Speechwriters

Goodness, January is not being terribly eventful so far.

I took Oliver to the dentist this morning.

Despite all of my newly-created cyber-reminders I still nearly forgot. The alarm went off, as organised, half an hour before. I shouted to Oliver, and we agreed that I would call him again ten minutes before we were due to leave.

I forgot this bit completely, which resulted in an unseemly rush of tooth-brushing and shoelace-tying in the final minute before we were due to present ourselves at the dentist. 

This did not matter very much, because the dentist is less than a minute’s walk away from our house, like everything else in Windermere. 

The dentist was relieved to see the gap where his tooth had been, having uncomfortable recollections of our last visit, and admitted that he still found this sort of tooth-extraction rather satisfying. 

He told us that Oliver still has seven baby teeth left. Apparently this is remarkable in somebody in their teenage years, but since he didn’t actually get any teeth until his first birthday anyway, I supposed that it should not be much of a surprise. 

He was gummy for longer than any baby I have ever known, which was endearing but meant that his diet was uninterrupted bananas and Weetabix for ages. We were in France then, which meant that we were allowed to dip his dummy in wine, and we did. 

It is amazing how many things are poisonous to English people but not French ones. In France expectant mothers are encouraged to eat things like shellfish and unpasteurised cheese, and I recall our doctor telling me gravely that. should drink a quarter bottle of good red wine every day, for the sake of my tranquillity and the unborn baby’s good health. 

I was a much better patient in France than I am here. I followed his instructions to the letter.

Today the dentist drilled a large hole in Oliver’s tooth, leaving Oliver rubbery-lipped and spitting for the following hour. He took advantage of having a rubbish day anyway by going back home and doing his homework. 

I helped him. He had got to write a speech persuading people not to use plastic, because his English teacher is young and keen and has just watched Blue Planet, or some similar programme where David Attenborough warns you that if you take your shopping home in a plastic bag then probably you are singlehandedly responsible for the murder of baby turtles.

It has interested me in the past to discover that people who believe this often believe equally enthusiastically that an exception should be made for dog poo. They seem determined that this handy fertiliser, although nothing else on the planet, should be put into plastic bags and stored in perpetuity. 

I think that these should be banned outside urban areas, and that anybody who collects their dog poo in a plastic bag on a country walk and then leaves it hanging on a fence should be publicly executed and then made to eat it. 

We wrote Oliver’s speech together. He refused, probably diplomatically, to entertain my suggestion that we ought to come up with a speech explaining why the sea was the best possible place to dump plastic waste. I thought this would be an interesting intellectual challenge, and also support my general principle that unless you can argue both sides of an argument equally effectively, you haven’t understood the question. 

Oliver said that his teacher did not think that there was another side to the argument, and that on the whole he would rather keep his head down.

Mark said that this was exactly why nobody ever wanted to employ me anywhere.

We wrote about fountain pens instead of biros, and china cups instead of plastic ones, which gave me plenty of opportunity to rabbit about some of my favourite special interests. We went on to blackboards and chalk instead of whiteboards and marker pens, and pretty washable drinking bottles filled with tap water instead of green plastic bottles filled with mineral water from an unaccountably fizzy stream in Scotland. 

When we had finished he heaved a sigh of relief, and dived off back upstairs to divide his attention between cowboy zombies and the biology of a cell.

I sat in the kitchen and sewed labels into his new underpants.

They are only for Age Ten, but we can all see that they are going to be massively too big. His current underpants are for Age Six, and he has had them since he started at prep school. They have become threadbare due to years of boil washes, and frayed at the edges, but not, it appears, too small.

He is just going to have to wear his old underpants underneath until he gets a bit fatter.

I have taken a picture of our picnic to attach at the top of this. I see lots of pictures of people’s dinners on Facebook. I am not sure why this is, but did not want to be left out, so here is mine.