Smug

It has been a Day.

It has been an absolute Day And A Half.

I am going to go on and on about this, because it is my diary and I can show off in it if I like. You can switch off now if you do not wish to have insufferable smug chirping inflicted upon you for the next seven hundred words.

We have Oliver’s Common Entrance results, and he has, to use a Number One Daughter phrase, smashed it.

His results are brilliant.

The school does not tell parents directly. The boys are called into the Head’s office, one by one, and given the news privately. This gives them time to come to terms with their future without anybody else looking at them.

They pull themselves together, come out and ring home.

Oliver rang me at about quarter past ten this morning.

I had been hovering over the phone all morning, looking anxiously at the clock and crossing my fingers in an agony of hopefulness.

I snatched it up with my heart in my mouth.

He could barely get the words out.

He has scored brilliantly in some things, and jolly well in almost everything else except, inexplicably, his French listening test. Given that he got 87% in his written French I think we will just have to assume that he takes after his father when it comes to listening.

His results are As and Bs across the board. He has passed well enough to meet the standards for any public school in the country, even the most selective.

He has done fantastically, brilliantly well.

A little while later we switched the computer on to find an email from his teacher. I am going to reproduce it here because I am showing off, unashamedly and happily.

Dear Mark and Sarah,

I can not put into words how utterly pleased I am for Oliver. He has worked so so hard over the past year, honing his revision and exam techniques…. and it certainly has paid off. He certainly deserved the grades he got. What a smile he had on his face when he came and found me at break! Hugs and tears all round!

I just want to say a big thank you to you both for sending Oliver to Aysgarth and believing that we could help him develop and achieve his potential. He has been such a joy and the most rewarding pupil to teach. You must both be so proud of him, as I am and all his teachers.

I look forward to seeing you tomorrow.

Rewarding pupil. I feel very smug indeed. No teacher ever said anything like that to my parents.

We read it and cried.

After that the day passed in a happy haze.

It was a busy sort of day, because as the letter remarks, we have got to be at Oliver’s school in the morning, for the Sports and Speech Day. This means we are going to have to set off after work tonight, at around four in the morning. We will sleep in the camper van and wake up in the school car park.

Today we organised food for the next couple of days and tried to bank some more sleep. This worked just about as well as it always does, by which I mean that it was nice to get enough sleep this afternoon, but it is night time now, and I would not be at all sorry to get a bit more.

In between sleep and ambling about grinning, Mark went to see the doctor to collect his X-ray results. He has crumbly knees, which have now officially been called Rheumatoid Arthritis. We thought this was probably the case anyway, thanks to the mighty Internet, so we are feeling quietly satisfied with our diagnostic abilities, although irritated with the general tiresomeness of getting old.

It doesn’t matter. The younger generation are all doing just fine.

We had just emerged from our afternoon snooze when Lucy arrived. She took her last A Level this morning, and is home for the summer, in an intermittent sort of way.

Her results won’t be out until August.

It seems like a terribly long time to wait.