Nature things

I had a terrible fright today.

I was pegging the washing in the garden, because it looked as though the rain might just hold off for a while. It didn’t hold off for very long in the end, and I had to rush out again and drag sheets and aprons and dusters off the line in a hurry.

Anyway, I put my hand into the peg bag and instead of a clothes peg, discovered the most enormous spider. Fortunately I hadn’t actually picked it up, it was lurking at the bottom, and as I put my hand in, it danced out from underneath the pegs and waved its legs about threateningly.

Of course I dropped the peg bag, and squeaked with the dreadful shock of it.

Mark was in the garden building me a conservatory, and he was hardly sympathetic at all. He laughed, a lot, and he kept laughing in little snorts afterwards, when he thought about it again.

He did remove the spider from the peg bag, though, he picked it up with his bare hands, which I thought was terribly brave, and put it in the builders’ yard across the road, because he thought that probably the builders would not be scared of spiders either. It is not the sort of job for arachnophobes, because of old buildings and dark corners.

Perhaps is is a man thing. Sometimes we do seem to have different ideas.

We have had an email from some parents at Oliver’s school. It seems that it is traditional, at the end of your sons’ last term, for the Head Boy’s parents to organise a whip-round and arrange some kind of collective parting gift for the school.

I am jolly glad that Oliver was not virtuous enough to be Head Boy. Probably school can spot dysfunctional parents and choose their Head Boys from a select group of boys whose parents are not likely to flap round swearing at the last minute, getting themselves in a tizz and frantically searching through Amazon.

Anyway, we have been all asked for our ideas. I have not got any ideas at all, other than perhaps an innovation of balls and chains for idiots who persist in doing Parkour, but I have read everybody else’s with interest. It seems that mummies, generally, would like to plant a woodland, to remind the boys to be mindful of their carbon footprint and to give them an opportunity to commune with Nature, and daddies want to buy the boys some more guns. One daddy thoughtfully pointed out that guns would be the most useful asset in the event of a zombie apocalypse.

I think probably I am with the daddies on the whole. The reason school needs more guns is that the last ones, literally, have been shot to pieces. They are the most eternally popular occupation in school, and our walls at home are adorned by several treasured targets with skilfully placed holes in them, the most prized of which have been marked “Assassin Grade” by the teacher.

Having said that, the boys like the existing woodland very much. It is the site of something called Valley Games, played when the rugby pitch is too sodden to be used, which is a sort of combination of hide and seek and mud wrestling. The smaller boys had a mining operation going on in there, and they all slosh through it on Cross Country.

The boys like the woods, although I am not sure that they do much communing with Nature or contemplating their carbon footprint. As far as I can tell the thing they all like best about their current woodland is the easy availability of sticks. These can be used as swords, and are handy in an ambush.

I suppose from that point of view it could be considered that a woodland would also be useful in a zombie apocalypse.

Mark is getting along with the conservatory as you can see. He has installed the window frames in order to get them out from under his feet whilst he is cutting steel for the solar panel. This is because of only having the tiniest of gardens, and it is even tinier now that was have eradicated all of that green stuff and laid bricks.

It is all very exciting indeed.

It might be finished by Christmas.