Mark made a hundred and fifty quid for the scrap.
We were very pleased about this.
If you add in Number Two Daughter’s generosity, that is almost enough for a whole jacket.
We have bought it anyway, because you can do things like that in these financially flexible days, and it might even be here tomorrow. It is very exciting. It is lovely to go to places looking polished and tidy. Mark looks like a real grown up when he tries. I can wear absolutely anything and just look like a scruffy person who has dressed up. This will not matter if am with a chap in a smart jacket. People will just assume I am a bit odd.
I occupied the time of his absence at the scrapyard by flapping about the house.
I washed things and bought fruit and salad for picnics, and I dug out plastic cups and plates and old knives and forks for the children to take camping.
As you know, Lucy is off to Glastonbury this week, and Oliver has got two separate camping trips, just for the boys who are leaving. This is because now that school has finished teaching them Latin and maths, they need to keep the boys busy to stop them doing things like Parcour and generally being nuisances.
The first, lasting a week, is a trip to Cornwall. This is mostly an excuse for doing things like surfing and going to the cinema, and is not really camping in the usual wet socks and beetles in sleeping bags sort of way. The tents they are staying in are there all the time and are equipped for being relatively civilised, although I am not sure that I would like them. I was not convinced by the camper van until Mark arranged the electricity so that I could keep the hairdryer and the microwave. I do not yearn after the natural wilderness. It contains mud and spiders and unregulated wild poo.
The second camping trip is run by the younger masters, and involves marching off into the landscape with their rucksacks on their backs, presumably over the tops of their tweed jackets.
I have had a letter from school explaining that since they are grown ups now, on this second camping trip they are going to have lessons about surviving in the wild.
I am sure that the younger masters know all about this. It appears that the boys are going to be given a budget to feed themselves on the first day, and they are going to be taken to Tesco. After that they are going to live on the things they have bought, cooking for themselves.
This will be an interesting adventure. Oliver only really eats chocolate spread sandwiches and sausages, and being the youngest child with three older sisters, he has never so much as boiled a kettle. Occasionally he and Lucy are left to fend for themselves, by which I mean told to put their own pizza in the oven, but he has never done any serious self-catering. I hope he manages all right. He does not have any fat to live on if he has an emergency.
It is all very masculine rite-of-passage stuff, boys and masters trekking off into the wilderness together.
I don’t even think Matron is going to be there.
I have been worrying about this for a day or two, which has made Mark laugh. He says that it will make a man out of him. When Mark was Oliver’s age he had to go out with a gun and kill rabbits for dinner, and dig coal out of the ground for the fire, and share three pairs of jeans with his cousin, and he seems to have grown up all right.
I worried a bit more anyway, and flapped about a bit more. It would be awful if his sleeping bag was not warm enough, or if his shoes got wet on the first day and there was nowhere to get them dry.
I put his cup and plate in a bag to take with us when we see him, which will be at the shooting competition on Sunday, and thought that perhaps I had better email Matron again. She knows all about camping trips.
After that I thought I had better distract myself.
I filled in my tax return.
That made me feel better.
Have a picture of my garden.
