Practice

We have worked for ten nights on the run now, and I am looking forward to a break.

We have got another couple of nights to go and then we will be free. Next week we will be going off to Northamptonshire with Lucy for yet another encounter with their constabulary, this time for the dreadful Bleep Test.

She is now full of iron and considerably more cheerful. She was blithely dismissive of my bleep test anxieties, and insisted that she is managing to do it easily in her practice runs.

I was pleased to hear this, because I never once managed to do it easily. Every single time meant a great deal of huffing and puffing and self-pity. One of the very pleasing things about not being in the Prison Service is that I will not now be expected to run the stupid thing every year. Every cloud, and all that sort of thing.

Lucy came down and had coffee in bed with us this morning, joined, after a while, by Oliver, once he had got tired of his early morning drum practice. She is getting herself into a tizz about it all. It is not easy to be doing A Levels and job interviews and fitness tests all crammed into the same few weeks.

We reminded her that she only has to do one day at a time, but of course all the teachers at school are flapping about the Independent Schools League Tables and are not in the least encouraging anybody to relax and take things easily.

They are all very keen that students should be poring over the set texts even before breakfast, and are horrified by any less rigorous approach. One kindly tutor was shocked to his gentlemanly core to hear about her summer job, and wondered, delicately, if perhaps it might count as child abuse.

Lucy was touched by his concern, but nevertheless explained gently that at eighteen, she had outgrown her eligibility for Childline, and that she was hoping that a summer job would eventually help her fund her first independent ventures into the housing market. Regardless of her parents’ thoughtless lack of income which had made such wage-slavery a regrettable necessity, she still did not feel that it qualified her to write the letters MeToo after her name. 

Once we were all dressed we thought that we would have a bit of a practice for next week’s sponsored walk. It is always a good idea to experience unfamiliar boots in a relatively domestic setting before setting off to hike for mile upon excruciating mile in them, as I have discovered to my cost in the past.

It was wonderfully sunny. The dogs charged about barking at things, and we ambled up the fellside, breathing in the gorgeous springtime scents of hawthorn blossom and wild garlic. We looked at tadpoles and water boatmen in the sheep pond, and listened to the blackbirds. This time last year the swifts were here, heralding the summer on its uplifting way in,  but there was no sign today. They won’t be long now.

We stood at the top and looked out across the valleys to the sea, glittering in the distance. Oliver, who is doing geography as part of his Common Entrance, told us about erosion and weathering, and Mark pointed out the log stack, tidily sheeted up in our field far below.

I was sorry to go home, because the sun was so lovely, and left us all pink and freckled: but we all had things to do. Oliver had homework, and we had work, and Lucy was not supposed to be there in the first place, because she should have been at school.

We did not do any of these things straight away. We went home and cooked a large breakfast omelette, the sort laden with bits of potato and ham and cheese. It was not very breakfasty, because it turned out that by then it was four o’ clock in the afternoon. We were going to be late for work, and Lucy was going to be late back to school and miss Chapel, but none of us minded.

We had several cups of tea, and some ginger biscuits afterwards, and then, grimly and inexorably, duty called.

Lucy went off to school, and to A Levels, and Mark and I went to work, leaving Oliver to puzzle his way through a stack of Common Entrance maths papers.

I am pleased to be able to tell you that I can’t help him with these any more, because he is better at them than I am.

That is a happy discovery.

It has been a wonderful day.