We did not go to work.
Instead we have had the nicest evening, and we are going to go to bed, absolutely any minute now.
Mark has taken the dogs to be emptied and the children have retreated upstairs, where I can hear them both singing, loudly. I am so tired that I will not even mind if they carry on after I have gone to bed.
We have been to visit our friends.
We have been over to see Actual Head Boy and his father.
Regular readers will perhaps remember that Actual Head Boy is a friend of Oliver’s from prep school, where he was Almost Head Boy for ages, because he was such an obvious shoo-in for the role. As soon as he reached the glorious heights of the fifth form, obviously he became Actual Head Boy immediately. I think that now he is at public school he really ought to be Almost Head Boy again, because it is just one of those inevitabilities, like death and taxes and Boris Johnson changing his mind.
It was really lovely to see them.
They live in absolutely nowhere, the sort of nowhere where you feel quite excited when you pass some sheep and a hurrying rabbit. They have a tiny cottage roughly the size of the public loo in the Library Gardens, and it is crammed to the eaves with interesting looking books and pictures and model ships. Of course it is not polite to stare too much, so I had to try and investigate it all discreetly, whilst I was talking. The bookshelves were full, and every spare corner was piled high with more books, with all sorts of intriguing-looking covers.
You are not allowed to say: let me look at your books instead of talking, when you visit people, so I did not pay them as much attention as I would have liked. This did not matter because Actual Head Boy’s father is really interesting to talk to. He has travelled all over the world and knows lots of curious details about odd foreign things.
There were all sorts of pictures. There were lots of jolly good artworks, because Actual Head Boy’s father is an artist. He is a real artist, not like me, who is a taxi driver with a set of paints, and indeed, he used to be Artist In Residence at Kew Gardens.
I think his paintings are splendid, you can see them for yourselves if you look them up, and for the interested I have put the link to his page at the bottom. He paints pictures of plants, and will pop round to people’s houses and paint a picture of their very favourite flowers, although there is not a huge demand for this, and so he is unlikely to be a millionaire soon. He will have to wait for Actual Head Boy to grow up.
My favourite picture was not a painting, however. It was a woodcut of a distant and long-dead relative who had been misfortunate to be the last woman to be burned at the stake in England. This was because she was found guilty of treason, which in those days meant horrible disembowelling for men and a dreadful incendiary end for women. She did not do anything wickedly dreadful, she was smuggling Protestants away from Catholic persecution, which I thought was entirely admirable, how magnificent to have such a heroine in your family.
We do not have any pictures of our ancestors, although we do have some sepia pictures of us dressed as Victorians that we did in Blackpool at the Old Time Photographic Studio, which look almost as good.
Oliver and Actual Head Boy played board games and had their dinner at the table in the living room whilst we squeezed around the table in the tiny kitchen and talked. We had brought dinner with us, because Actual Head Boy’s father simply does not have the space for mass catering, so we had prepared an enormous cottage pie which we shoved in the oven as soon as we arrived. Then we ate, and drank some lovely wine, and talked and talked.
Time to go home came round all too soon, but we could not stay late because we have got so many things to do at home tomorrow, and indeed, Mark has just come in and I am on my way to bed this very minute.
I have had a very nice time indeed.
I haven’t taken a picture.
Have a picture of the dogs, who are sitting patiently at my feet waiting for me to finish.
https://www.instagram.com/fothersart/?hl=en
