We were woken up by a text arriving from Oliver to tell us that he was still unpacking. This was a monumental task because unusually Duffus House was having some renovation work done over the holidays, and every single thing owned by every single boy had needed to be packed up and put into storage.
Another text arrived later to explain that he had finished, and that in the end Matron had helped. I was glad about this. The Duffus House Matron is, to my mind, a bit slim and cheerful to be a proper Matron, everybody knows that they should be ruthlessly efficient and be discovered to be wearing face cream and curlers when they are called out to an overnight boy-crisis. Anyway, it turns out that despite these obvious failings, she is more than capable of restoring an anxious boy to tranquillity, so I shall try and be more accepting.
He had not been unpacking all night, obviously. He had been obliged to go to bed and leave it, and hence woken up to the dreary spectacle of rugby kit and sailing boots strewn all over the floor. He was very pleased to have everything tidily put away this evening, and as I write I think he is on the phone to Mark, having a live tutorial about how to reassemble a bicycle.
For my part I have cleaned his bedroom. In fact I have cleaned a lot of things, we are trying to catch up on ourselves a bit.
The last few weeks have felt a bit like running upwards on an escalator which is chugging relentlessly downhill. It has not seemed to matter how much we have puffed and struggled, by the end of every day we have always seemed to have lost ground, so this week we are trying to regain some.
Today we are trying to catch up on ourselves a bit.
We have been clearing the house of its scattered debris. There was a lot of this. Some of it was related to having a boy at home, muddy fell-walking boots and similar, but more of it was the product of endless kitchen-shifting. Still more was leftovers from things that we have not done whilst we have been otherwise faffing about. Mostly these were very dull things like not changing broken lightbulbs or emptying overflowing rubbish bins.
Today we did those, and the world is feeling better.
Mark was not working today, unless you count the taxi, which I don’t, and that wasn’t today, it was this evening. We were going to have a full day and night off, and carry on reforming our lives into a state of tranquil uncluttered perfection, but by this evening temptation had got the better of him and he went off to sit on the taxi rank for a few hours. This turned out to be a complete lemon, because between six and ten o’clock he took £4.75 and even that was paid by card so we won’t get it for days and days, so he came home instead.
He had been hoping to earn some money because our microwave is not working any more, and we think that we would like to replace it with a new one. It has been making the electricity go off for ages, by way of letting us know that it was ailing, and yesterday it expired completely with a quiet little sigh.
I am trying to tell myself that nobody actually needs a microwave oven, and that my grandparents managed perfectly well without one, but actually they didn’t. They bought one in technology’s very earliest days, and my grandmother liked it so much that she bought me one as well. I did not use it much for ages, not being entirely certain what it was for, but those days are gone and in our modern tech-dependent era nobody, especially me, makes as much as a sandwich without first flinging some ingredient into its gaping maw to be partially pre-digested by radiation technology.
We are going to have to get a new one, and have been looking hopefully on the Asda website. We have got to earn another £30.25 first, so it might not be today.
At current rates of earning it will take a further 6.368 nights at work to afford one, or 3.814 nights if we both go out to work.
I know that because my calculator still works. Hurrah for technology.
Have a picture of Roger Poopy and his remaining fragments of ball.
