon when we were upstairs and Ritalin Boy had gone down for another ice lolly. We heard him saying: “What does this do?” We belted down the stairs as fast as we could but he had already pressed all of the buttons. It is difficult to tell if anything happened to the dog. Both dogs have been hiding under the table and growling all day, they are not very good at visitors.
He wanted beef burgers for dinner, somebody had informed him, correctly, that Granny could cook beef burgers. He knows that in our house you are allowed to eat your dinner anywhere you like, you do not have to eat at the kitchen table unless something important is happening. It was some time later before I discovered that he had decided to eat them in our bed.
We have made his bed up underneath the desk in my office. He always sleeps there, because we can hear him if he has a crisis, and also because he likes it, it is like a little cave. It is now ten o’ clock at night and he is in it. He is still talking, but I am ignoring him.
I am going to stop writing now and go and clear up the consequences of allowing him to shower by himself. He discovered that the shower head made a rather useful gun, and shot things, including me when I came to get him out.
Mark is taking him back to his Other Grandma in the morning.
She has got him for three weeks.
I have no words to express my admiration.
