I have spent much of today doing laundry, and feeling very glad that Oliver has ditched rugby in favour of the far less violently muddy sport of badminton. Long may it continue.
I am also glad, under those circumstances, that I declined to shell out sixty quid for new rugby boots. School rang up about this, because rugby boots feature prominently in the Compulsory Kit list. I explained that it was an economy measure as in recent years I have calculated that the cost of rugby boots has been roughly £25 per hour of wear.
School grumbled under its breath but conceded the point, reluctantly, and found Oliver a pair of abandoned rugby boots once belonging to somebody else. He wore them a couple of times, moved on to occupy his games lessons with swimming and badminton, and the boots were abandoned once again.
It is much easier to wash badminton kit than rugby kit. How glad I am that he hasn’t yet metamorphosised into an eight foot giant with hard shoulders that would look good on the M6. It would be very tiresome indeed if he suddenly turned into a prop forward.
The PE teacher is hoping that he will. His report said that he would be brilliant at rugby if only he was bigger, but he isn’t.
Ah well.
In the meantime, the house is draped with unfestive swags of steaming laundry. Games shirts and underwear, towels and sheets, have all been dragged limply from his boy-scented luggage, and stuffed into the washing machine. The weather is too ghastly to dry it all outside, and the windows and doors have begun to trickle with condensation.
I suppose it will help the Christmas tree to last a bit longer.
Whilst I have been compensating for the lack of pantomime by being Widow Twankey in my own home, Mark has been clearing out the conservatory.
He has massacred the poor tomato plants.
They needed a massacre, because they had become huge, and flapping, and unwieldy. They were still producing tomatoes, at least enough for sandwiches every day, but revenging themselves on us by dropping a blanket of dead leaves all over the conservatory every morning.
Tomato plants poo by stuffing all of their waste matter into a whole little branch, and then once it is full they just dump it, mostly on the carpet. They currently have the difficulty that their resources are becoming scarce, by which I mean that the sun doesn’t shine as often and they have completely filled their beds with their root systems, and that I keep forgetting to water them. The result is that they put all of their efforts into their gene pool, a bit like bankrupt parents. I have kept finding long, straggly branches that looked utterly dead, with exhausted withered leaves and a shrivelled stalk, with a single treasured tomato blooming fat and red at the very end.
I can sympathise.
This is quite useful, but unlovely to look upon. We have decided, in any case, to arrange some of the seed beds differently next year, and so sooner or later things had to change.
The sooner or later happened today.
Mark dragged it all out and chucked it in the compost heap, layering it all with pigeon poo as he went.
Poor tomatoes.
I did not like even to watch.
He is going to build me another bed, along the side of the conservatory where the tomatoes were, and we are going to start again now that we know what we need. I have got some seeds for some heritage tomatoes and I am going to plant them after Christmas.
Incidentally, there was a man from Kew Gardens in the Telegraph today, saying that we must not call seeds heritage, or native, any more, because it is discriminatory and might upset their little feelings.
I read it twice in case I was more confused than even I had suspected, and it was the first of April, but it wasn’t.
I do not care. I am going to discriminate if I like. The banana tree in the corner is not only not a fully-fledged heritaged native, it is an immigrant. It has foreign genes. It will never manage to be like a heritage tomato and it will jolly well just have to learn to fit in.
It needn’t expect equal rights until it has jolly well proved itself and grown some bananas. Whilst it is still sponging in the corner I shall be giving the tomatoes first dibs on the sheep poo. It has got plenty to be going on with.
It must not be allowed to milk the system.
Have a picture of Roger Poopy, because it is the only one that you have not seen already. He has gone to visit Pepper and that is her bed.
