Number One Daughter rang up late last night and was somewhat unimpressed to discover that it had not occurred to any of us to suggest to Ritalin Boy that he might like to go to bed.
I do not know why it had not occurred to us, because his visits are rather like an outbreak of shared tinnitus. There is an endless whittering in one’s ears from the moment he descends in the morning until he collapses into bed at night.
He has now departed, and it is very, very quiet.
I can practically hear myself ticking.
He decided this afternoon that he would like to go back to his Other Grandma’s tonight, possibly for dietary reasons, as apart from pizza and doughnuts, I have been unable to find anything much that he wanted to eat. He said that his favourite foods were bacon and pasta, and so Grandad cooked a pan full of bacon-flavoured pasta, which I might add was superb. It included cream and pesto but omitted the pepper and olives, in deference to youthful taste preferences.
Ritalin Boy sniffed it and wondered why we weren’t having pizza.
We told him to jolly well eat it, and he did eat a bit. Mark saved the rest to put on a sandwich at some later date, and we all blobbed in front of a film called The Secret Garden. This was a desperate attempt to find some juvenile entertainment that had not come out of the Disney Studios, and was actually very good indeed, being about an improbably fecund garden in a freezing expanse of bleak Yorkshire moorland which we all recognised as being just off the A66.
After this, and what I imagine was some late-night gaming, about which I know nothing because of having gone to bed myself, neither Oliver nor Ritalin Boy materialised until lunchtime.
Mark was busy adding yet another solar panel to the back yard. This one is an improvement on the divorce solar panel that has made me so cross for so many years, mostly because it works.
He bought it for twenty quid from some scrap yard because the glass is broken, and has prudently been storing it out of sight at the farm until he came to putting it to use here.
Today he has installed it.
It has gone on the top of the wood store.
He almost spoiled everything by covering the wood store with a sheet of heavy-duty plastic first. This was important, because the roof had leaked terribly, which is not an asset when you are trying to dry firewood. I was very glad that the leak had been resolved, although less pleased about the method, because the plastic had come from his friend’s dog kennel business, and it smelled absolutely dreadful.
I mean really dreadful, imagine going on a trip to an unhygienic zoo filled with incontinent jackals and you will get something of the idea. He put it on anyway, and I am now the only person in the Lake District hoping desperately for rain.
It is against next door’s wall. I am so glad I don’t live next door to us.
He put the solar panel on the top where presumably he did not even need to glue it down. I imagine it just fused with the general sticky ambiance.
He spent ages tiddling about with wires in his shed then, but in the end it turned out to work, which was very pleasing, because it is to run the pump for the watering system in the conservatory. This is turning out to be most planetarily virtuous, because it is pumping the pure rainwater that has dripped off the roof and is powered by the beneficent rays of our own dear sun. I imagine our tomatoes will grow tall and strong, resplendent in their own virtue.
Also it is not costing anything so if we need some spare cash to blow on weedkiller and insecticide we will probably have plenty left.
Have a picture of Ritalin Boy, contemplating an early bath.
