Oliver has departed for the Deep South, and I am alone again.
It feels very wicked even to think how very lovely this is.
It isn’t as if Oliver is any trouble, because he isn’t, not really, but somehow being by myself feels liberating. Actually it probably isn’t because I can’t ever say Could You Just Empty The Dogs? to anybody, and I will have to rescue myself from spiders in the bath and slugs around the kitchen sink.
Actually I had to rescue myself from a spider last night anyway, because Oliver had gone to bed. It has been prowling the bathroom for ages, and I have been looking pensively at it as it crouched in the corner of the ceiling above the cistern. Last night it had somehow managed to plummet into the bath, which led to a short but decisive trip to the garden, so I hope it doesn’t feel too despairing at the loss of its far more upmarket indoor billet.
I watered the garden after that as well, so I hope it had found somewhere to hide.
I have not spotted a single other person out watering their gardens in the dead of night, so I don’t know how all their plants are surviving. It is ages since it has rained, and it looks as though the sunshine is going to carry on for at least another week. It is the nicest August I can remember, and I am enjoying it very much, not least because today was Clean Sheets Day, and they all dried wonderfully well in next to no time.
In fact there was a lot to be done as well as the Clean Sheets, because Oliver had some things to be done before he left, and some maternal support proved necessary.
The Army had sent him a long form to complete which was full of the sort of questions everybody asks these days, like What do you consider your greatest achievement? and What do you think are your strong points and weaknesses?
I am very glad I am old. Nobody ever wanted to hear that sort of embarrassing burble when I was in the job market, which I think probably I am not any more, because of finally accepting my general unemployability. In my day employers more or less stuck to Name, Age, Qualifications, with an occasional small space at the bottom for Hobbies, which seemed to work perfectly well without necessitating an unedifying and intrusive dive into one’s personal thoughts, feelings and ambitions.
Between us we spent ages concocting his various adventures into something acceptably readable, and then went outside to contemplate fixing his car.
His car had an oil leak. It was not engine oil, but gear box oil, and Mark had instructed us that although he would repair the problem on his return, in the meantime we ought to find a way of refilling the oil.
Oliver looked it up on YouTube, and discovered that for some arcane car-designing reason, the hole through which the gear box had to be filled was not on the top of it, where one could handily stick a funnel into it, but on the side, where one could not.
I might have mentioned my opinions about car designers yesterday. Today’s experiences did nothing to improve matters. It is, as I am sure you have already understood, completely impractical to attempt to pour oil sideways, but somebody designed the hole to be on the side anyway.
We had to cut a length of hose with which to fill it.
The hose was too fat to fit into the gear-box hole.
After some consideration, we cut the hose up and taped it into a narrow funnel shape and wedged it in as tightly as it would go, which was not very tightly. Then we found that the other end of the hose was too narrow to stick the oil-funnel into it.
After some considerable oily faffing about we gave up and I brought my gravy jug out of the kitchen. We filled it with gearbox oil and Oliver lay underneath the car jamming the hose into the hole whilst I poured oil carefully down the hose.
It took ages, and you will not be surprised to hear that we were very oily indeed by the time we had finished.
In the end Oliver got on his way, and I rushed around watering the conservatory, sweeping, mopping and re-sheeting the bed. I was not at all sorry to go out to the peace and quiet of the taxi rank.
At the risk of returning to a much-overworn theme, I can tell you that once again I have neither hoovered nor done the ironing.
As we all know, tomorrow is another day.
