When I checked my e-mail this morning there was a photograph of a wet-looking Oliver with a sparkler at the school’s bonfire night.
This was a lovely surprise. Of course we can’t ever make it to that sort of event because they always happen at weekends when we are at work. If we were to spend our weekends floating around the touchlines of Under Eleven rugby matches or waving sparklers about and making social chat with other financially over-extended parents we would never manage to raise the cash for the fees in the first place: so we don’t go.
Tiresomely, this means that when we do go to school events, which are all wonderfully social and friendly, we never know anybody and have to stand at the side of the room smiling vaguely at everybody chatting to the friends they made at B Team cricket matches and trying not to look like wallflowers.
However at last night’s bonfire a kind mother had noticed that Oliver was unencumbered by parents, and had very thoughtfully taken a picture of him and e-mailed it so that I would know he was having a nice time, which I thought was a very generous thing to do. I was especially impressed because it looked as though she had got the right boy and everything: I can never match the boys in Oliver’s class to the correct parents, even when they are all there, they all seem to be semi-identical small wiry dynamos with floppy hair and engaging grins, the boys, not the parents, obviously, who tend to be tall and beautifully polished and elegant. Still less can I remember boys’ names, and if they were charging about in a crowd, especially in Bonfire-Night darkness, I would not even put money on me reliably being able to pick out Oliver.
Of course we scrutinised the picture carefully for signs of well-being and contentment, and satisfied ourselves that he seemed to be in rosy good health, which was a nice reassuring start to the day. We have actually heard from him since he went back, there was a phone call to inform us that he needed his Lego police van and helicopter posting to him urgently, so we knew that he was not dead, but it was lovely to have some actual photographic evidence.
After that Mark took the dogs for a very wet and brief emptying in the Library Gardens, and we got ready for work.
Once the summer is over we only really need to work in the afternoon on Sundays, because everybody has gone home by tea time, so we thought we would have a half-holiday.
We worked until just after dark, and then had the unaccustomed pleasure of a whole empty evening in front of us. We had to go for a swim, of course, on account of the taxi-driving fat and lazy problem, but after that the night was our own, and we had a DVD that we have been saving for ages.
We have not actually managed to get round to watching anything since about May, due to the summer and other adventures, so it was lovely to do something so completely decadent. Mark made some pasta and bread, and we had a glass of wine and watched a film called The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, which had just about all our most-admired actors in it.
The story was the sequel to a film we watched a few years ago, which was a nice film although confusingly unlike the book. I couldn’t at all remember what had happened in the first one, and so didn’t entirely follow the plot, but it wasn’t important, because it was filmed in lots of places in India that we had visited, and so of course we loved it, because of the memories it evoked: but also because of the glitter and the sparkle and the music and the happiness of it all, so in the end the plot didn’t seem to matter in the least.
We had an ace evening, curled up lazily with the dogs, and remembering Indian adventures and eating pasta. We have been idle hedonists for the night and it was splendid.
Happy Sunday.
