Our financial worries have been massively relieved by my parents, once again, heroically subsidising the school fees.
The relief practically trickled between my shoulder blades and made me think that perhaps I would not need to take out some insurance and then shoot myself after all.
It is very splendid not to feel worried, and last night we both slept as peacefully as the fortunate sort of pigs who are being fed on buckets of restaurant leftovers.
We were extremely glad to have some financial support, because we have got a new drain on our finances.
I think Oliver must be growing again.
He is spending his between-lesson breaks prowling around the kitchen wondering what there might be to eat.
There are all sorts of things to eat. There is an enormous pile of cooked ham and sausages in the fridge, and I occupied this afternoon baking biscuits to refill the rapidly-emptying biscuit tin. There are three sorts of biscuits always on offer. There is plain vanilla shortbread, brandy tiffin, and chocolate, cherry and coconut biscuits.
There is also a tuck drawer, with an unlimited supply of chocolate and sweets, and a choice of home-made or shop-bought crisps.
After I had finished baking I sliced up mangos and melon and kiwi fruit. I left them on an inviting dish in the fridge although really I expected I would probably have to eat them myself. I can’t imagine either Oliver or Mark having such a hungry emergency that they would voluntarily eat fruit. At least, not fruit that hadn’t first been processed into jam or inserted into a cake.
I had got a chicken cooking in the oven for dinner. This was considerably later than it should have been because I had just finished coating it with lime and coriander when Oliver appeared and wondered where the stuffing was. Stuffing, he explained, was one of the very best bits of chicken. They always, he added accusingly, serve stuffing at school.
They serve sausage, bacon and egg for breakfast every morning as well.
I have managed to stretch myself to sausage-and-egg on a fresh-baked bread sandwich every morning, carefully separated because Oliver will not eat egg yolks, so Mark has those. He has a plate with these, and yoghurt and fruit and biscuits and more apple juice and a probiotic drink.
Later he brings the plate back down and I throw the fruit away.
I spent the next ten minutes chopping onions and garlic and beating eggs. Fortunately I had got loads of breadcrumbs, because our daily bread consumption does not include anybody wanting to eat the crusts. Half of these are made into bread-and-butter pudding with lots of chopped apples out of the tub in the conservatory, and heavily dolloped with apple and blackberry jam. The rest become breadcrumbs, for making home-made chicken nuggets, which are nicer than the shop ones, and fortuitously today, stuffing.
I made stuffing. Then I made bread-and-butter pudding, to be served with cream. Then I cut potatoes and sweet potatoes for Fatless Chips.
Oliver, in the meantime, ate half a pound of home made yoghurt and some biscuits, before retreating back upstairs with a couple of sausages and a litre of apple juice to pace about hungrily until Mark came home and dinner might be ready.
Eventually Mark came home, and I was just about to dish it all out when the telephone rang.
It was Oliver’s tutor.
She is a lovely sort of person, keen and enthusiastic and friendly. She and Oliver had missed one another for a meeting, but, she explained, she wanted to speak to me.
Oliver has to fill in a form every day during which he grades his Home Experience. I am so very impressed with this. School is truly trying to make sure that they are doing as well as they can.
Oliver had given both Eating and Sleeping only three out of five, and said that he was having sleeping problems and eating difficulties. Obviously this had flagged up alarms. His tutor had become concerned in case there were issues about his well-being, and did we feel that he was coping?
Mark and I stared at one another, speechless.
This was Oliver The Hungry Dormouse we were talking about.
Later on in the evening we summoned him to The Presence.
He explained that he has indeed had sleeping difficulties, most especially waking up in the morning if he has ignored the instruction to go to bed and continued playing on the computer or reading his current spy thriller.
Eating is a bit problematic as well, because it is not like school. The stuffing, for instance, had the onions cut in bigger chunks than school does, and sometimes the home made yoghurt is thicker than school yoghurt. He only has sausages in the morning, instead of bacon, and we do not purchase Cheerios cereal. Also there does seem to be a lot of vegetables.
We have assured his tutor that we will keep a watchful eye on him to make sure that he does not fade away.
Roll on school.
