We are home.
We have a boy, and we have just had a message from Lucy to tell us that she is just setting off on her way up from Kettering. I am looking forward to seeing her, and wish that we didn’t have to go to work, although really Lucy won’t be here until after eleven.
Also it is the Valentines’ Weekends, this week and next, being the weekends either side of the expensive day itself, and we are hoping for some quick cash to be extracted from visitors to the first three syllables of Aphrodite’s Lodge, not that they are likely to have much left once they have forked out five hundred quid for a night’s stay. It is never the best of times, and might be best described as Arguing Couples In Taxis Weekend.
We never do anything relationshippy at all for Valentines’ Day. We go to work. It is the most awful waste of money. Anyway, we will have the children at home.
Oliver has disappeared into his bedroom with some lovingly-prepared pizza. I have filled the freezer with a stack of these, because it saves me worrying about cooking. Sometimes they will have pizza, and at other times they will have pasta. Occasionally there will be sausages.
I am a nutritional expert when it comes to children.
Not that they are exactly children any more. Lucy is in her twenties, and Oliver is going to start driving lessons this year.
That is a peculiar sort of feeling. Mark did lots of driving with him when he was smaller, around the fields at the farm. He had to be propped up with lots of cushions because he was not tall enough to see over the wheel, and for a while had a car of his own.
I obliged Mark to dispose of this when it became clear that it was not going to pass an MOT, ever, and that the National Park did not feel it was a beneficial addition to the World Heritage Site Area Of Outstanding Natural Beauty Landscape.
I had some secret sympathy with this point of view.
The next car that Oliver has will be for real driving.
For some arcane reason Gordonstoun does not allow students to have cars on campus, so he will not be allowed to drive himself, although I will probably make a massive fuss about that if he turns out to have a hundred interviews in far-flung parts of England the way Lucy did. So far he thinks he would like to opt for a career in the Armed Forces, although we are still a long way away from that yet.
He has joined us, on and off, in the front of the van on the way home, and told us stories about school. I am very glad my teenage years are over. I would not at all like to be youthful today. Whether you are a boy or a girl seems to be a hot topic for discussion, and nobody seems entirely certain either way. On the whole school seems to have the matter reasonably settled by allocating people to a boarding house which only admits people with the appropriate bits, but that does not stop them all going on and on and on about it.
Oliver, fortunately, is in no doubt at all. He says it is easy to tell the difference, and he knows which ones are the girls because they are the ones who never stop talking.
It was a reasonable journey home, made anxious only by some exciting braking issues on the last stretch. Mark has inspected this and ordered the new bit, it is a leaking bit of hose. This is a nuisance because it will need to be fixed this week before we go back, along with whatever Lucy’s car needs doing to it for its MOT on Tuesday, and before we go off to the theatre on Thursday.
Mark has retreated to sit on the taxi rank with his book to contemplate the days ahead, and I am about to join him. I do not think there will be many stories written this week.
I think it is going to be a bit busy.
