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We have left Oliver at school.

The house feels oddly empty, and we are a bit quiet and sad. We have got no children left, our nest feels rather dreadfully empty without any constantly chirping hungry creatures.

It has taken up most of the day, there were lots of last minute things to do. Mark cleaned the car and Oliver’s bike, and we took the taxi sign off the top, in an effort to look a bit less disreputable: although I can’t say it improved things very much.

I spent the morning desperately dredging photographs out of the bowels of my computer to put in his Photo Pocket for school. They all have one of these, it is a plastic sheet with lots of wallets for photographs, and he has had the same ones for two terms and begged for some more, so I put together lots of photographs of his camping trip, and of all of us in Blackpool, and one of Grandma in a false beard, he didn’t see it until we got to school, and he laughed a lot and was very pleased with it. It is hanging on his wall behind his bed, he will have to tell the other boys that he is a distant relative of the Seven Dwarves.

Finally I filled in the kit list, which is a complete list of everything they have taken back with them, along with any other observations for Matron’s benefit like: ‘these are somebody else’s underpants’ . It is a smart school so I thought I might try to counter the effect of the pink shirt and the taxi with a bit of dignified calligraphy, so I dug out my fountain pen to write it.

Of course it was so long since I have written anything at all in the ink-to-paper sort of way that it had dried up completely and all the ink had set in scratchy black lumps round the nib, so I had to take it downstairs to wash it in some warm water, and then the ink that wouldn’t have any truck with the paper gushed out plentifully all over my fingers. No amount of scrubbing with Honey and Jasmine Handwash made any difference whatsoever, and in the end I had to give up and go to school with purplish-black fingers.

It was entirely my own fault for being pretentious. For the sake of writing things like ‘2 x prs shorts’ and ‘we seem to have mislaid a shirt, have you got it?’ in a sophisticated style I had to try and not shake hands with anybody for the whole day, and keep my hands tucked out of sight for the whole time, and it turned out not to be worth it anyway, because when we got there Matron just told me to leave the list in the bottom of his underwear drawer and she would sort it out at the end of term.

We had been worried a bit about Oliver going back, he had been very upset when we told him that the Hour Had Come, and that it was time for pre-school ablutions to commence. We do washing and polishing and nail cutting and ear-inspecting fairly thoroughly, to make up for four weeks of benign neglect, and it was a bit grim and final-farewellish, like scrubbing up ready for brain surgery, but surprisingly he cheered up almost as soon as he had got his uniform on, and was progressively more and more excited during the whole journey. He told us that it was like having two souls, one was a home soul and one was a school soul, and he loved being them both, although he added kindly that he thought that maybe his truest soul was the home one.

When we got there, there were lots of other small boys noisily charging about and riding their bikes round and round the yard, because bikes are allowed in the summer term. He parked his bike happily, and when we got up to the dorm he dived straight in and hugged Matron, rather to her surprise, and hastily unpacked his bag, proud to be able to show me exactly where everything was supposed to live. We hugged him goodbye, but he had gone already really, and we left him trotting downstairs for supper whilst we went on to the talk for parents in the library.

It was a talk about school’s thoughts on academic achievement, and the all-important question of how they will turn them from small ignorant oiks at age nine, into self-assured thirteen year olds who will blast through Common Entrance exams and straight through the front doors of Eton. They chart each boy’s progress in different areas on graphs, so that the staff can all see how they are getting on, and they correlate the graphs so that they can all see what a boy’s strengths and weaknesses are: it is very practical and carefully considered, and it all impressed me very much.

The Head does not believe in showing these graphs to parents, because he is quite sure that we non-educationalists don’t understand them properly, and anyway he does not think that parents should interfere with the teachers, who are experts and above question: and I am wholeheartedly behind him on that one, they can get on with trying to divest Oliver of his ignorance and I will get on with driving a taxi, and we will all be happy. Oliver will be sitting his first exams this term, which is why he has got to have legible handwriting, and with any luck by the next time I see him he will have some.

I do like experts.