We have had a very full day and should have gone to bed earlier.
We didn’t go to bed early, and because of this when the alarm went off at half past six this morning we did not, once again, leap out of bed crying “hail, shining morn.”
We did not leap out of bed at all, although I could have cried a bit.
We had got to be at Oliver’s school for ten. They were holding a talk about how to be a parent of a teenager, hosted by some visiting counsellor who was hoping to plug her new book.
I am reasonably experienced at parenting teenagers, Oliver being my fourth go at it. I have got rather better at it as the years have gone on, and so far Oliver has grown into a fairly tranquil and untroubled sort of person. Even my first attempts seem to have survived my amateur meddlings, and grown up rather nicely.
Of course, this may be in spite of me rather than thanks to me.
We arrived a few minutes early, and managed to bag the comfortable seats, near the front. They weren’t very comfortable, but considerably better than the emergency ones at the back. These had presumably been brought in from some unused classroom, and looked like you would need to be eight years old to sit on them without wriggling.
I think I knew within the first two minutes that it was not going to be a success.
Also I know Mark well, and could tell by the bristling of his ears that he was not very impressed either.
The counsellor was full of warnings about the dangers of the internet, and the possibilities of children seeing pornography, and the likelihood of them becoming addicted to everything from self harm to gambling.
I think that almost all of this is alarmist drivel.
My offspring, as you know, have completely unlimited access to any bit of the Internet they wish to view, including pornography, zombie massacres, killer death disaster films, or party political broadcasts. They can watch anything, in short, that does not require my credit card details. If they want to pay to view then they have got their own.
They are far too parsimonious for such extravagance.
In fact, both of them seem to prefer Japanese cartoons and Disney.
None of it seems to have done any of them any harm at all.
There was a lot of talk about conflict with your children. I have never had a conflict with Lucy or Oliver, and it was interesting to discover that perhaps I should. Both of them seem to be perfectly able to decide for themselves when to go to bed, or to do their prep. This is because they have discovered from bitter personal experience that the absence of both sleep and prep makes life rubbish. These things are called Leaving A Present For Future Me.
Afterwards, just to be sure, I looked up some of the erectile dysfunction problems that the counsellor warned us about as a consequence of rascally internet usage, and fortunately they don’t seem to exist outside the imaginations of middle aged women. Think about the sort of things that they warned Boy Scouts not to do in Baden Powell’s time.
She did actually recommend showering as a release for this sort of stress, although it was hot, not cold, perhaps because of modern plumbing being more efficient.
I managed to contain my disagreement for about an hour and a half, but of course in the end it burst out.
I don’t think anybody had ever challenged her before. I think I might have been quite forthright.
The headmaster interrupted when it looked as though she was starting to get upset, and rescued her, diplomatically.
He told us that even Roblox, which is a game played by Oliver, has a sex play torture dungeon buried in its complexities somewhere, let the unwary beware.
Oliver was intrigued by this when we told him afterwards, and we all speculated about how the headmaster might have found it, when Oliver, who has been trying for months, has failed. We suggested that he ask him, but he thought it would be more prudent to work it out for himself.
I was cross about it all the way to York, where we met Lucy and Nan and Grandad for the usual jolly lunch. Lucy agreed that she was a stressed teenager with performance anxieties, just like the counsellor had said that they all were.
She had not found the Roblox torture dungeon either, perhaps the headmaster was making it up.
They refused my suggestion that they watch pornography or play violent games on their computers in the car on the way back, and insisted that we played I Spy, by way of family bonding. They ignored all of my protests and Lucy looked up Car Games on her computer.
We played I Spy, Car Charades and Twenty Questions, although nobody counted any of the questions, so it could reasonably have been called A Lot Of Stupid Questions. Car Charades is a game in which you simply describe a film, because obviously it is difficult to do a detailed mime whilst driving.
That could also have been called A Lot Of Stupid Questions, actually, and by the time we got home I had laughed so much that my face hurt. Mark guessed Spider-man from Oliver’s opening words of: “There was this guy, right.”
Mark and I had a sleep when we got home, and when we woke up Lucy came bouncing excitedly down the stairs.
She had an email from the police.
She has passed her interview and is through to the next round of interviews.
We are very pleased indeed. She has got to go for another interview in a fortnight.
How exciting.
I haven’t taken a picture. Have one that I took when the sun shone a couple of weeks ago.
