It is two o’ clock in the morning.
We are in the camper van, parked outside my parents’ house.
Never let it be said that we don’t have an exciting and interesting life.
Of course we had to take Oliver back to school today.
As you know, I packed his things up yesterday.
This morning when we got up I did not do anything. I wrote my letter to the prison service, hastily, and rather grumpily.
I rushed. I do not think it was my finest literary work.
Even so it took me all morning, and when I had finished I could not get the printer to work properly. It would not scan anything, and was not at all keen to print things because of the computer updates. I managed to get some of it on to paper, and then emailed it all, to make sure.
I did this at the very last minute. Oliver and Mark had finished the packing between them, and Mark had cleaned the camper van up whilst Oliver showered. By the time I was hurriedly typing the covering email they were ready and waiting in the living room downstairs and we were an hour late.
Oliver dashed up to the post office with the hard copy that I had managed to coax out of the reluctant printer. I shoved bread and cheese into the fridge and then we were away.
Oliver sat with us in the front so that he could practice with his new glasses. He has suddenly discovered that he can read things like road signs, and was very pleased. He kept lifting his glasses up to peer out from underneath them, and then dropping them back so that he could marvel at the three-dimensional clarity of the world.
It was dark when we reached his school, and the car park was full of flapping mummies and stoic boys, hauling enormous bags and spilling wellingtons and towels out all over the place.
Oliver is Dorm Captain this term. His dormitory is right at the top of the school, in the attics. Mark bravely dragged his luggage up the stairs. This is one of the splendid things about being a two-parent family. Even so I was still puffing like Thomas The Tank Engine when we finally got to the top.
Oliver is made of springs and knotted wire, and bounded up the stairs without even pausing in his conversation.
We unpacked everything and put it all in his drawers. He is very organised these days, he is an experienced traveller.
We hugged him a reluctant goodbye under the archway, and drove away, feeling a bit bereft.
He has got two weeks of adequate feeding and sensible bedtimes ahead. He will be just fine.
We did not go home. Instead we drove on to Nottingham.
Over the last month or two we have been saving up for some more dining chairs. We bought them on eBay some time ago, and the lady kindly agreed to let us pay a bit at a time over a few weeks.
We made the last payment amid much relieved celebration a couple of days ago, and thought that we would drive down to collect them.
The thing was that they were in massive boxes. We had got to post them in through the back window of the camper van, and they only just went, helped along by some squeezing and swearing.
The window fell out whilst we were doing it, but we caught it in time and poked it back.
The entire back of the camper is occupied with enormous cardboard boxes full of chairs.
They only just fit.
I mean really only just. There are not even centimetres to spare. They are squeezed in like those Chinese melons that were grown in fish tanks to make them a handy shape for stacking onto lorries.
Getting them out again is going to be interesting.
Fortunately that is not today’s problem.
Once we were full of chairs we drove back North. We thought that we would pop round and see my parents, since their house is practically on the way, only the motorway was shut so it took a bit longer than expected.
My parents were surprisingly welcoming considering that it was a quarter to eleven at night. They were surprisingly welcoming anyway, since we drank a bottle and a half of their wine, ate a plateful of mince pies, and then announced that we would like to avail ourselves of my father’s store of handy lengths of timber, for building shelves and walls and a new conservatory.
What a blessing it is to have children.
It was lovely to see them. We stretched out blissfully in front of their fire and talked for ages, until they started yawning and glancing at their watches, and we thought perhaps it would be a good moment to go and make sure our chairs were still all right.
We are here now, in the camper van in the quiet dark.
It is not quite as nice as it could be, because something in the camper van smells a bit funny. It is not the chairs, because it started before we got them.
We think that we might take the carpets up tomorrow.
