We have had the most lazy day off imaginable.
Mark was going to cut firewood, but he didn’t, and I didn’t either.
Almost the only useful thing that he has done all day has been to do an occasional journey around the radiators, letting the air out of them with bubbling hisses.
He has done this several times and I think that we have almost persuaded them all to work now.
Fortunately the radiators are not very important., because our house is tall and thin with a stove in the bottom, which means that it acts like a big chimney. This is brilliant for hot air to rise and spread through all of the bedrooms, but a bit rubbish on the occasions when we have accidentally set the kitchen on fire.
Mark is not even doing anything busily useful now. He is sitting in front of the fire watching chemistry lectures on YouTube. Oliver was supposed to be watching them, but he is still in his dressing gown, making things explode in his bedroom.
I have hardly done anything productive either. Obviously I did the washing, but I was not concentrating at all and so I have only just this very minute remembered to get it out of the washing machine, so very possibly it will not be dry by morning and I will have to put up with the uncomfortable sensation of my jeans still being wet around the pockets.
Heigh ho. I am resigned.
Instead of doing useful and productive things we have been out for walks in the snow.
We walked with the dogs through the woods, once in the morning, and again in the afternoon. On the second trip, we lost Roger, who buzzed off in pursuit of a deer and failed to respond to all of our anguished bellowings. These were not so much at our distress at having temporarily mislaid him, but because the icy dark was creeping in, and our fingers were fast becoming numb and frozen, and we wanted to go home.
Obviously he turned up in the end, looking terribly sheepish, because he knew that he had been unspeakably wicked. We shouted at him, and he spent the entire journey home trying to hide behind his father. This was not an easy thing to do, as his father is about four inches shorter than he is, and furthermore, irritated by Roger’s close presence. Poor tragic Roger spent the whole journey home being snarled at and snapped at by his father, who found Roger’s repentant attempts to crawl underneath him monumentally annoying.
We did not sympathise. We told Roger that he was the worst-behaved dog in the whole world, and that he was adopted anyway. Number One Daughter used to tell Number Two Daughter this when she was cross with her, it was years before I found out.
She grew up all right anyway, fortunately.
Despite Roger’s doleful misfortune, they were very sedate walks. I have attached some pictures of far more exciting activities, which I think ought to be included in all parenting manuals as a reassuring reminder that most children grow up just fine despite everything.
Obviously the pictures are of Number One Son-In-Law and Ritalin Boy playing in the snow. The sledge one is today, the other is an older one, but both of them make me very happy indeed. I am pleased to think that my grandson is most unlikely to succumb to the current fashion of saying farewells with the sickening injunction to ‘stay safe’. Incidentally this is one of my most hated remarks that taxi customers could ever make, back in the halcyon days when I was a taxi driver. It is worse than ‘I haven’t got any money’. There has never been a safer time to be alive, and it is jolly well time that we all stopped being so cowardly about everything.
Anyway, Ritalin Boy will not do that. Ritalin Boy will have glorious and magnificent adventures, because he is being taught courage.
I am very impressed indeed.
