On your marks…

We are flat out with the last preparations for Oliver’s departure.

He leaves on Wednesday, and our fingers are sore with sewing.

It is very nice to have Oliver around to help me. We had a very happy afternoon in the little sewing room in the attic, ironing and stitching and chatting and packing things into bags.

He is a bit nervous. I do hope he is all right. He has formed some vague idea that everybody else on the course will be wiser and more experienced and cleverer than he is, which of course is rot, but I can see why it is scary.

Not only is he starting a new course, he is also trying to organise a new job. He is trying to set himself up with some door-supervising menacing work in Bath to start this weekend. This will fund his general living expenses and he can go out and do it instead of going out and drinking.

A lovely thing happened to him this afternoon. His current employer, who used to be our lodger, popped round with an award and a goodbye-present for him, because he was their Employee of the Month. The award was a beautiful pen, engraved with a Latin inscription reminding him to reach for the stars, and he was so pleased he was still beaming half an hour later.

He has put it in the pocket of his blazer and packed it in the case. He is going to go to Norland and take it out with a flourish whenever he is asked to sign something. He has already written his name all over just about everything he could find, if ever he becomes rich and famous I will be able to flog off loads of old Booths receipts to autograph hunters.

It was Clean Sheets Day, but I did not get round to any dusting. The Inland Revenue had finally sent me their magical code numbers, the enchanted keys to the mystical domain of PAYE, and I spent some considerable time trying to fathom out how it was all supposed to work.

I got there in the end, I think, and I have told the Inland Revenue something, although whether it is exactly true I could not say. It might be wrong because my accounting website assured me that the Inland Revenue now owes us one thousand four hundred pounds, which frankly I did not believe, some things are just fairy tales really.

I think I have probably got the numbers right. I have told them exactly how much money we have given ourselves, and they told me in return that they were not going to make any of it disappear, like the leprechaun’s gold, but the Inland Revenue is what my Cambridge tutor used to call an Unreliable Narrator, somebody whom you would like to believe but shouldn’t. I sighed and switched it off, I will have to wait a week or two and see if they send the bailiffs round.

I did get the sheets washed, despite the dusting failure. Getting them dry proved challenging. The day was warm, but very, very wet, the sort where my boots filled up by the time I was halfway around my walk and I was certain that I was developing the early symptoms of trench foot before I finally sloshed back home.

I lit the fire, which made the house drearily steamy, and switched on the dehumidifiers, which made it windy as well, and Oliver and I retreated to the attic to continue sewing and packing.

I was feeling anxious about our progress until poor Number One Daughter telephoned this evening. Ritalin Boy starts at Milton Abbey tomorrow, and when his uniform arrived from Schoolblazer this week, none of it fitted. She is having to send it all back and call Matron to borrow some emergency spare supplies until the new lot turns up, and in the meantime is frantically sewing his name into socks and underwear in time for morning.

I shuddered with sympathetic horror.

Almost all of our sewing is done. There are some trousers to go, and that will be it.

After that we can start loading it all into the cars.

Just one more day.