Monday, day of Clean Sheets, has come around once again, and I am pleased to tell you that we no longer have to try not to notice sticky, slightly yellowish, coffee-scented sheets.
The coffee scent was quite a good thing, actually, because it was as good as an explanation that the yellowish patches were coffee and not elderly incontinence. Not that anybody visited our bedroom in the meantime to enquire about it, we are certainly not that sociable, but it was vaguely reassuring to know that even if they had done, then embarrassment could have been avoided.
Still, Monday has arrived, and almost departed. I have washed and dried the sheets, and our bedroom is no longer a source of potential discomfort for a hypothetical sheet-inspector.
I am sure you will be pleased to hear it.
We did not want to get out from underneath the sheets, despite their sticky disreputability, because neither of us was looking forward to the day that was looming ahead of us.
We do not spend Mondays doing excitingly constructive things to the camper van. Mondays are for doing the tedious things that make the rest of life bowl along without too much inconvenience, and although they are importantly useful, they are dull. When I win the lottery I will give somebody vast sums of cash to come and wipe the dust away on my behalf. It would have to be vast sums otherwise I would find myself giving in to a guilty imperative to volunteer my assistance.
Mark went to saw up and collect some firewood, and I resigned myself to a day of cooking and cleaning.
Somehow this just did not work very well.
The day had begun with the disconcerting news that Oliver has not been accepted to Sandhurst this year. Apparently it had been a close-run thing, with considerable discussion, but in the end they had decided that he is not yet Ready, and he has got to go back to the Board to be interviewed again in a year’s time.
Of course, at first this was a shocking outcome. Oliver is jolly good at all things soldiery, and we had all thought that he would get along just fine. When we thought about it, though, we knew that the Army had noticed all the things that we had worried about just a little bit, like Oliver being very young to tell bad-tempered sergeants what to do, and supposed, reluctantly, that they were right.
This has led to considerable discussion about his next move, occasionally, over the telephone during the day. This distracted me so much that I kept starting to do things and then forgetting all about them and wandering off, like the sort of person with Alzheimer’s who has to keep a list which says things like Clean Your Teeth, pinned to the fridge.
There was a chap whom we all thought must have that in the Post Office this morning. He was insisting that the lady behind the counter give him his pension in twenty-five pound notes, which she could not quite understand at first. In the end we all worked out what he was talking about, but he started to get quite cross when she explained that she couldn’t. Eventually she had to pretend that she had run out. The whole queue breathed a sigh of relief when he accepted this and wandered off, mumbling about public services going down hill, whilst we all watched in sympathetic horror, hoping desperately that our own futures would not follow him along that grim pathway.
By three o’clock the house was a dreadful mess of half-completed jobs, the worst of which was the half-emptied cat litter tray, which I thought really I ought to finish before I started making the sandwiches. I telephoned Oliver occasionally, to find out what his newest plans might be, and to tell him all of my ideas, to which he listened, as politely as he could manage.
He thinks that he might occupy the intervening year either joining the Reserves or possibly becoming an ordinary soldier, so that when he goes in front of the Board next year he will have had lots of experience to tell them about.
I thought that this sounded splendid. I was rushing around trying to clear up after myself before work when Mark came home and helped.
I told him all about Oliver’s deliberations.
We were in agreement that whatever he decided, he would be absolutely fine.
