Oliver has been telling us stories about school.
There have not been as many stories as we would have liked, because once he was safely home, he gave a massive sigh of relief, donned his dressing gown and collapsed in front of the PS4.
He has accepted sausage sandwiches and apple juice, and emerged occasionally to resupply, but apart from that he has retreated into the cyber company of his best friend Harry, and they have been adventuring together around the digital universe.
It is nice to have him home. We woke up this morning to his voice chirping away upstairs, and wondered, for a moment, what it was.
The housemaster appears to be encouraging them to talk about girls. Duffus house has evenings which are called Brew Nights, when they all congregate together and eat unsuitable confectionery and drink fizzy drinks and discuss, amongst other things, affairs of the heart.
It is very sad to hear about teenage boy heartaches, how glad I am to be past that particularly excruciating stage of life. I hope that the teenage girl housemistress is explaining to her charges that Boys Get Upset As Well.
They are not the only ones who have things to get upset about. I do not often philosophise about social or political issues on these pages, but I was so shocked by something today that I have made an exception.
This is not anything that Boris Johnson has done. I think I am beyond being shocked by anything that goes on inside the hallowed portals of the House of Commons. Indeed, if they all took their clothes off and started doing naked clog dancing to the strains of “I’m Getting Married In The Morning” it would be a welcome change rather than a shocking scandal.
My shocking scandal started when I got home to discover a letter addressed to Lucy, which I opened without the smallest qualm of guilt, in case it was something interesting. I was fascinated and horrified to discover that it was an exploratory communication from a potential loan company, offering to lend money to broke people when nobody else would.
Clearly since Lucy has been at our address without a credit history this lot thought that they might have a go. In warm, pastel colours, with a picture of a smilingly relieved lady at the bottom, they offered, thoughtfully, to help her solve her financial worries.
They would, they promised kindly, come and visit her at home to help her fill in the paperwork if she had literacy problems. They would collect all the repayments by easily managed weekly home visits which would avoid any worrying and upsetting communications with banks. They included customer feedback which spoke of sympathetic collection agents and a long and happy relationship.
I did not in the least believe the last bit, except possibly that it would be long.
The APR was five hundred and thirty five percent. I have written those figures because when you write it as a number it is easy to skim over it and not notice the dreadfulness of it.
That means that for every pound you borrow during the year, you amass five pounds and thirty five pence in interest alone.
They are called Provident Loans, without a trace of irony, and if you ever meet the Chief Executive please tell him from me that he is wicked. Rarely have I come across such shockingly predatory behaviour, such an abuse of desperate poor people as we come into the Christmas season.
I scowled about this for much of the rest of the day when I thought about it, what an awful thing if Lucy had opened the letter and coincidentally been desperate for money and also monumentally stupid all at the same time. She could have borrowed a hundred quid over five years and finished up mortgaged for the rest of her life.
I hope the perpetrators toss and turn with nightmares on their mattresses stuffed with poor people’s money.
Hanging is too good for them.
