We have had an online parents’ meeting with school.
School is doing the most magnificent job imaginable in these ghastly times, and I have got no words for my heartfelt admiration.
Oliver is happy, and trying hard, and working. He has got to keep his computer camera on during lessons, so that the teacher can see what he is doing, and also see that he is dressed, which he almost wasn’t this morning after he dozed off again after I shouted him to get up.
They are having every single lesson just as normal. He had PE yesterday afternoon, which meant some bumps and peculiar noises coming from his bedroom. They are even at school tomorrow, which is Saturday, and are going to be doing catching-up things and learning support and asking questions.
Truly we are fortunate.
It was nice to see school again, even just in the background behind the Principal.
The Principal is not the headmaster, who is somebody else and I think is of slightly lesser significance. I do not exactly know what the Principal does, except that it is seriously important. Calling the most important person something unidentifiable is one of those public school code things. Eton calls the chap in charge the Provost. I don’t know what that means either, or even what he does other than be on the board of governors for all of the prep schools that he approves of.
Eton talks in a peculiar code anyway. Teachers are called beaks, and terms, inexplicably, are called halves, although what they are half of I have got no idea.
I am rather glad that Gordonstoun does not do anything quite so odd. There is a private Gordonstoun language but mostly it translates into Scottish.
The Principal is an alarmingly confident lady. It is the first time I have seen anything of her since this whole sorry shebang kicked off, and to my huge relief, she was entirely sensible, full of practical methods of keeping education going even though every politician in the country seems to be trying to stop it.
If I were Nicola Sturgeon I would not want to pick a fight with her.
I listened as carefully as I could but was distracted halfway into the whole lecture by the horrible realisation the camera was switched on, because this happens automatically when you do this online stuff.
The Principal could see me as clearly as I could see her, and behind my head was not a shelf full of intellectual and erudite publications, or portraits of my ancestors. Behind my head you could see my office noticeboard.
The noticeboard contains a rude letter from the council about some council tax. I have paid this but did not bother to put the letter in the bin. There is a letter to me from one of Father Christmas’ reindeer, written by Mark and spelled with all the joyous creativity of the extremely dyslexic. Just as a starting clue, it was sent at Crissmass.
There is a detailed breakdown of all of our weekly expenses, and how much we need to squirrel away for school fees. It says things like: We have got to save £2,500 before the end of March so we will have to cut the electricity bill, and it is littered with exclamation marks and crossings-out. Underneath that there is a grim-looking letter from Carlisle Crown Court telling us that we are summoned to be witnesses at some time in February, and including the usual sort of threats that make it sound as though you are the criminal, when in fact you just saw somebody doing something that they shouldn’t.
There is also a very obvious bag of purple and yellow plastic stick-on butterflies that I haven’t yet got round to sticking on things.
I did not like to get up halfway through and start clearing the noticeboard, and so instead of listening, I started trying to turn my screen towards the window, a little bit at a time, so that it would not all look quite so incriminating.
You will not be surprised to hear that I failed completely.
Just to make things worse, just as it was finishing, Oliver wandered in. He looked at the screen vaguely, and said: What’s this stuff? only he didn’t say stuff.
I can only hope that the Principal was looking at somebody else.
I am never going to make it into the middle classes.
The picture is Roger Poopy and Pepper on the lake this morning. It was chilly. Pepper broke the ice at the edge and fell in. She liked this so much that despite being called back she jumped in again and again, wallowing about in the water and crashing noisily through the ice. Even when we were leaving, she kept rushing back to jump in again.
She was retrieving bits of the ice in her mouth and trying to take one home with her.
You will not be surprised to learn that this was quite an astonishingly unsuccessful endeavour.
