It is Oliver’s birthday. We have been the parents of a boy for fourteen years.
Mark gave me some flowers by way of congratulation. It might have been a long time ago but childbirth is not to be forgotten in a hurry.
I might think about going on a diet and trying to lose my baby weight soon.
Actually it was not cut flowers, which are not terribly seasonal at the moment. It was a poinsettia. I love these, they have velvety leaves and the most stunning scarlet blooms, but I am rubbish at encouraging them to survive. It is supposed to be possible to persuade them not to abandon life in the days after Christmas, but I never have. Inevitably after a few weeks the slow, dreary shedding of the leaves begins, until I am left with a stick and some spent soil for the compost heap.
That is not today, though, and today it is sitting cheerfully on my windowsill, reminding me of our absent boy.
Obviously we have spoken to him a couple of times during the day, and although he was sad to be so far away from home, he was bearing up well. We felt a bit sad as well, missing birthdays is one of the difficult bits of boarding school. He did not even have much in the way of presents, he had asked us for a game to be downloaded on to his PlayStation at home, and everybody else sent cash. This is always the best thing to get but does not come in an interestingly-contoured parcel.
He was cheerful enough when we spoke to him, and pleased to be having a day off. He had had cake and pizza for dinner at school, and his bank account was bursting at the seams. Life could be a lot worse.
In the meantime we had to get on with ours, and we were not short of things that needed our attention. Mark went into the garden to cut firewood whilst I got things done in the house.
I put some music on whilst we worked. We have got a programme on our telephones which plays music. I think that this is absolutely brilliant, you can put on absolutely any song from any time ever, and today I was listening to music from my own far-distant youth, back in the nineteen seventies.
I liked the music, but thought after a little while that it was absolutely horrifying.
One song after another seemed to be being sung by mournful women who were still sticking by some chap even though he treated them terribly badly and could not make his mind up whether he wanted to stay with them or not.
There were so many of these that I started to wonder if all of the singers had had the same boyfriend. One tiresome rascal adventuring his way through the bedrooms of the chart toppers.
It made me very glad that we are not still in the nineteen seventies. I do not see today’s young women putting up with this sort of awful behaviour. Certainly the ones who get in my taxi seem to have rather more about them. I had one customer last night whose husband had got cross with her and stalked off back to their hotel, leaving her in a pub by herself. She had switched her phone off and when I encountered her, was on her way to play drinking games with a stag party.
The picture is of Number One Daughter and her cross fit team, talking of women who do not hang around feeling sorry for themselves. She has been competing in a cross-fit event in Dublin this weekend.
As with all group photographs of my children, she is the short one.
We discovered this morning that we could watch her on YouTube, so we did. As a result our day was interrupted by bursts of rushing back to the computer to watch another heat of her doing something else exhausting.
I can’t remember all of the events, but one event consisted of cycling on one of those stationary bicycles until she had burned seventy calories, and then picking up a sandbag which she had to throw behind her over her shoulders for her partner to pick up and throw behind her over her shoulders. They had to cross a hundred meters in this manner, in between bursts of more frantic cycling. The sandbags looked bone-crushingly heavy. I would have struggled to shift them in a wheelbarrow.
There were all sorts of other horrible-looking activities, and her team did not win, although they did jolly well. Number One Daughter is currently ranking at seventy fifth in the world, so if you are doing some building work and need some bags of cement chucking about, she is the chap to ask. Having said that I don’t think she is likely to have much time, she is off to another competition in a week or two, this one in China.
We were very impressed, and gazed at it all with a sort of fascinated horror, until Mark noticed that we were burning the toast and we had to turn our attention back to not setting the house on fire again.
I have spoken to all of them this weekend. Lucy is organising her life ready for another week of bringing law and order to Northampton, and Number Two Daughter, who leaves for Canada on Wednesday, has been to see my sister before she goes.
They all have such busy lives. It makes me hardly notice how elderly and dull we have become ourselves.
How splendid to have children.
