Lucy has gone back to school.
I dragged myself out of bed, reluctantly, at some tiresomely early hour, and we heaved her luggage into the car to cross the country into Yorkshire.
I can tell you now that Yorkshire was another world altogether. It was so warm and sunny that when we got there I took my fur-lined boots off. It was like landing in Tenerife, except with better fish and chips.
Obviously our first stop was the pub. We were not in any hurry, because actually she should have gone back to school yesterday, so we were already so late that we we were beyond any further reproaches.
I didn’t take her back yesterday because it was Saturday. We are busy at work on Saturdays, and driving to school and back in the middle of it was just too difficult to contemplate, so I didn’t. In any case, the only thing that she was going to miss would be Chapel this morning. I discussed this with Lucy, whose religious inclination is not noticeable, and she agreed that she could live with that, so I emailed the housemistress, who emailed back to say that it would be fine.
It was obviously a bit hectic when they got back, because she rang me yesterday evening to ask where Lucy was anyway.
We met Nan and Grandad at the pub, and ate huge quantities of pub lunch. The pub is under new management, and I don’t at all approve of them, because their cooking is not nearly as good and their menu much shorter: but I ate it anyway, and it was perfectly fine really. We haven’t seen Nan and Grandad since last term, and so it was ace to catch up, by which I mean it was ace to have a properly appreciative audience for all of our holiday stories, as well as to hear all of theirs.
I managed to spill red wine on my white T-shirt in the process, which was not a good start to meeting the housemistress for the new school year, but which went well with being a day late.
The new girls were due to arrive today, and there were lots of brand new parents milling about in carefully-applied makeup and artfully matched jeans and casually expensive shirts. It is wonderful to have reached the point of boarding-schooling at which I am no longer an anxious new parent trying not to make some ghastly social faux-pas. It is much easier at Lucy’s establishment for genteel young ladies than it is at Gordonstoun, and even Gordonstoun is easy compared to the first, terrifying few visits when the children were young.
Lucy’s new boarding house is absolutely wonderful.
Now that they are in the upper sixth, and are the school grandees, they live in what are called The Cottages, but which are actually some fairly decent sized houses on the edges of the school grounds.
These are beautiful.
They are brick built, and were a beautiful deep red colour in the evening sunshine, with wisteria and ivy crawling up the walls, and hollyhocks in the gardens. You can see some of them in the picture, it looks like a street in some country village, but it is actually the sixth form corner of the school. Lucy’s house is on the left of the picture, the second one.
Inside it is splendid, in a creaky sort of way. Lucy’s room is on the ground floor, and is almost three times the size of her bedroom at home. Furnished with an armchair and an elderly walnut wardrobe, it was warm and welcoming, and filled with evening sunlight.
We unpacked and ambled about a bit, passing some other sixth formers on their way back from the gym, because school sixth form is like that, and in the end I had to leave her. I was sorry to leave her, not because I was upset to say goodbye, but because I would rather have liked to stay. Lucy’s school has won awards for providing the best school food in the country, and it would have been rather nice to have been fed on salad and pasta, and then to go to Cellars for an evening glass of wine, which was Lucy’s plan.
Obviously I did not stay. I hugged her, and she bounced off happily to find her friends, and that was it.
I went home via Scarborough, which is not at all on the way, but I had some solar tubes to collect for Mark, who has started collecting together the challenging new equipment that he needs to provide us with hot water.
They are massive, and glass, and fragile.
I drove home very, very carefully.
It was well worth the detour.
I will like having hot water.
