We are setting off for Gordonstoun on the day after tomorrow.
Followers of these pages will know what a long road this has been.
It is ages since that first parents’ meeting in the prep school library, when our sons were scared new boys of eight, and the headmaster knew everything. There was a long list of public schools on the blackboard, along with the required grades at Common Entrance, and we all looked at it and shivered at the enormity of the task in front of our little treasures.
We would have individual meetings with him, the head explained, and he, in his wisdom, would tell us where our boys should go next.
I didn’t at all like the idea of Gordonstoun when he first said it. I had hoped for somewhere southern, where mummies dressed in heels and big hats for Sports Day, not Barbour jackets and wellies. I had wanted Repton, maybe, or at least Harrow. Somewhere near the equator.
“He’s a Gordonstoun boy,” the head said briskly, when we saw him, and I argued and dissented and grumbled inside, but agreed, reluctantly, to go and visit.
Of course when we saw it, when we talked to them, the head was right and I had been utterly wrong. We had hardly walked through the front door before first we, then Oliver, were bowled over, and completely and absolutely sure that this was the place he belonged.
After that came the financial worries, and the work, and the Common Entrance, and then this summer the preparations. The sewing and the packing and the organising, and now it is upon us.
We have one more complete day and then it begins.
There was a letter from his housemaster this morning. He is allowed to take a penknife for expeditions, and school is not nut-free, so he can take Nutella if he likes.
“It’s a school for superheroes,” said Oliver happily, when I told him, and spent ages practising not cutting his fingers off.
You will not be surprised to hear that despite the excitement of it all, he is also fairly nervous. Of course he is. It is a huge adventure.
This has led to a very noticeable increase in autistic flappiness. Mark has been helping in the kitchen today, and accidentally gave him yoghurt with the wrong sort of spoon, followed by sausage sandwiches which had mayonnaise on them. It was not much mayonnaise, because it had been largely scraped off and replaced with lashings of camouflaging tomato sauce, but Oliver can detect a rogue flavour at thirty paces, and I had to make him some more later.
Mark says that he will starve to death when he gets to Gordonstoun.
I am sure he won’t, at least not if we remember the Nutella.
I seem to have flapped about all day, doing lots of things that needed doing without achieving anything exciting at all.
I changed Lucy’s sheets and cleaned her bathroom. Then I cleaned the rest of the bathrooms whilst Mark took Oliver for a last minute haircut. He didn’t really need a haircut, but it might be a while before we see him again, so we thought we would get one in the bank, as it were. In any case short hair does not need so much faffing about, if it were all right for women to be bald probably I would be.
I cooked and cleaned and remembered last minute bits of packing.
You will be interested to hear that the new beeswax wraps work really, really well.
You shape them around whatever you are covering, and they just stay in place. They are bendy and flexible and the cheese that I have wrapped up has not gone in the least dry. If they stay this impressive even after they have been washed a couple of times I will be making some more.
Oliver says that they smell of the summer.
Good.
