Oliver has decided that he does not want a lifetime career in the hospitality trade.
Everybody at the pub is very kind so far, but the job is hard work, consisting of scrubbing pans and filling the dishwasher, which does not hold out much promise of long term fulfilment and job-satisfaction. The chef, who appears to be called Ginge despite being bald, has not yet lost his temper, but I know a lot of chefs, and I am entirely sure that he will, sooner or later, because they do.
Being a chef is stressful
With this future prospect in mind, and because the holiday part of the holiday is now over, Oliver has made a start on his GCSE revision. He has decamped all of his books and papers to the table in the conservatory and has done his first hour this evening.
We have considered this project, and decided that the approach we used for his Common Entrance worked very well. This worked on the recognition that ‘have a good career when you grow up’ is a bit vague and unpromising to provide very much of an incentive. It all sounds as though it should be sufficient, but it doesn’t work for Oliver. It didn’t work for me, either, which is why I am now driving a taxi for a living.
Hence once I had emptied the dogs this morning, Oliver and I made a trip into the sweet shop in the village.
It is a proper old fashioned sort of sweet shop, with shelves and shelves filled with tall jars, of things like Nuttall’s Mintoes and humbugs and raspberry bon-bons.
We decided that we would have a sweet for every half hour of revision completed, and an additional lollipop every time two hours had been done.
We bought eighty sweets of all sorts of different varieties, and twenty lollies, which perplexed the girl behind the counter until we explained what we were doing.
Oliver said that he would try and work hard enough to get diabetes by the end of the summer.
He spent an hour learning physics equations and then trudged off to work.
I am very proud of my children sometimes.
I have also trudged off to work, after a day which has been fully and busily occupied with domestic tasks.
I have been somewhat hampered by the difficulty that I am now finding it very difficult to go through the conservatory. This is not because of the ever-increasing need to hack my way through the undergrowth, actually overgrowth really. I hacked a lot of this back the other day and it is fairly passable at the moment.
It is because we have a monster lurking in there.
Yesterday I discovered the most enormous spider hovering by the back door. I mean really huge, with great long legs and a massive fat body, of sufficient size to make me anxious for the continued safety of the dogs.
I crept cautiously past it all day, and then when Mark came home I asked him to persuade it to move to a more appropriate location, ie, one a long way away.
He agreed, but when he came to capture it it turned out that despite its vast bulk, it could move like lightening. It dashed away from him and squeezed down behind the plastic beading, out of reach.
Once there it disappeared.
It is still lurking, somewhere in the conservatory, biding its time.
Mark made matters worse by hoovering up its horrid dense spidery nest, so it has even more to be cross about.
I have been looking for it, in a fearful sort of way, every time I go in, but it is nowhere to be seen, and I am beginning to be a bit concerned that it is somewhere in the rainforest-thicket that is the roof, and that one day, as I am passing below, it will leap down from the high branches and clutch the back of my neck in its vengeful spidery embrace.
I do not at all like this idea. We are going to have to hunt it out and dispatch it to live in the builders’ yard. They are all manly types perfectly capable of wrestling a giant spider to the ground should they find it in their truck.
It is going to have to leave.
Have a picture of some incentives.
Mark has volunteered to help Oliver with his revision. I have told him that the incentives do not apply to him.
