The season has changed.
We have heavy, impenetrable mists and rusty carpets of leaves. Shop windows are beginning to sprout Christmas trees, and I am starting to worry about money.
The Gas Board has marked the occasion by decorating the roads with multi-coloured lights and digging holes in them, the roads, not the traffic lights, obviously. This always happens once the tourist season has ground to a halt, and it is a tiresome nuisance, but inevitable. I do not really mind. I would rather have to wait around for five minutes every now and then than do without the joyous convenience of piped gas and water to the house.
Mark does not need to buzz off fitting rural broadband until tomorrow, and so has spent another afternoon engaged in his efforts to construct an alternative to our reliance on such public conveniences.
In fact it now appears that he has managed this. He has succeeded in creating a heat source out of a battery and some water, which I am prepared to concede is a colossal achievement, and I have got no idea how it works.
Regrettably it turns out that it only works if the water is salty.
He is contemplating this setback thoughtfully, because we do not live at the seaside, and I am less than enthusiastic about emptying the salt pot into the heating system a couple of times a day.
He has considered, briefly, replacing the salt with graphite, or graphene, or something carboniferous, at any rate, and wondered if he could create some of his own by heating up some charcoal. We have usually got lots of charcoal, obviously, because of having a slow-burn fire.
He put a piece in the microwave to see what would happen, but after about twenty seconds it burst into flames, rather spectacularly, and I have told him that he is not to try it again until he has got his own microwave, in his shed at the bottom of the garden. He wanted to try again quite badly, because of the interesting changes that happened to the charcoal before it burst into flames, but he is not allowed, and I will know if he does.
I am sure that he will work it out.
With the change of season comes Lucy and Oliver’s birthdays. The two of them are both in November, and Numbers One and Two Daughters are both in January. If I had planned them for our least solvent times of year I could not have done better.
We will not see either of them for the occasions. Lucy is going off to celebrate with Number One Daughter, probably by going for a run, and Oliver is, of course, at school.
I have written to him and asked what he would like me to do for his birthday, but you will not be surprised to learn that so far I have had a total lack of response. In the end I wrote to the housemaster and asked if he could investigate and then charge the answer to our termly invoice.
Usually the housemaster celebrates birthdays by asking Pizza Hut, or some similar Scottish equivalent, to deliver sufficient colossal pizzas to feed the entire house for the evening. This, inexplicably, is known in Gordonstoun as a brew, and sounds like an entirely appropriate way for a teenage boy to celebrate his birthday.
There is a new Assistant Housemaster this term. Oliver likes him very much. I do not know what he did before becoming a housemaster, but it sounds as though he was James Bond. He is teaching the boys chemistry and unarmed combat, which I am sure will come in very handy in later life.
He will be home before we know it. The season has changed and midwinter is almost upon us.
The year has disappeared and I have hardly noticed.
