The picture is our poor garden.
This is what it looks like after Mark has tidied it up and taken lots of timber across to the farm. This is it in its newly improved state at the end of the day.
I have not had anything to do with the garden again today, but this was not because of being too idle. Oliver has finished school for half term, and this morning I drove across to Yorkshire to collect him.
It is always nice to collect the children. Of course it is something of a shirk, because it means that for at least four or five hours, I can’t be expected to do anything energetic such as washing or dusting or firewood splitting. I can only sit quietly in the sunshine in my car, listening to the radio and tootling across the North Yorkshire moors at a hundred miles an hour.
I reached school just as the bell went. Boys poured out from all over the place, identically tousled and grubby and noisy, and I looked with interest at them all until eventually one jumped up and down and waved.
Obviously this one turned out to be my favourite one, the one with the chipped tooth and SpiderMan in his rucksack. He bounced along energetically, he is tall and freckled and cheerful. Soon he will be as tall as me and I will not have any children left, only independent grown-ups who think I am a bit embarrassing.
I like the journeys back. it is lovely just to be able to be with the children for a while and to listen to their adventures.
Oliver told me all about school. They have had a day off to play in the snow, and they have been practising for their play, and there is one youth in their class who has developed a taste for something called Parkour.
I didn’t know what this was, but basically it turns out to be taking the shortest cut possible to get somewhere, like jumping out of the window rather than trailing all the way down the boring old stairs. This youthful idiot has jumped off all sorts of things, apparently without any awareness that boys who miss their intended target and accidentally fall fifty feet, die.
The school, unsurprisingly, has gone mental. Parkour is now banned for everybody, absolutely everywhere. This includes places you would think harmless, like stairs, but which turn out not to be at all harmless, because the idiot has been leaping across them, from one staircase to another.
He has now been placed On Report. This means that every fifteen minutes somebody has got to sign his report card to say that he has survived another fifteen whole minutes without doing something startlingly brainless.
I am glad I am not a headmaster. The problem is that nowhere in the world is really idiot-proof, and if you have been saddled with a truly determined idiot in your school, then basically you have just got to put him in leg-irons and wait for him to grow up and leave. I lean to the opinion that it is a primitive kind of natural selection. There are some genes that just don’t have what it takes to get to adulthood, but the headmaster is not allowed to think that because of the fees and the insurance. He has got to come up with a preventative method. Rather him than me.
Apart from such diversions, school seems to be going well. Oliver has been cast into gloom by the necessity of giving a talk in French about LaFayette for his French oral exam, but lifted into happiness by being awarded extra tuck for his successes in algebra. They had a social evening with the junior girls from Lucy’s school, at which Actual Head Boy, to everybody’s excitement, had Actually Pulled. Son Of Oligarch has been determined not to be outdone and got himself a holiday job in a barber’s shop. The Aysgarth School Cross Country Run For Boys, Teachers and Enthusiastic Parents went all right, and all in all, he was happy and exhausted and pleased to be coming home.
He was, I noted with pleasure, wearing his vest as instructed and his shoes have not yet worn into holes. He has retreated to his room now, where he, and various other boys from school, are doing something noisy online together.
It is lovely to have a boy upstairs.
I know we are at work, but all the same, holidays are ace.
