Dear everybody,
I have had too much to drink, but it is my birthday and so I don’t care. I have been here for fifty four years, and this evening I have celebrated with a glass of wine, followed by another, and then another. The last one was only half a glass, because the box ran out, but that is probably just as well, because we have got to go to Oliver’s school in the morning, and I do not want to have a horrible hangover.
It has been a contented, although unremarkable birthday. Mark bought me a card and some flowers out of the Library Gardens, and he had saved ten pounds out of the taxi takings for me to do something nice.
He did not buy the flowers from the Library Gardens, obviously. He had to pick those discreetly after work last night whilst he was emptying the dogs. This does not really matter because after Mark was helpful last year the gardener said that we could take anything we liked, so it was not stealing, not unless they have got a new gardener.
I was very pleased to have the ten pounds. In fact I used it to pay for parking in Kendal, and to buy cheese and onion rolls in Greggs when Lucy and I got desperate later on, but it was much appreciated anyway.
As you might have gathered, I spent my birthday in Kendal. This was because Lucy was booked to go for a tidying-up haircut before then summer ball, after which we wandered around the shops, and she bought clothes for a private security operative. Up until now she has only ever bought clothes for a schoolgirl, suitable for a quiet girls’ school in Yorkshire at that. This is a jolly different thing, I can tell you.
She can afford to buy clothes. She has earned a lot of money this week.
I ambled about Kendal happily, looking at things and thinking how nice it must be to be young and pretty and not look at modern clothes and just feel mildly alarmed. I cannot imagine, for instance, even considering the purchase of a T-shirt that might reveal my greyish spare tyre to the world, but Lucy bought some. She was completely undeterred by my observation that you really aren’t getting your money’s worth if somebody has snipped off the bottom half of your garment before it even got as far as the shop. We could do that with some of Mark’s T-shirts and have both a T-shirt for Lucy and a substantial duster for me, but she was not at all tempted.
Mark did not come with us. He pegged the washing on the line and then went to work.
There was a lot of washing because of Glastonbury.
We had to get it all done, though, because there will be a lot more tomorrow.
In the morning we are going to collect Oliver, who has been camping virtually since the Common Entrance results came out. I have not heard from him lately, but Facebook has been covered in pictures of boys paint balling and surfing and caving and sitting round campfires.
These activities look splendid but will result in substantial laundry.
Tonight is his very last night at Aysgarth. It has been a brilliant five years, and it is quite shocking that it is over.
He has lived and eaten and slept with his friends for five years. They have little sayings amongst themselves, and jolly rituals of punching somebody who breaks wind without touching a doorknob. They have sung together and fought one another and managed to get the door of their common room removed because of being rascally on the other side of it. They have snored and stuck their heads through the shower curtains for Matron to squirt shampoo on them. They have broken bits off one another and suffered through detentions given to the whole school for one boy’s villainy. They have climbed on the cannons and crashed their bikes and splashed on the waterslide and bashed each other with pillows. They have played German Spotlight and Mars Attack and Sniper and Valley Games, and now it is over. Five years ago they were scared little boys, and now they are confident young men.
Tomorrow we will go and collect him.
It will be the very last time.
