Apology

Dear My Mother,

I have just discovered, on my trip to Sainsbury’s, that the day after tomorrow is Mothering Sunday, when we all celebrate Our Mothers.

I know this because Sainsbury’s is trying desperately to palm off practically everything they can think of as being the Perfect Mothers’ Day Present. Eat Fish For Mothers’ Day. Buy A Bar Of Soap And Cheer Your Mother Up. Obviously there are bunches of daffodils and bars of Dairy Milk, but practically every apple has got a Mothers’ Day exhortation stuck to it as well.

I do not know how this has managed to escape me up until now, and I am very sorry, but up until this very minute, when obviously it is far too late to do anything about it, I had completely forgotten.

Would you perhaps not mind too much if we celebrated Mothering Tuesday again this year instead? I can probably get my act together in time for that.

I didn’t actually buy anything in Sainsbury’s, obviously apart from lettuce, which was why I had gone in there in the first place. The impracticality and incomprehensibility of posting a pineapple, or some sausages, all of which were being punted as suitable Mothers’ Day offerings, seemed somehow inappropriate, even with an explanation, and the only cards left were ghastly, the sort of things with rainbows and pink teddy bears and I Lerve Yew The Bestest  Mummmie written on them in curly writing.

I would be horrified and probably rather puzzled to receive such an offering myself and therefore thought it preferable not to encourage their continued manufacture by sloshing out £3.50 on one, not even with a pink envelope.

Not that it is at all likely since I can say with unadulterated confidence that all of my offspring will be in exactly the same Mothers’ Day position as I have found myself, that is to say, they will have forgotten all about it.

Dear My Offspring. Don’t bother, all the decent cards have gone by now and I really don’t need a pack of sausages or a pineapple. I will be more than happy to send Daddy to go and pinch some daffodils out of the Library Gardens if I feel a sudden need to be appreciated.

Anyway, I am terribly sorry but I have messed this one up. Better luck next year. I will go and see if the card shop has any decent cards left on Monday, by which time they might even be cheaper, so you can have two if you like.

In other news, we are back at home. We got back in the middle of the afternoon after a long and sunny chug back, accompanied by a long history lesson on the story thing. Oliver slept for most of the way, it seems to have been a busy term.

He has run in the cross-country race, and said proudly that he resisted the temptation to self-identify as a girl at the beginning, because the girls only need to do two laps whilst the boys do three. He has continued with his Krav Maga lessons and is becoming adept at all sorts of violence. He is in some sort of arguing club where they discuss the finer points of law, and he explained that the microwave lying inexplicably on the lawn outside their House is there because the housemaster got cross with them and threw it out there.

This was not in a burst of rage but because it was on fire after some stupid youth had put a pair of climbing boots in it. The housemaster had just sat down to dinner with his wife when the fire alarms went off, and he was not impressed, and the house email waxes lyrical about a lack of respect for kitchen appliances.

I have crossed Housemaster In A Boys’ Boarding School off my list of potential future careers.

I am off to work.

PS: Just a post-script to last night’s entry. Something horrible did happen in the night.

I wonder if a dog might be a good sort of Mothers’ Day present.