Gamblers

We have been making investments.

We have invested in some new school trousers and some waterproof expedition kit. We are taking a gamble on Oliver not growing any more before September.

I am not sure that this is a good bet.

We have not finished yet. He needs a new Smart Uniform jersey and an everyday uniform waterproof jacket. These two items will set us back almost a hundred and fifty quid.

School has two sorts of uniform, one sort for ordinary wear and one sort for when the Queen visits. This is all very lovely but makes the whole thing less than economical. Oliver’s Smart Uniform had become so small that he would not have been able to breathe, so it would only have been any good if the Queen was not planning to stay very long.

We have also invested in some contact lenses, because of looking rugged and macho and not like somebody who wears glasses and understands computer language. After that we invested in half a box of wine, which we drank last night between the three of us to help soften the blow.

Oliver helped to drink it. Our days of a relatively low alcohol budget are over. Our last teetotal child has seen the light, and we are now a family of wine-appreciation. We are really good at this. We can appreciate absolutely any old wine, even the stuff in the generic two-colour box from Asda that the label describes simply as Red Wine, presumably to save the purchasers the embarrassment of not being able to pronounce Cabernet Sauvignon. In any case we appreciated it, especially after splashing around in the Lake District summer all day.

Mark has been off work today. He has been loafing about tiling the conservatory whilst I flapped about counting Oliver’s trousers. He is going to fly back from Canada and fly straight to Aberdeen, and so everything for school has got to be ready before he leaves at the end of next week. Obviously it isn’t ready. It is scattered all over the loft and Oliver keeps telling me about new things that he needs and I have not yet organised. We bought him some brilliant school shoes last year, from a retailer who has inconveniently gone broke in the meantime, and so we are going to have to investigate alternatives.

SOME TIME LATER

Goodness, alternatives are expensive. I found one website selling nice black shoes reduced from two hundred quid to sixty. When we read the reviews we discovered that this was because everybody complained that they had been delivered with the soles hanging off.

We thought we might buy some anyway. We have got some good glue.

In other news, I have passed a peaceful evening in the taxi undisturbed by many customers, sewing name labels into trousers and listening to a splendidly savage book written by a journalist called Tom Bower, whose writing I rather like. This one is about the Queen’s grandson Harry and his wife, who you probably know is called Megan. I discovered some time ago, rather to my surprise, that she is actually black, and have squinted curiously at photographs of her ever since to see if I could see where. Really there ought to be some sort of entry qualification for being black, to save people like me from being accidentally racist. This is because I think that I do not like her at all, because she has upset Prince Charles, who is after all an ex-Gordonstounian, and nice cheerful Prince William. Now it turns out she is black we are not allowed to think she is a villain.

The book is rather a satisfying hatchet job. I have not kept up with their comings and goings in and out of the Royal Family, and so it has been interesting all the way through, what rotters the author seems to think that they are.

It has kept me intrigued and horrified, it has been better than the Archers even at their most scandalous. I finished it just before I came home, and am really rather sorry. I am going to find some other gossipy drivel to occupy my evenings.

Maybe one of Piers Morgan’s books. I like those as well.