Oliver’s girlfriend arrives tomorrow, and I have been doing the room-turnaround, just as if I was the Midland Hotel. I imagine they must have some sort of special arrangement with the Weather Gods, though, because raining on my sheets is one thing, but raining on dozens and dozens of the Midland’s sheets pegged in their back yard would be pretty calamitous.
Fortunately today was dry, and all of the sheets were back on the bed before the heavens opened, so maybe they had gone out for the day.
Still, I hoovered and dusted and wiped with all the enthusiasm I usually muster, and then Oliver dragged his school luggage down from the loft. We emptied the bags on his bedroom floor, and for a little while his bedroom looked like a passionately-fought church bring-and-buy sale, whilst we counted shirts and ties and handkerchiefs and folded them all neatly back into the bag.
To my enormous pride and satisfaction he had thoughtfully made a list of all of the things that he had left in the school laundry to be dyed grey, and so I could know at a mere glance what was missing. He is in the last year now, so it doesn’t really matter very much what is missing, he can do without it for two terms and some exam leave.
He is going to need some more shoes, and probably some more socks. He always seems to need socks, and I am suffering from occasional guilty pangs about his underwear, which has also suffered from the school laundry affliction. If his girlfriend stays the course that will be her problem eventually, only of course she is probably a modern sort of girl and will leave him to sink or swim by himself. It is a good job I am not a modern sort of girl. I do not know how Mark would get along if he were obliged to dress himself.
Eventually we were done, and he is ready for school again, apart from the things he is still using and the things we have forgotten, all of which will presumably sort themselves out in the end. We will need to refill his tuck box when he comes home from Korea, and that is it.
Once he had hauled the enormous bag back up the stairs I left him to make his own way to work and buzzed off to Kendal. I am quite enjoying journeys at the moment, because of listening to a truly fascinating and dreadful account on Audible about a complete lunatic in Austria who locked his daughter in a cellar for twenty four years. It was in the days when I did not bother with a daily newspaper, and so I had not heard of it before, but I have been entirely astonished. I have never heard of anybody quite so comprehensively insane before, but it seems that nobody ever noticed.
It has made me look with speculative eyes even at the customers I don’t think are nutters.
I was going to Kendal for a haircut, which was a joy beyond measure, and my hair is now short and tidy. My head has been sympathetically massaged by a blonde trainee with impossibly long eyelashes, who did not feel any need to make polite conversation, for which I was profoundly grateful, and sank into a contented daydream-state whilst she did it. My hair is now trimmed and neat, although when I looked at it all over the hairdresser’s floor it looked uncomfortably as though it had done ten rounds in the Gordonstoun laundry.
I do not care. I do not need to look at my own hair, that is for other people to worry about. In any case it was a happy afternoon, catching up with my friendly hairdresser, and hearing all about his doings, and telling him mine. I had to get somebody else to cut my hair in an emergency last time, and it was not at all nice.
Then I listened to the lunatic all the way back to Windermere and came out to work.
I am feeling light-headed and content.
