Family matters

Mark has dismantled his taxi and built a new one out of the bits.

At least, that is what I think he must have been doing, it has taken him ages. He has been lying outside underneath it all day complaining a lot and coming back inside covered in oil and bits of gravel and leaving spanners on the doormat.

I think it might be possible that I am probably not the most tolerant of partners at times. I was without sympathy for his woes and quite vociferous on the topic of my own. Mine were mostly related to the issues of childcare with which I was becoming newly reacquainted.

It started with breakfasts. Boarding schools are not good for your children in this department, they encourage unrealistic expectations which you don’t have a hope in hell of fulfilling when they get home. Lucy explained that she likes two eggs and sausage and beans for hers. I didn’t feel I could quite run to that, but managed some chocolate spread on toast. I couldn’t run to scrambled egg, kippers and porridge for Oliver either, so he settled for a different sort of chocolate spread, on sandwiches with the crusts cut off, and yoghurt and apple juice.

I was quite pleased about this, it was the sort of thing that wouldn’t be too damningly embarrassing if other people knew about it, having at least some things in it which could qualify as nutritious, at a push. It was also a useful chance to get the yoghurt used up on somebody who wouldn’t bother about the sell by date, and also the birds like the crusts, which I chucked out into the garden along with the last slice from the old loaf which had dried up. They fought like mad over the bits with traces of chocolate spread on them, and ignored the unadorned Morrisons White Sliced. I didn’t blame them for that. We get it because Lucy likes it and it is ghastly, like eating a well salted slice of that stuff that they put in cheap pillows in youth hostels.

After that it was luggage and ironing. I have started boiling sheets and towels and shirts, to try and get rid of the various nasty stains. I think Oliver must skip the water and soap bit of his school shower and just wipe the grime off on the towel: and Lucy may have been going to bed in her wellies. Halfway through the process I got an e-mail from a parent at Oliver’s school, asking me if I had found one of her son’s towels and explaining that her son had got one of Oliver’s. She volunteered to wash it, kindly, without adding ‘because it is filthy and smells vile’: which I thought was very civilised of her.

There was a revolting facecloth, which appeared to have been thoroughly soaked and then wrapped around a bar of soap and then trodden on and left in a plastic bag for a fortnight: and about a hundred pairs of tights, all knotted together in the manner of an escape rope, and some of which had other people’s names sewn on to them, and a miscellaneous collection of underwear with malfunctioning elastic in need of replacing. Oliver has decided that he wants a different style of underpants (boxer shorts are the rage at school) which will be a complete pain because he will need about fifteen pairs and I will have to sew a name tag in every single one. However it appears that it is very unreasonable of me, having bought the wrong style of underpants in the first place, to force him into the daily humiliation of wearing them, when everybody knows that only girls wear underwear which isn’t boxer shorts: and some times arguments are just too wearing.

Lucy hung about the kitchen for a while, correcting my pronunciation (having started life in Oldham I have never got to grips with the acceptable way of enunciating: ‘bath’ and ‘grass’, much to her merriment) and Oliver settled down at the  table to do his prep, he has to do daily handwriting practice. He does it without (much) complaint, but despite having forty tonnes of luggage with them it appeared that they had both left all their pencils at school and it took ages of hunting around to find one in my office because Mark takes them out to his shed and hides them.

After that they both wanted lunch, and were astonished when I made them sausages and fruit and bread and butter, because they had that yesterday, and it is clearly unthinkable that one might eat the same lunch two days’ running, honestly, and in the end Harry came round to play Zombie Nightmare Massacre on the computer and I left them all to it and went to work.

Work was full of abusive drunk people taking drugs, it was an absolute doddle. I am going to go earlier tomorrow.