Olden days parent

We had to get up early this morning.

This was because if you don’t ring the doctor’s surgery a week before you are ill you are unlikely to get an appointment. They are kindly and helpful but very busy, I suppose Windermere must be an unexpectedly sickly sort of place, like the slums in Birmingham during the Industrial Revolution.

The receptionist patiently agreed with my determined premise that innocent victims of violence should have a moral entitlement to an early appointment, and gave us the half past ten slot. This meant that we had to get up properly and get dressed and everything.

The doctor glanced over Mark’s almost completely recovered injuries, because almost all of the swelling has gone down now, he just looks a bit strangely shaped and discoloured. He poked him about a bit and grunted. He wrote something on the computer and said, encouragingly, that the police never bother checking the GP records anyway. He thought that this was probably because everybody always pleads guilty. We nodded, although I confess that secretly I was not entirely convinced.

That done we ambled back through the village where we bumped into Actual Head Boy and his father, who had come shopping for a wetsuit, because Actual Head Boy has put himself down for sailing classes at school next term. I asked Oliver if he had put his name down as well, but he couldn’t remember, it will be a surprise when we find a wetsuit added to the school bill next term.

They came round for tea and an update on the holidays. We have got fed up of talking about Mark being a victim of violence, so we only told him the nice bits.

They had brought an Easter egg for us, which we thought was very kind indeed, and once they had gone we all fell on it like starving rats, because of not having had breakfast.

After that Mark went outside to mend my car, which has got various faults that we have been ignoring. This is never a good strategy just before the Easter holidays, because it is a rule of taxis that they will wait until your busiest moment, and then fall apart, expiring in a puff of depressing white smoke at the side of the road just as the meter clicks over into double time.

We hoped to avoid this misfortune, and so Mark spent the day with his head under the bonnet, trying to find out why the horn and the windscreen wash and the full beam headlights and the starter motor don’t work, also why it makes a funny little chuffing noise.

He did find out in the end, it will cost us a hundred quid.

I went into the kitchen to do some cooking, because we were down to the last of the cakes. Oliver said, rather touchingly yesterday, that he thought that cakes were one of the best ways that a person could show that they loved somebody, because they were nice to eat and nice to look at, but also they were something that you had taken time and effort to do, it was like giving your family a little piece of yourself.

Obviously after a lead in like that I could not leave the tin empty. I made yet another batch of Easter egg cakes, and then some mayonnaise, and then a large pan of risotto for everybody’s dinners.

Oliver came down to start on his homework whilst I was in the middle of all of this.

“You’re just like one of those olden days mothers from the nineteen nineties,” he said, admiringly. “You do all of the feeding and looking after us all. Thank you.”

I felt this was a suitable reward for my efforts, it is nice to be appreciated.

I have taken a picture of the slowly disappearing shed. Mark hasn’t been doing the garden today but maybe tomorrow. The weather is supposed to stay fine for a bit longer, so perhaps we will make a bit more headway soon.

I do hope so. Car repairs are so dull.