Oliver has gone back to school, in a locked-down, still at home sort of way.
This left us all a bit shell shocked this morning.
The school day started at half past eight, with a Duffus House Meeting, and so we had to set the alarm for seven.
It was a horribly startling experience, I can tell you. It dinged its head off when it was still perfectly plainly the middle of the night. The dogs were so astonished that they refused to get up to go for their morning wee in the yard, and had to be booted off their bed to shiver, grumpily, down the stairs.
Obviously Mark and I did not go to the house meeting. School has explained that our part of the arrangement is to see that our offspring is adequately fed and dressed, and spoken to lovingly occasionally, and they will do the rest.
This is a massive relief. I have only the most rudimentary understanding of the way Google Docs works, or indeed any of the other provisions made by Google to facilitate learning. The new educational norm seems to be something called Google Classroom. I know nothing about it whatsoever.
School has kindly reassured me that I do not need to trouble myself with such technicalities, and so I have not become concerned about my ignorance. Oliver’s continued education is an arrangement entirely between himself and school, who are enforcing their authority with the threat of exams as soon as the lockdown has been lifted.
We got up to make him some breakfast, prior to the House Meeting, and then wandered around a bit aimlessly after that, having leapt out of bed at sunrise and fulfilled the urgent business of the day in the first half an hour.
Oliver retreated to his bedroom with croissants and apple tea, and everything went quiet for a while.
A little while later he ran up and down the stairs a couple of times to simulate being late for Chapel.
After that we did not see him again until lunch time.
I was prepared for this one as well, and he had half a tin of ravioli and some sliced apple. I have never bought tinned ravioli before, but we have had some discussion about the best ways to replicate school life, and Oliver assures me that it is a Scottish lunchtime delicacy.
He had a ride around the block on his bicycle after lunch, and then retired to his bedroom again, this time to learn French.
He got a Merit Mark in French, and he has joined the Mountain Biking Activity. This is causing me some problems because he has got to have a cycling helmet for this, and we have left his at school. I have been sending anxious messages to cycling neighbours ever since, to no avail, so if anybody in Windermere has a spare cycling helmet until one arrives from Amazon I would be very pleased.
By the end of the day he was exhausted.
He is upstairs now, doing his prep. He has got to do an hour of prep every evening, and half an hour’s reading. This has got to be an actual book, not a screen. He has still got some unread library books from school but after that he will have to start on mine.
Once school was over we had a walk up the fell all together, because it was Lucy’s last day. I think that technically this might have meant that we were in breach of the lockdown, since Oliver had already whizzed once around the block on his bike and we had emptied the dogs, briefly, in the Library Gardens before breakfast. Lucy and I had even been to Sainsbury’s, although we could not be inside it together, and I bought sweet potatoes to make soup for dinner, and she bought milk and bread to take back home.
We thought that a walk would probably be all right, under the circumstances, and we reassured ourselves that after all, we had our own portable policeman with us to make sure we did not do anything contagious.
The sun is still shining, and a cool breeze blew. We found a swing in the woods, as you will have noticed from the picture. I broke my arm on a similar contraption as a child, but nevertheless was persuaded to have a go, and almost repeated the experience. The dogs charged about and barked, and Lucy practiced some police brutality on Oliver, and in no time at all it was over, and she had to go.
She called later on to tell us that she had reached Northamptonshire, and thought perhaps there might be a dead body in her fridge, but there wasn’t.
She thinks that tomorrow she had perhaps better do some cleaning.
