It has been another action-packed day at Ibbetson Towers.
I have not been at Ibbetson Towers for all of it. I have been shopping in Asda.
This was very horrible.
I was in an advanced state of upsetness even before I got there, because I had to collect Oliver from the railway station. He took Emily back down to her house in Kent, and has returned on the train.
I was late even before I set off, because of collecting some anti-flea dog drugs from the vet, and the receptionist faffed about with agonising slowness, ambling around the back room in a state of completely distracted inability to hunt down our order. When she finally emerged, smiling absently and wondering vaguely if I could explain how I managed to be both me and Number One Daughter, her eyes suddenly narrowed with suspicion as she realised the improbability of this feat, and she wanted proof of identification before releasing dangerous flea inhibitors into my unreliable custody.
I was in an agony of hopping from foot to foot before she had finished. When she couldn’t get her credit card machine to work I was tempted to fling the drugs back over the counter and tell her to use them on herself, but of course my veneer of aspirationally middle class sophistication prevailed, and I merely smiled a tight-lipped smile and snatched the bag out of her hand before dashing off.
As it happened, I had left Mark in the middle of dismembering my taxi, meaning that I was in his, which is entirely wrong. Everything is in the wrong place and the gears need changing at different times, and he had wisely eaten his chocolate out of it before he let me get in. I bashed it up and down the gears, crunchily, and arrived on the station at the same moment as the train, where I became instantly embroiled in a shouting match between a very cross man in a Land Rover and some taxi drivers. The cross man thought the taxis were taking up too many spaces and my car, being also a taxi, should have been on the taxi rank and not in the space where normal people park who are just collecting their travelling offspring.
There are several reasons why I could not have parked there, none of which I could be bothered to explain, but the rest of the taxi drivers handled the situation with what I considered to be superb effectiveness, in that they were brief and indifferently Anglo-Saxon, and when the chap turned to shout at me he was instantly drowned out by a volley of horns. This made me laugh, even though I was still trying to find Oliver, who seemed to be incapable of finding his way off the platform and across to the taxi rank.
After that came Asda, which was expensively horrible. We will not talk about it, although I concede that it is something of a relief to be the possessor of soap powder and tin foil again.
When we got home Oliver thoughtfully offered to help Mark with the taxi dismantling process, and Ritalin Boy reminded me that I had volunteered to help him compose his English coursework.
I like to imagine, fondly, that a Master’s’s degree from the English department at Cambridge University ought to make me more than capable of tackling GCSE English, but regrettably this turned out not to be the case, and I gazed at it in puzzled incomprehension.
It was a piece of overblown tripe about some idiot who had become convinced there was a ghost in their house, simply because the electricity had tripped during a thunderstorm.
Fortunately Oliver’s girlfriend had already helped him to write the first bit, and all I needed to do was insert punctuation, which was just as well, because my own essay on the subject would have been very scathing indeed. I can never understand writers who are determined to allow the weather to colour their mood, as if you can’t be overwhelmed with grief in the sunshine or excitedly thrilled with your life when you are in the Lake District.
We are going to have another go tomorrow. Tomorrow’s is a Wilfred Owen poem, and so I am feeling more inclined to be interested, although it is hardly a topic to inspire one with optimism, being a lengthy description of an unfortunate chap whose legs have been blown off.
I can’t say I am impressed with the choices of the GCSE board, no wonder everyone says young people are all struggling with depression.
I can’t see why they can’t give them some Jilly Cooper to read.
At least it would give them all something to think about.
