It is not very exciting to be a real grown-up tonight.
I have been looking on Amazon for new quilt covers for the children’s beds. This is because theirs are worn out. Oliver, as you know, is having a new and more grown-up bed, but even if he had been keeping his old one he would have needed new linens anyway. The duvet cover currently on his bed went to prep school with him aged eight. Not only was this ten years ago, it has been ten years of school laundries. School laundries, entirely reasonably, seem to cope with their role in this most revolting area of childcare simply by boiling everything, hard, for a couple of hours every week. That fixes most things.
It has certainly fixed Oliver’s duvet covers, and they are as limp and exhausted as a parent who has been obliged to join in with the school sponsored walk. I am going to turn them all into dusters and dog-sick cloths and start again.
I have been trying to engage both children in the choosing process for duvet covers, with limited success. Oliver offered the textual equivalent of yeah whatever, and then buzzed off to do some exciting Gordonstoun adventure instead of thinking about duvet covers, probably abseiling off Ben Nevis or something. He didn’t take his phone, whatever it was, and my duvet-cover suggestions floated away un-noticed, into the Scottish ether.
Lucy liked lots of different duvet covers, none of which were the ones I had thought might be nice. She sent me so many pictures and duvet suggestions that after a bit I stopped being able to tell the difference between them. Sometimes being a grown up is very dull. When we get home – obviously I am on the taxi rank, duvet covers cost money – I am going to have to choose between tartan or floral, and choose something that will not clash horribly with the colour scheme in their bedrooms. I already know I am utterly incapable of doing this so I think I shall just give Mark’s credit card to Lucy and stand back.
In other news, Lucy went off to some Victorian market with Elspeth and her daughter yesterday. She came back having had a wonderful time but with a sick headache that left her white and shaking for the rest of the day. Fifteen hours sleep seemed to cure it, although she was still fragile and a bit tottery this morning. Fortunately it was Sunday and she was not obliged to think about, or indeed do anything about, her fast approaching house move, which is now thundering towards us like a late Lake District bus approaching a crowd of Japanese tourists on a Bank Holiday Monday.
She has one more week before her first day. She is having the sort of dream where she gets to Manchester and discovers that they have changed their minds. I am sure it will be fine, but poor Lucy, it is an exciting time.
I dreamed last night that I was working backstage on a play when the curtain went up long before we were ready. In my dream we were still focussing lanterns and painting the set, but the audience turned up anyway. I was not sorry when my heart-thumping panic turned into a recollection that a visit to the bathroom might be a good idea, after which I was awake, so I fidgeted until Mark was awake as well, and we got up.
You will gather from that that the pre-Christmas panic has not yet abated, very far from it, in fact. We are almost in December now and I have not yet made a mince pie. Mark has not yet finished boarding the loft, although the bottom bits along the eaves are done and are even plastered, and so as soon as I have finished the Advent calendars, which must surely, surely be tomorrow now, I am going to start painting it.
This is a hopeful feeling. I am glad about this. I need some hopeful feelings at the moment.
The curtain is going to go up very soon indeed.
