We are in York.
It was the day of collecting Oliver for exeat, and despite setting the alarm and even waking up five minutes before it went off, we still only just made it in time.
I suppose this was due to hanging about in bed with coffee for rather longer than we should have done. Idleness comes back to bite you in the end.
We took the camper van. This is the perfect vehicle for this sort of journey, as long as you don’t mind it being about as aerodynamic as a flung brick. This did not matter anyway, because we have reached an epically exciting bit of our Game Of Thrones CD, and so the journey passed faster than I can tell you.
Obviously we know what happens next anyway. This was what made it was so thrilling. It is brilliant to listen to a story being carefully layered together, bit by bit, and not to worry about the story, but just to have the leisure to marvel about what an amazingly clever writer the chap is. We listened breathlessly, and before we knew it we were at Oliver’s school, and the bell was ringing.
School had thoughtfully provided coffee. This was not really supposed to be for us, but for some other parents who had to come in for a parents’ meeting, but we felt that we had earned some after two hours of non-stop blood and treachery, and went and helped ourselves anyway. A second cup of coffee in the day was an ace thing to happen, even though we had to gulp the end of it a bit hastily when Oliver appeared.
Once we had chugged down the drive, waving at people who were laughing at the camper van, we went to the butcher in Bedale where we queued behind loads of other parents for pork pies with apples on the top of them. We like these, possibly best of all, and retreated to the service area to eat, and listen to Oliver’s stories about school.
He had had a splendid birthday, partly because half of the school had buzzed off on a rugby tour and there were only a handful left to share the cake. This is an annual fathers-and-sons jolly around Scotland, supervised by the head of PE, who went to an all-boys public school and is an expert on rugger adventures. I know about this in some detail, because one of his friends gets in my taxi occasionally.
It all sounds very rumbunctious and splendid, and both Oliver and Mark thought they would prefer to be excused. It is the sort of event for which we need Number Two Daughter, who used to play international rugby, albeit for a far distant Middle-Eastern country, but who nonetheless knows all about the best way to drink too much and get into fights.
Once we were all suitably full of pork pie, Oliver retreated to his bunk and YouTube, and Mark and I dived back into the cab for more fire and murder and plotting to enliven the rest of the journey to York.
We stopped by the side of the road to walk along a muddy field track with the dogs, and fed Oliver on pizza, which he didn’t much like because of the wrong cheese, and then it was time for Lucy’s dance show.
This was brilliant.
It is on for two nights. Tonight, as it happened, they had introduced a bonus feature where you handed a tenner to the school charity fund, and they filled you up with champagne and canapés before it started. Note to anybody going tomorrow, that bit was only running for one night, you will have to put up with coffee and mince pies.
Canapés are food served in such tiny helpings that you have got to eat absolutely loads before you are full, and you are not supposed to do this. I don’t know why. It is not good manners to wolf down canapés by the trayful, nor even to station yourself strategically next to the lady who is proffering them.
We did both of these things anyway, since all of the other guests were polite, which we thought was their loss. Oliver liked the sausages cooked in honey and mustard, and I liked the prawns in Chinese sauce. Mark decided that he liked everything, after sampling it all, several times.
We quaffed champagne, enthusiastically, and I was on my third glass by curtain-up, which certainly helped the evening to sparkle.
It was brilliant fun. There were little tiny excited girls, in tutus and tinsel crowns, bouncing about for their first Christmas at boarding school: and teenagers, glowering their resentment at having to do something so, you know, ridiculous: and then Lucy’s class, at the top of the school, tall and elegant enough to be mistaken for teachers, and who were, simply, having a lovely time.
It was ace. Wishing upon a star, and Cinderella, and every bouncy Disney song we liked to hear, and Lucy, who was not in it much, but who we thought was the best of all, obviously.
She came rushing out to join us afterwards, and we all retreated to the camper van for a cup of tea in our own safe travelling nest all together.
In the end she had got to go, because she doesn’t come home until next weekend, and we hugged her and said reluctant goodbyes.
It was two o’clock in the morning when we got home, and we felt as though we had been away for weeks.
We should have gone out to work for the last hour, but we didn’t, because we were falling asleep.
It was worth being broke.
