It is Saturday night and the Lake District is very full. We have had the most glorious sunset, soft blues fading into pink with a huge moon, all reflected in the still lake.
I am not expecting to have much time to write to you this evening, so if this is a bit patchy, it is because I keep being interrupted.
We were woken up by something splendid this morning. The postman shoved a small, squishy parcel through the letter box.
It was addressed to Oliver and turned out to be from his new housemaster at Gordonstoun.
Inside was a T-shirt with the school motto, Plus est en vous, which is Latin, and more or less translates as Could Do Better. This could be said to have been the theme of my own school reports.
There was also a page-long friendly letter, welcoming him to Duffus House and telling him that he would have an ace time.
I thought this was splendid.
Oliver thought it was splendid as well, although the T-shirt was in the normal size for a thirteen year old boy, and so would have made him a new overcoat with some left for a shirt.
He is very excited.
I am very excited on his behalf, what a brilliant adventure it is all going to be.
When we got up we ambled about looking at the new conservatory and considering our next moves. You might recall that yesterday Mark offered to move the kitchen into it in order that I would not need to be stuck in the dark underground when the days are full of sunshine.
We considered this.
Then we considered moving our bedroom downstairs and putting the kitchen where our bedroom is.
Then we considered putting the living room where the kitchen is and the kitchen where the living room is.
Then we wished that we had a bigger house.
We decided that we did not want a kitchen in the conservatory because I want a banana plantation and also because the butter would melt whenever the sun came out. I would not like that even though we do not use butter much any more, because of Hard To Spell Disease. All the same it would be tiresome. Everything would get warm and the colours would fade.
We decided that we did not want to put the kitchen where the living room is because there is not enough room in the living room, especially now we have got a handy boot cupboard.
We definitely did not want to lose the handy boot cupboard. If I had realised how many boots and bags and coats we have got, I would have made it twice as big, except that we wouldn’t have had a living room at all then. It is stuffed to bursting, especially now that the children are home and we have got camping things and school things and general clutter leaking out all over the place. It is like the shop in the old television programme called Mr. Benn. You could go in there and come out dressed as practically anything.
We thought that we would not put our bedroom in the kitchen because everything in a kitchen needs a wall to stand against, and there wouldn’t be enough wall space in our bedroom to put all of the wall-shaped things.
After that we considered pulling the bedroom wall down and having a mezzanine bedroom. I have seen a picture of one of these in a holiday brochure and liked the look of it very much, but Mark said that it was in a bigger house in a hotter country belonging to somebody who had more money to spend. Very few terraced houses in the Lake District have got a mezzanine floor, and there is probably a sensible reason for this.
In the end Mark suggested that we move the existing kitchen around so that my working surface is in the light bit instead of the darkest corner. We both thought that this was a good idea, and also cheaper and involving less effort than everything else, especially Mark’s idea of knocking down the whole back of the house and just rebuilding it as a bigger one.
Obviously we could not do this today, because of electricity and plumbing issues. Instead Oliver came down and we made some cakes together. He had found a recipe in one of his Beano comics for Monster Cakes, so we made those. They were basically a mixture of chocolate and Rice Crispies, with various added extras, although Oliver refused to allow the addition of anything actually interesting, like cherries or dried fruit or rose water or nuts.
We made them with Cheerios, because when we unearthed the Rice Crispies, Oliver pointed out that the sell-by-date was July 2015 and declined to use them despite my protestations that they would probably be perfectly all right. Regular readers might recall that his youthful aspiration was to become a Health And Safety inspector, and he was adamant.
We shared them with the children in the alley, who had just brought me some flowers. I am getting to like having a dozen noisy children in the alley. It is more interesting than peace and quiet.
The picture is my own garden. It is the best bit. The rest is a rubble-strewn building site.
