Departure

We have today had the sorry news that the children in the alley are moving away.

We are unexpectedly downcast about this.

I was not at all pleased to have our middle-aged tranquillity interrupted when they arrived. They bounced out of their house like half a dozen kangaroos unexpectedly released from a sack, and spent every sunny afternoon after that charging about and asking questions and bothering the dogs and generally being small and colourful and, well, loud. On more than one occasion we closed the gate with some relief and pretended to have gone deaf.

Then we got used to them.

From being a mass of interchangeable noisy urchins, they have metamorphosed into individuals, with names, and personalities, and interesting characteristics, and of course it turns out in the end that they are not urchins in the least, but polite, well-behaved human beings, just like all the rest of the street and rather better than some. I have even come to like their parents, who are not after all hooligans or hippies or ne’er do wells or socialists or arms dealers or admirers of Tim Farron or drug abusers. They are charming and friendly and entertaining, and I will not now get to know them better because they are going.

The children told us this afternoon that they were going to move very soon, and far from being relieved, it was as if some of the colour went out of the day. We were suddenly sad. We have come to listen for the noise in the alley, the clatter of bikes and the squeaks and chirps of little voices, and the occasional crunch and bellow of things going wrong.

It is as if all of the life will be drained out of the alley, and it will be grey and silent again.

Their voices are not little at all. They have got the most massive voices.

It is going to be very quiet without them.

We woke up this morning to an extremely welcome email which informed us that my parents had generously tipped some cash into our school uniform fund. This was brilliant, there is no feeling quite as splendid as money worries melting a little bit.

We told Oliver, who was pleased on our behalf, although obviously broadly indifferent to the massive expenditure that a school kit list incurs. In any case his thoughts were entirely occupied by his own concerns, which were mostly developments on the Fortnite game that he is playing online, but also an approaching adventure of his own.

He is going away tomorrow, to spend a week with one of his school friends who appears to live in a castle in Northumberland. This sounds ace, although I have got a vague feeling that everybody in Northumberland lives in a castle, because of the Scots.

There are several of them going, and his friend’s mother, whom I like very much, seems to have organised a week of camping on the beach and campfires and swimming in the sea. I think this sounds magnificent, and Mark and I wondered wistfully if perhaps we could go up in the camper for a few days as well, because the weather forecast for next week is beyond glorious. Obviously we can’t, because of the previously addressed pecuniary issues, but it sounds as though Oliver is going to have an ace time

I packed his rucksack today whilst Mark pottered about in the garden, occasionally shouting for me to come and hold the ladder whilst he carried sheets of double glazing up to the top. This looked very perilous, and I watched anxiously, without, obviously, volunteering to join in.

The roof is slowly creeping back towards the house, as you can see in the photograph. Today I hung some washing underneath it when it rained, and was enormously gratified to discover that it dried. I know that roofs do that, but there is a world of difference between theory and practice, and I am very pleased to attest to the correctness of the hypothesis.

It works.