Collectable

Despite having spent the weekend, and indeed the last week, collecting children from all over the place, when we woke up this morning we did not have any.

This was quite tranquil. It is nice not to have any pressing need to get up. Indeed, we sat in bed and wondered what we ought to do with the day.

Obviously there was lots to be done. It was not like a holiday, where all you need to do is flap about all day changing your dress and drinking wine and remembering not to swear.

I did not mind this. I am full of holiday at the moment, and it was nice to have some time at home, even if this inevitably means tripping over dogs and a huge pile of laundry to be conquered.

We took things to the dry cleaner, and stuffed things in the washing machine, and pegged things on the washing line. Even as I write there is  still a dispiriting heap waiting for my attention, and the ironing pile is steadily expanding, like instant mashed potato used to when you added water to it in the nineteen seventies.

To my great happiness, Mark started building one of the new flower beds that we are having in the conservatory. I am very pleased about this, despite sensible advice from every single grandparent that we ought to have plant pots instead. I am quite sure that they are all entirely correct but I do not want plant pots and I do want a flower bed. I am looking forward to indoor gardening, and you can’t do this with plant pots. If it turns out that I am wrong they will never know anyway because I will probably not own up.

I have attached a picture. It is the most exciting thing that has happened for weeks.

Oliver has been at Centre Parc in Penrith with some of his school friends. This is very brave of the kindly mother who volunteered to take them. I think she would have quite liked a week of watching Wimbledon with a glass of wine, and then instead finished up herding joyous but disorganised boys all over the place and collecting sackfuls of dirty laundry. I spoke to her this evening, and it sounded rather like trying to create order in a hurry when somebody has just upended a barrel full of tennis balls from the ceiling.

Oliver sounded exhausted when I talked to him. He said he was having a lovely time, but thought that he would like to come home and sleep. They are going to go to the Great Yorkshire Show tomorrow, and then we are going to drive over to Yorkshire, in a surprise extra trip, and collect him.

He wanted to go very badly indeed, and he has had a brilliant time, released into the wild with his friends, especially because they are going to go their separate ways so very soon, but of course it means that we have got to go and collect him again. I am pleased to have another excuse to go out in the camper van, but it does mean more high-speed dashing up and down the country, and I was rather hoping to earn some cash before the first invoice turns up from Gordonstoun.

We had originally planned to put him on the train, but he does not have a mobile phone at the moment. Mark’s phone has broken, so he has borrowed Oliver’s. I do not think I want Oliver trying to navigate his way through three or four changes of train without the ability to phone home if he lands up on an alien planet, or Edinburgh or Birmingham, by accident.

In any case we have got to go back to school. After all that emotional rushing about leaving the place behind. Oliver has forgotten his cricketing bag. It is too heavy to be easily posted, and so the bursar has chucked it in the potting shed so that we can collect it some day on our way past, as if we were likely to be passing Yorkshire on our way to Gordonstoun or Northamptonshire.

By a stroke of good fortune, now we will be doing just that. How pleased I am.

Lucy was away camping, with a friend that she made on her Glastonbury adventure. The friend was a chap, but has not made it through the increasingly rigorous selection process to become a boyfriend. His encyclopaedic knowledge of martial arts was not enough to tip the scales in his favour, and she turned up this evening with her heart untouched.

She has decided to spend her next festival not camping with the rest of the bouncers, but staying with her friend Chloe, who lives close by. Mark seems very relieved about this development. I am relieved as well, because the sleeping bag is one of those things that I have not yet got around to washing after Oliver’s end-of-school adventures.

I am sure I will get there in the end.