Oliver rang this evening to tell us that he was having a lovely birthday.
It is one of the hard bits of boarding school. We have not had a birthday with Oliver for the last five years.
He did not seem to be especially downcast about this when we talked to him. He has had an enormous cake, cards and presents, and been with his friends all day.
The school chef makes their birthday cakes. I have added a picture of Oliver’s. It makes me think firstly of indigestion, and then of diabetes. You could not ask for anything more perfect.
Oliver’s school does lessons on Saturdays, but even so he said enthusiastically that his day had been jolly good, apart from being compelled to write a letter to us in Form Period this morning.
His form teacher this year is keen on letter-writing, probably because he needs to keep them all quietly occupied whilst he writes to other prep schools to organise rugby matches, or maybe he suffers from hangovers.
I was pleased to hear this, but Oliver said that it was dull. His last letter home said: “I have been made to write to you but can’t think of anything to say. Love from Oliver.”
I am not expecting anything very different from this one.
We have still got Lucy at home, although I would be fibbing if I said that her presence has made much of an impact on the household. She did not surface until early afternoon today, and when she turned up in the kitchen to make herself a Pot Noodle for breakfast, she reported that she had slept for twelve hours.
She retreated back to her bedroom with the Pot Noodle, and has spent the day curled up in her chair in her pyjamas, watching Netflix and drawing pictures. I took her a sandwich this afternoon, to ensure a balanced diet, but other than that she has remained in hibernation.
Sixth form must be an exhausting experience.
I have spent much of the day painting pictures of my own.
This sounds more dramatically artistic than it was, because actually there wasn’t really much of the day to be spent. We worked late last night, and today was occupied largely by sleep, followed by a subdued coffee, some dog-emptying in the Library Gardens, and then Mark cleaned the taxis whilst I painted pictures.
We had another little sleep before it was time for work, following Lucy’s good example.
I am on the taxi rank now. Even though it is November we are still managing to be reasonably occupied. It is not exactly busy, but in fact people do still come here for holidays. This is only really at weekends now. The rest of the time we are very quiet. Nobody seems to want to take a proper holiday from work in the middle of the week during November, probably because of the rubbish weather and saving up for Christmas.
We are doing this as well, and have got secret funds hidden all over the place. There is one for the Christmas tree, and one for the Christmas dinner, one for the pantomime, and one for the tax bill in January.
We are feeling quietly smug with ourselves about this last achievement. For the last few years we have utterly failed to get our act together in the Inland Revenue department.
This omission has made the last few Januarys into depressingly penniless times. There is not much taxi work in January, and to make matters worse, I have been obliged to occupy my days with embarrassing phone calls to the Inland Revenue to make rubbish excuses. These always involve hours of waiting on hold followed by ten minutes of answering security questions asked by a machine.
Even then, sometimes they just hang up.
I have never enjoyed that.
Not this January.
This year we have saved the money.
It took a jolly lot of self-control, I can tell you. Imagine, working and saving your hard-earned cash, a tenner at a time, to put away just to give to the Government.
All the same, it is something about which we can be very pleased. This January will be no more financially embarrassing than any other month.
I hope they spend it sensibly.
