Once again, it is the middle of the night and I am dashing off a few hasty words whilst Mark is engaged in his ablutions.
Tonight, however, I am not on the top of some remote Scottish mountain. We have finished our journeyings, and I am at home.
I am sitting quietly at my desk, adorned with all of my new desk-ornamentation, appreciating the loveliness of the world. It has been a splendid journey through dramatic mountain landscapes and idyllic rural pastures, but it is nice to be home.
We slept and slept last night. Indeed, we did not wake up until lunchtime. Our goal was achieved, and Oliver attained, and we could sleep in peace, so we did.
Oliver did not wake up until even later, because of being worn out at the end of term.
He is home. We have now reached the stage of school where the next time we do everything, it will be for the last time. The last Christmas carol service, the last Sports Day, the last everything, and it really will be the last, because after Oliver there are no more little chicks to be hustled out into the world. The school fee years will be over.
Oliver is still contemplating his career path. Today we have been looking at investment banking. I hope he chooses that one, actually. It is a great deal of stress and hard work but at least he will be able to look after us in the lap of hedonistic luxury in our old age, which will be a relief for Number Two Daughter, who has been gloomily predicting that that particular challenge will fall into her lap.
I have read about investment bankers. They take baths in champagne. I do not think I like that idea, it might be unpleasantly sticky, but actually it has been ages since we have been able to afford to fill our bath even with water. Hence I would be very pleased even to do a low-budget version, so he does not even need to aim for the sky.
Lucy is contemplating her career path as well. She has got her CID interview on Tuesday. We have decided that we will all go and cheer her on, because nothing helps your chances with senior management as much as a brightly-painted-but-still-very-rusty old camper van parked in the police station car park.
In fact I had messed that one up rather badly, because Oliver’s driving theory test was booked to be at the very same moment as Lucy’s interview, but fortunately we have managed to change it, the driving test, not the interview, obviously. We had a lot of concerned frowning and contemplation about this when we arrived home and discovered the problem. The confusion had happened because of it being written in a diary on my desk and not on the sort of telephone which tells all of its friends what you are doing, and dings anxiously at you if any of them have got other ideas. Anyway, we have rearranged ourselves now, which is all right because Oliver has not done any revision for his driving theory test yet.
Hence, for those who need to know – please excuse me, everybody else – this is now the plan for the next week. Oliver is playing cricket in Yorkshire on Sunday. This is just a jolly, not the serious sort of cricket with racial abuse or Australian cheating. It is friendly cricket, if that has not become a contradiction in terms. It is an Old Boys’ match at his prep. school. We are going to go to that in the camper van, after work on Saturday night. The weather forecast is good, so we can snooze in the sunshine. After that, Mum and Dad, we will head to your house. Lucy, we will meet you there. We will be late because there will be post-cricket pies and white-wine guffawing in the afternoon sunshine, all of which I like.
We will all stay chez my parents until Tuesday, by which time we will have thoroughly coached Lucy in the things that she had probably better not say in her interview. We all know lots of those. There is a reason I am driving a taxi despite the Master’s’s’ degree that I am doing at Cambridge, which I might or might not have mentioned, and it is largely that I am unemployable.
All the same, we are unanimously decided that we would like to be there, even if we have got to stay out of the way.
In consequence we are going to have to earn some cash and work every hour that we can for the rest of the week. Do not expect thrilling mountain sunsets and bucolic rural idylls in these pages for the next few days.
There are going to be taxis.
