Oliver’s new uniform has arrived.
It turned up in a box big enough to have posted him in it, and probably a couple of his friends as well, and the postman woke us up in the middle of the night to give it to us.
Of course its arrival was a colossal excitement. The school uniform will be the Appearance Of Oliver for the next five years, it will become part of his identity, and we were all dying to know what he would look like.
Unsurprisingly it is all huge, even though it was the smallest sizes they had, perhaps Scottish people are bigger. It will fit him for ages, which is fortunate because it means that we will be able to finish paying for it before he needs the next size up. It is not all there yet, I could not buy the trousers from school. Theirs do not have adjustable waists, and the trousers that would have fitted him at the top end did not go on for long enough to get anywhere near the ground.
I had to order some from Marks & Spencer. I pretended to the lady in the school uniform shop that I was disappointed about this because she assured me that they were of the very best quality, far better than any chain store ones, but actually I was not really sorry at all because he needs three pairs and the M&S ones were a tenner cheaper. They will get here on Monday.
In the meantime I can start on the name-label sewing. This is always a major summertime chore, all it takes is an unexpected growth spurt and I can be kept occupied sticking needles in my fingers for weeks. Socks are the worst because you have to sew two labels before you have achieved anything useful. Fortunately the evenings are light and I can do it in between taxi customers and writing to you. Unforgiving minute and all that.
I was supposed to take Oliver to the opticians today, but after some soul-searching discussion I rang them and cancelled it. He needs, and occasionally remembers to wear, glasses. Mostly these are handy for getting him out of any lesson when he might need to look at the blackboard in order to scurry back to the dormitory to collect them.
The optician recommended that he be prescribed some special contact lenses to be worn at night only. These squish your eyes back into the preferred shape and your vision is magically restored to perfection during the daytime.
I was all in favour of this until I spoke to them earlier this week and found out that it would be two hundred quid for the lenses followed by a charge of forty quid every month for some unspecified supervisory activity.
I explained to Oliver that I preferred not to splash seven hundred quid per annum on contact lenses that he would very probably forget to put in several times a week, and almost certainly lose for ever during his first night sleeping in a scrape in the snowy wilderness.
Oliver was disappointed by my lack of commitment to his visual acuity, but bore it nobly and disappeared back up the stairs to be in the US Cavalry. This is what he is doing at the moment, and he very much prefers it to the necessity of accompanying me to the optician, followed by the walnut shop and then the ground coffee shop and finally the supermarket.
In consequence of this I went on my own.
I do not like the supermarket and prefer it when Mark goes with me, but today he was busy building our new princess palace and I did not want to distract him. This is still coming along very pleasingly, and by this evening we had enough windows in the roof for our new lodger to stand underneath them out of the rain for a cigarette.
Window installation has been temporarily ceased, however, because we have run out of the lovely copper vinyl to coat the frames. I have ordered some this evening on eBay, but it will not arrive until next week and hence we have had to desist. In other news, however, Mark has found where he left the coloured LED lights. It turns out that there are loads of them, which has been like finding a present that our past selves had left for our future selves, we will be able to put them up everywhere.
I went shopping and spent far too much. I am trying to train myself not to feel guilty about this, because it is not me who eats Party Ring Biscuits or Best Value Sausages, but it is not easy. After a particular splurge I come sloping home like a cat hoping that nobody will notice that it has just done a poo in those gardening shoes that were on the doorstep.
It took ages to unpack, because we had run out of everything. We had eaten all the emergency things that nobody likes much but that we buy because they are good for you or middle class or cheap. We had even eaten some cooked potatoes in the fridge that Mark cut the mouldy bits off and fried for ages just in case.
I am pleased to have full cupboards despite being broke. If you are going to live in a princess palace it is nice to have a well-supplied kitchen.
Tomorrow I am going to cook some of it.
Life is getting better all the time.
