I have made the shocking oversight of forgetting one of the Peppers’ birthdays.
This was awful of me, most especially since we are using our new Christmas present heater practically the whole time.
I was so pleased to think that Christmas and all of its attendant fuss was over that despite knowing about the birthday, I never gave it a thought. In my head the season for parties and roistering jollity has completely finished, given that if the BBC is to be believed, New Year has very probably been cancelled.
You can’t always believe the BBC these days, especially when it comes to the weather forecast.
If New Year is cancelled, perhaps this means that we won’t have a 2021 but that 2020 just carries on for ever.
This has in itself created a whole new flurry of little anxieties. Lucy is supposed to be coming back home again on Thursday. She has a whole glorious fortnight of annual leave booked and is going to come and settle back into her newly painted bedroom nest until Oliver goes back to school.
If she comes.
If Oliver goes back to school.
It does not seem so very long ago since the Government was making such a fuss about schools that you were fined a hundred and twenty quid if you sloped off for your half term holiday a day early. Today’s youth are going to be fortunate if they can spell ‘education’, never mind benefit from one.
I am hoping and hoping that the Government will just decide to vaccinate teachers, and then this whole school problem will be over. No matter what else happens during this whole horrible performance, if education carries on, the rest is bearable.
I mean properly carries on, with sports and dance and friendships and comradeliness.
I am hoping with my whole soul that he is allowed to go back to school.
Even if he is, we have now been told that he has got to be tested for bat flu before he is allowed to go. I am not impressed with this, partly because it does not sound as if the tests always work very well, and so the result that you get is only marginally more effective than tossing a coin, but also I am depressed to think that he is going to become a statistic on the Government’s gloomy roll-call of bat-flu guilty verdicts.
Obviously I do not think he is likely to be found guilty, he is hardly likely to catch bat flu from his computer, and he has not been anywhere else lately. He has been adventuring through the cyber-universe with his dorm mates. They are all over the world, but their voices are inside Oliver’s computer, and he has been bouncing with happy sociability, without even needing to get dressed.
He is more likely to catch something nasty from his dressing gown, and I have issued an edict that it is to be scraped off and washed tomorrow.
I tried to book a test for him today. This was tiresome and a bit intrusive. It included all sorts of unexpected questions, like whether or not we were gypsies, or if we worked for the NHS. It took ages, and after half an hour of squinting at it and wondering if there were any answers that might accidentally get me arrested, or charged two hundred quid, in the end it wouldn’t let me book a test anyway because you can’t book them two weeks in advance.
I do not understand why this might be, presumably the same number of people are going to want a test no matter when they are booked, it seems to just be another way of keeping a bored population hanging on the edge of their seats. I suppose any cliffhanger is something of an exciting proposition in these times of domestic tedium, and now I have got one. I can now worry for the next fortnight about whether I will remember to book him a test a the very last minute before we have to set off for Scotland.
I loathe doing things at the last minute.
I blame the government.
I am going to see if the Peppers will forgive me.
Have a picture of guilt.
