Reflections

Lucy rang this morning.

She has had a truly awful couple of days.

She had exams all day yesterday, but worse, because she should have had a third that would not fit on to the timetable, she had to spend last night in supervised isolation, and then sit the third exam this morning.

No mobile phone, no computer. No YouTube, no Facebook, no Instagram, no Amazon. The list is endless and heart-rending for a modern teenager, poor Lucy.

She was utterly alone in the world, staying with the examination supervisor, and a book.

Fortunately because it is a boarding school she did not have to go very far, because the supervisor lives at school as well.

Because it was a psychology exam she knows that solitary confinement sends people mental. As a consequence she worked herself into such a state of lonely anxiety that by the time she sat down to do the exam she was entirely convinced that she knew nothing whatsoever. She was quite surprised to open the paper and discover that she has been expensively well-informed about all of the relevant topics for the past two years.

She has almost finished with A Levels now. By this time next week they will all be over. She does not know if she has done well, we will have to wait for the summer to find out.

I have been thinking about it all being over, and I think that I would like to do something celebratory, although I do not know what. Between us all we have achieved an education, and I think that we should do something to mark its conclusion. Something other than our current idea of becoming completely intoxicated at the end of school ball, anyway, and obviously I would like it to be something recklessly extravagant. I will let you know when I have dreamed something up.

We did not have much time today, because of it being Saturday. We fed Oliver on chocolate spread sandwiches a couple of times, but there was not really time to build a new conservatory before we went to work.

In any case it was raining.

We did things in the house.

We stuck some mirrors all round the kitchen window.

Our kitchen has been built in a hole in the ground, so much so that our front door is upstairs. There is a perfectly normal sized window in the kitchen, except that it looks out on to a wall, about two feet away, which is holding the front garden up.

Our next door neighbour borrows his ladders every now and again and climbs into the hole and cleans it out.

Today Mark climbed into the hole.

He screwed some bits of wood to the wall and laid some mirrors on the top of them. They are at an angle so that they reflect the daylight.

The mirrors are left over from when the Royal Air Force were rebuilding their cadet training centre in Windermere. We used most of the old training centre as firewood this winter, but you can’t burn mirrors, so we saved them in case they came in handy.

Today they came in handy.

Mark cut the mirrors to the right size and stuck them to the walls and ceiling around the window.

Suddenly we had got quite a lot more daylight.

Our kitchen has become very much brighter indeed. I took a picture of it so that you could see, the mirrors are at the bottom reflecting the top of the window, and the roof of the bay window in the bedroom, and the sky.

It is a splendid thing. Having a dark kitchen has been one of the difficult things about life, especially when the sun is shining outside. It is marvellous to have all of this new daylight flooding in.

I can’t wait until the sun shines again. I want to try out the new mirrors with actual sunshine bouncing off them, and also I want the fairy lights in the back garden to come on. Especially I want this because I fell over the wheelbarrow this evening.

I am consoling myself with the recollection that it won’t be long before we have our own indoor garden. We have also started on the new plumbing works.

It might really be finished for Christmas this year.