I have been amused beyond telling this morning.
This was because I have been informed that our son and heir, flower of youthful masculinity, has gone to school wearing a dress.
He has got up and put on tights and a girl’s skirt instead of his trousers.
This was not because he had suddenly become confused about his sexuality, but in solidarity with the actual girls, who are having a protest. The protest is because they feel they ought to be allowed to wear short skirts.
Oliver is entirely in agreement with this. He is greatly in agreement with women’s right to self-determination, and wished to demonstrate his support for girls who wish to wear short skirts. Every girl should be allowed to wear a skirt as short as they like, he believes, and hence today he is dressing up in order to participate in their protest.
Regrettably this momentous action might not have the colossal impact that it might have in another school, because Gordonstoun includes kilts as a part of its uniform for boys, and hence it is entirely possible that it will go almost completely un-noticed.
Either way it has provided me with some entertainment over coffee this morning, and I have sent him a copy of Lou Reed singing Walk On The Wild Side, and requested photographs.
It is now some time later. Oliver has emailed the requested photograph, which I have attached below. It reminds me of those Facebook pictures taken seconds before the shark attack, or the collapsing building, or the detonation of the car bomb. It could be titled: Last Moments Before Expulsion.
Of course he has not been expelled, not least because it is perfectly permissible in this day and age to announce oneself to be confused about one’s sexuality, and educational establishments are not even supposed to laugh, which was what we did when one of our friends made such a revelation.
In other news, Mark has been rural broadbanding, and I have been cleaning the house. It has reached the depressing stage of little balls of dust and fluff careering around the floor whenever I flap anything, and it was more than clear that I was going to have to waste my entire day doing something about it.
I think the problem is that it is almost March, which is of course the season of Dog Haircutting. Over the winter their coats have grown long and grubby, and even though we do occasionally oblige them to undergo ablutions, their hair is now breaking off and sticking to absolutely everything. It is not a place for wearing black trousers.
It is still to cold to render them bald at the moment, and of course it really should be left until bird-nesting time, in the interests of recycling, obviously. All the same, it is not improving the carpets, and I had to empty the hoover four times on my travels around the house.
We do, of course, have anti-dust machines these days. These work really surprisingly well. They do not exactly stop the dust, but they seem to catch a jolly lot of it, because when I hoover them out they are inevitably full of revolting grey powder.
I was fed up about having to do housework, and grumbled my way around the whole lot. Really I would very much have preferred to be getting on with my saga of Symon the Black and his army of trolls, but it is ages until it has got to be handed in, and so I supposed that I ought to leave it until tomorrow.
It is the last class of the term tonight, to my great sadness, not to mention my puzzlement that Cambridge does not seem to know when Easter actually falls, it is not for ages and ages yet.
We are discussing having a class get-together in Cambridge. I would like that very much, although some of the students, the ones in Pakistan and America, might not be able to make it. It has been such an odd thing. I feel as though I know them so well. I have read their writings and considered their opinions, seen them in their homes every week, and yet we have never met.
It has been absolutely splendid. I am going to miss it very much.
