Growth

I expect by now you have all had quite enough of hearing about it being bat flu’s first birthday, and so I will not carry on that theme here. Mostly I won’t because it makes me very cross.

I will simply say that my teenage son, who is at no risk whatsoever from bat flu, has been prohibited from attending school or seeing his friends for all but ten weeks of the last year. That means no football, no rugby, no cricket, no expeditions, no girls, no dancing, no jokes together, no adventures.

Instead, he has been shoved into the company of his ageing parents, with no respite at all except the occasional visitation from an off-duty police officer.

To all those readers who have been frightened that they might catch bat flu, I hope you jolly well appreciate his sacrifice on your behalf. He has been very patient and brave.

In fact we are currently having some difficulties with Oliver. These are not the sort of difficulties that make you growl and shout and start to make threatening noises about the naughty step, but of a rather more practical nature.

In fact they are to do with unrestricted growth, which has been what has happened to him over his prolonged period of home-education.

There are two problems, firstly that we brought him home from school with the expectation that he would be allowed to return, and hence left most of his stuff there.

All of his school uniform is there.

I have a very uncomfortable suspicion, although not nearly as uncomfortable as he will be if I turn out to be right, that he has outgrown all of his trousers.

September was absolutely ages ago, and he has been growing like a pumpkin seedling in the meantime.

You can practically see pumpkins growing if you have got a very dull life and a cup of tea.

I did not know what to do.

I had a vague recollection that I had turned them up before he left, but it was a jolly long time ago, and I was not sure. However, one of the magnificent benefits of being a diarist turns out to be that all of this sort of dull trivia has been recorded. By carefully checking back through these pages, which occupied an entertaining half an hour and is now easily possible thanks to the magnificent computer-literate help of my friend Kevin, I was able to ascertain that not only had I turned his school trousers up, I had done it on the twenty seventh of August last year and made a pig’s ear of it.

How handy to know.

I talked to Mark and we decided that we would set off a bit early and when we got to school we would collect his trousers from whatever hiding-hole in which Matron has stashed them, and let them down there and then.

It does not matter if they are too long thereafter. He will have grown a bit more by Sports Day.

I do not think that he has got fatter. He will just have to unfasten the top button if so.

The second difficulty is that he is in terrible need of a haircut.

School restarts on the twelfth of April, which is exactly the very day on which hairdressers reopen.

I do not know any rogue and lawless hairdressers who might be prepared to help us out in the meantime, and Oliver has flatly refused to let me near his scalp with the dog clippers again. He said that the rest of his dorm think that he looks like an egg, and that in any case he is going to the north of Scotland and does not have to wear a woolly hat until August.

So far we have not come up with a solution. The Peppers have said that they can lend us some human clippers, which might be less savage than the dog clippers, and so we are going to have a go tomorrow.

I am very worried about this. I am an unskilled hairdresser and do not want to make him feel uncomfortable on his first foray back into the world of education.

I think probably a stiff drink first.

The picture was taken this afternoon and shows the Ibbetson family estate, almost in its entirety.