The Back To School crisis has reached a frantic momentum.
That is to say, I have become frantic.
I turned up Oliver’s trouser legs today. There were four pairs of trousers, so that was eight legs. I am very glad we have not evolved into some sort of insect shape, how terrible for four pairs of trousers to mean twenty four hems.
I did them on the sewing machine instead of by hand, so they look rubbish. Worse, they are all creased and tucked, because the trouser legs got narrower towards the bottom, and so there was too much fabric to make a tidy hem without leaving horrid crumpled tucks in the legs.
This could have been easily solved by taking the side seams apart, which I did not bother to do. Obviously the point of massive trouser turn-ups is that eventually he will grow into them, and I can just let them down with a speedy whizz of a Quick Unpick. If I have had to alter the whole shape of the seams and the legs then it just means so much extra sewing at some future date.
I wanted to leave a present for Future Me. I do not want to have more hours and hours of sore sewing fingers lurking ominously in my future. Also it suited the idle Present Me very much as well, and so Oliver has got rubbish trouser legs. I have no idea if he will notice but since the trousers were a hundred quid for four pairs I am not buying him another set when he has outgrown them all at Easter.
I sewed on labels and trimmed out labels and ironed things. Elspeth rang halfway through, which was nice, and whilst I sewed, we grumbled about going back to school. I did not ask her about sewing name labels on. I do not think Elspeth likes sewing very much and suspect that her husband does it.
I would not let Mark do it even if he offered. I do not want Matron looking at his stitches and thinking that I am responsible for them, although it might have been useful to be able to blame him for the trouser legs.
Apart from the anguished panic and the sore fingers it was quite pleasant really. I listened to Jilly Cooper on my phone and worked my way through the slowly-diminishing pile, and thought that at least it was indoor work with no heavy lifting.
There was a lot of organising to be done as well. Some of the trainers bought only three weeks ago were troublingly tight when he tried them on again this morning, and had to be packaged up and taken back to the post office, and he had liked the new school dressing gown so much that he had abandoned his tight threadbare home dressing gown and pressed the new one into service straight away.
This was a dispiriting moment, I can tell you.
After all of the fuss and worry and final celebrations about dressing gowns, in the end I did not have a bright new school dressing gown after all. By this morning I had a fast-becoming-worn home dressing gown, ready impregnated with the smell of dog and crisp crumbs and old handkerchiefs in the pockets
I rang Sainsbury’s to ask if they had another.
Just a bit of public service information here. Sainsbury’s do not answer their telephone any more. They play you an infuriating message, which gives you lots of options to press to make you think that they are caringly interested in your problem. When you have pressed them all, they tell you the store opening hours, not to turn up unless you really have to, and hang up.
I rang them four times before I worked out that I ought to press Option Four, for colleagues and contractors only.
This made a gratifying ringing noise and was eventually answered.
The girl on the other end of the phone had so little to do that she actually walked down to the shop floor and then after that around the warehouse. She dug out a dressing gown in the right size and left it on the front desk with my name on the packet.
Mark and Oliver picked it up on their way home from work, which it wasn’t, but I was on the taxi rank by then, still busily sewing labels into things by torchlight, and so they made a helpful detour. They telephoned from Sainsbury’s to ask if it was the right size or if they should get a size bigger, but I had had enough of dressing gowns by then, and was loftily disinterested. I told them that between the two of them they ought to be able to work out if a dressing gown fitted and if they couldn’t it was not my problem. This alarmed them, and so they bought the one I had chosen in the first place, just in case they were in trouble.
Initiative is not always a good thing. It is a good idea to be cautious when your wife is concerned.
In the end I gave up and came home an hour early, and the Peppers dropped in after the dogs were emptied, to help us drink too much.
What would we do without them?
Have a picture of Oliver at work.
