Oliver is having a small teenage rebellion.
He has discovered on the mighty Internet that group punishments are outlawed under the Geneva Convention, and has decided to take this information back to his prep school.
The headmaster is not above cancelling biscuits for everybody because a small group of boys have decided to behave like idiots, and Oliver feels this injustice very keenly.
He has downloaded the relevant bits of the Convention, has persuaded Lucy, who is studying psychology, to explain the emotional damage thus incurred by boys thus abused, and is putting it all together into a presentation to hand to the headmaster on his return.
I am impressed. He has probably got a glorious career ahead of him in the civil rights movement.
I would be pleased if he finished his algebra as well.
His tooth came out this morning. This has been the cause of some alarm since the trip to the dentist yesterday. It was very loose indeed, and the dentist offered to pull it out for him. I think he was surprised by the firmness of Oliver’s refusal, which only just stopped short of punching him on the nose.
Oliver has got to go back to the dentist on Monday to suffer the necessary filling. He made the grim decision that the tooth would have to come out beforehand in order to forestall an actual fist-fight with the dentist over the issue.
He has been wrestling with the problem ever since. In the end he managed to waggle it out this morning in front of the mirror, determinedly, and then woke us up to tell us the good news.
We were stirring anyway, because of a persistent dinging coming from Mark’s phone. This turned out to be the optician trying to tell us that Oliver’s new glasses had arrived, so once we had managed to rouse ourselves to decent consciousness with coffee, Mark went to get them.
Oliver and glasses is an interesting new development. There are all sorts of rules at school about having a second pair which must be left with Matron, but since we haven’t got any cash and it is January, we will have to ignore that bit. A second pair of glasses is a luxury item, like scented candles or filter coffee, he can have some for his birthday. In any case he is thirteen now, not eight, and only needs them for reading the blackboard and paying proper attention in Assembly. He will just have to become Responsible.
Once everybody was out of bed I decided that I would pay a visit to the loft and throw some things away. We are going to need the space for storing things, when we start rebuilding downstairs, in the living room and the back garden.
It was impossibly cluttered up there, and I have been having some difficulties in organising the children’s luggage for going back to school.
Actually that is not true. Lucy has organised her own.
She has become Independent.
Soon they will not need me any more for anything except cooking, cleaning and giving them cash.
It is a sobering thought.
Everybody helped chucking things down the stairs, and Mark put it all in next door’s dustbin and sawed the old chairs up for firewood.
I know it is very rascally to abuse somebody else’s dustbin but it is a holiday house in January and there is nobody there so it is all right really.
We might have done it even if it wasn’t.
The luggage worries were precipitated by the realisation that the holidays are now over. Lucy goes back to school tomorrow. Oliver, who is busily struggling through a mountain of unfinished prep, has got until Wednesday.
I am pleased about this, because I have just discovered that none of his shoes fit him. I have got until Wednesday to remedy this, all I need is two hundred quid.
It is unlikely that we will raise that much this weekend. This is always the quietest weekend of the year. We have been here now for four hours, and so far I have raised a tenner. This was entirely predictable. I took several people home after New Year who I would imagine are still suffering from their hangovers.
Fortunately I got a pile of new books for Christmas, and also I am very happily occupied in watching the staff at the pasty shop across the road. They closed ages ago, and now they are having an illicit but interesting-looking party. They are playing music and dancing around the tables. Passers by have occasionally stopped to join in. It is cheering my evening up very much.
I don’t mind not making any money. We did not expect that we would.
It is the end of Christmas. The children will be gone and we will be busy with January taxis and building work.
I am going to go back to my very good book and wait for something lucrative to happen.
