I do not seem to be achieving a great deal at the moment.
I have tried very hard today, but somehow nothing much happened. Life has become a bit like trying to knit a teacosy whilst diving in a murky pond. Everything seems to have become a bit complicated, and difficult, and involving far more concentration than really it should.
Once Mark had gone to work I tried to address the colossal stack of luggage in the corner of the living room. There was cricket kit and rugby boots and a huge pile of Beano comics and a stack of books that made me feel quite faint at the thought of how much of our domestic budget gets spent on juvenile literature.
I summoned Oliver to help, and between us we took his tweed jacket to the dry cleaner, and the Beano comics to the doctor’s surgery. I shall have to be careful about the tweed jacket. It would not be the first time that I have realised with utter horror on the first day of term that I have forgotten about uniform in the dry cleaner’s, and been obliged to send children to school in their PE kit.
We left the rest of the luggage piled up in the corner. It did not seem to have diminished by the tiniest bit.
I might chuck a sheet over it.
After that we went to the library, and I got out some effortless feather-light fiction, and he got out a book of short stories about freedom and some adventure stories.
I approved of this, because it was free, and also I will not ever have to try and put it away anywhere.
We thought that we would pack things for our holidays then, and I emptied his bags and drawers in a futile and increasingly desperate search for his summer clothes, with no luck whatsoever. In the end we found some of his shorts in Lucy’s drawers, and cut the legs off some too-short jogging pants. I think that we might have to go to Asda for some T-shirts.
After that, Actual Head Boy came round to visit Oliver, and I went off to take Mark’s car for its MOT.
The MOT was lovely.
I sat on the bench outside the garage in the sunshine, and did lots of useful things on my computer, like paying bills and ordering pork pies. There is a butcher close to Oliver’s school who makes the most wonderful pork pies in the entire known universe. I do mean truly superb, with pale golden pastry and the sort of filling that just seems to burst on your tastebuds. They do not have horrid lumps of jelly or gristle or fat. Mark and Oliver both like them very much indeed. I do not like pork pies, but I like these.
They are so nice that Oliver’s school has been known to offer them as prizes for things, not very difficult things, admittedly, things like ‘first ten parents to fill in and return this form will win a Cockburn’s Pork Pie’, but it is enough to fire everybody’s enthusiasm, and presumably it helps with administrative efficiency.
I rang the butcher and arranged to collect some after Lucy’s speech day tomorrow so that we will have some to take on our holidays.
Then I sat in the sunshine and read my effortless library book. This was a very great happiness. I can’t tell you how lovely it was to sit peacefully doing nothing whatsoever, and without the smallest shred of guilt, whilst the world wagged busily past me.
In the end the car passed its MOT and I had to go home, rather to my regret, where I found the Number Two Daughters helpfully pegging out the washing that Oliver had brought home from school, and which had necessitated putting my foot in the door of the washing machine to get it all in. There was so much that it occupied every last spare inch of available washing line. This is because we are still largely living in our garden tent, which as you might remember, is constructed over the washing line, a bit like the sort that you build for a bored six-year-old when you want them to occupy themselves because you have got more interesting things to do.
I had to get ready for work them.
I had occupied an entire day and achieved almost entirely nothing.
One of the taxi drivers had very generously brought us a couple of bottles of wine for a belated birthday present. These will improve our holiday no end.
I am now longing for Sunday, and freedom, to arrive.
I have not packed or prepared a single, solitary thing, but I really don’t care.
