In the end Mark drove over this afternoon to get Oliver.
He has had a brilliant time. He has been staying with Prime Minister To Be, whom he likes very much.
They have been to the Great Yorkshire Show. This is a large agricultural event in a field, although it sounds to have been attended mostly by businesses who wanted to encourage Yorkshire to notice them
In the olden days you used to go to a show to tell all your neighbours that your bull was bigger than theirs, or that you had the fluffiest sheep, but I think these days things have changed. Oliver and Prime Minister To Be went charging off to see who could persuade the most free gifts out of the stallholders, and they seem to have done quite remarkably well, given that even the most hopeful of stallholders could not reasonably have supposed that they would have much disposable income to invest, at least for the foreseeable future.
The picture is them being weathermen on the television at the BBC stall. I do not know why the BBC need to advertise themselves at the Great Yorkshire Show, perhaps they are concerned that elderly Yorkshire dwellers will just economically switch them off when they are going to be required to purchase television licences in a year or two.
It would have been very handy to have had some weathermen here today, because I have played the Washing Game again and again and again, until in the end I was resoundingly defeated. I took everything in and draped it all over the house, after which the rain promptly stopped. I ignored this, because obviously it was one of those gambit moves to get me to make a rash decision, but for the next hour the sun shone and a gentle breeze stirred the flowers, so in the end I hauled the next load out and pegged it on the line.
Obviously within two minutes the heavens had opened, and when I got the washing in it was sodden and heavy. It stopped raining after that, but I was not being fooled again. Mark lit the fire and I plugged in the dehumidifier.
There was such a lot of washing. I had hand-washed our ball dresses and Speech Day dresses, by the expedient of tipping a couple of kettles of hot water in the bath and filling it up, and leaving the dresses in there to soak. Obviously they could not be wrung out, and they have been dangling about the house, sodden and dripping ever since.
Apart from washing I have been trudging around trying to create some civilised orderliness.
It is not easy to put everything away in an organised and tidy fashion when there is nowhere for everything to go.
We have collected two children and five years of accumulated boarding school clutter.
You might recall that lots of their stuff has been duplicated, and so there is nowhere in the house where it normally lives. They have pillows and duvets for school, and pillows and duvets for home. They have home towels and school towels, pairs of trainers that are left at school and pairs that stay at home. There are wash bags and tuck boxes and worst of all, there is a colossal pile of school uniform and games kit that will never be worn again.
This last is very hard to let go of, because of course it still looks as though it ought to be useful. Indeed, I have spent the last few years treasuring it carefully, mending it and scrubbing ink spots and ironing it and preserving its useful life for as long as possible.
It is very hard just to chuck it in the dustbin, but I have.
We have a very small house. There is no room for extra clutter. Things have got to be beautiful or useful or preferably both if they are to survive.
I considered saving some of it and posting it back to school, but when I looked there were an awful lot of darns and almost-vanished ink spots. Even Matron, who is parsimony itself, is not likely to want it.
Fortunately Lucy was busy preparing herself for another camping trip, this one to a festival called Beat Herder, somewhere near Clitheroe. She has got to go and visit the police again in the morning, and after that she is going to go and visit Chloe, but she is taking her trunk full of camping gear with her anyway, just in case.
This disposed of a couple of towels, and one quilt and pillow, and I stuffed the other in front of the grandfather clock out of the way. It has been Oliver’s and needs some considerable laundering.
Lucy has returned from her most recent camping trip with fresh sociological insights into the way the rest of Britain conducts itself. She and her security guarding friend visited his grandparents on their way back home, and she was puzzled to discover that they expected her to sit down without issuing an invitation. They smoked cigarettes and had the television on, even in the afternoon, and asked her if she would like a butty*, but she had no idea at all what they were talking about, and so declined.
She thought they were very nice people, friendly and talkative, but that it was all very peculiar.
She is going to have some interesting experiences in the police force.
*For anybody else who needs a translation, it is a Lancashire word for a sandwich.
