I am sitting on the taxi rank feeling gritty-eyed and grim, but I am here.
We have managed it.
We worked last night, crawled out of bed two hours after we got into it, and made it to York in time for Speech Day.
We weren’t late, or scruffy, or embarrassing, at least not more than we usually are.
We managed to pass ourselves off as middle class, in a gathering of real middle class people, and we don’t think that anybody noticed.
Obviously they didn’t, because one of the things that you find out as you get older is that actually nobody is looking. Everybody is far too busy worrying about their own shoes and nail varnish to notice yours.
When we arrived at school there were already hundreds and hundreds of very shiny four by four monsters sitting squarely on the vast school lawns soaking up sunshine, but by great good fortune we discovered a pleasantly comfortable parking place in the shade under the trees outside Lucy’s boarding house. This was a fortunate chance of fate, because of Oliver and the dogs, who of course had to be abandoned in the car.
Nan and Grandad appeared a few minutes later, and once the dogs had had a few minutes to charge about barking at people, we shoved them back into the car with Oliver and ambled off to sit in the hot tent being inspired.
We sat with my friend Annie, with whom I never get nearly enough opportunity to talk at these events. She is every bit as interesting as the Motivational Speakers who turn up to stand on the platform and issue us with our annual reminder never to give up on our Efforts, even though people might be laughing at us.
I am sure that this is sound advice but I would still have liked to have heard more about Annie’s son and his progress through his current crisis of career indecision.
It was not to be, however, and we listened and clapped politely and enjoyed the beautiful long-legged sixth formers striding gracefully across the school platform for the last time, to shake everybody’s hands and graduate to become officially Old Margaretians. This is always peculiarly moving, and it won’t be very long now before it is Lucy.
We were reunited with Lucy after the speeches, and although we were very tempted by the opportunity to spend the afternoon hanging about drinking Pimms on the lawn and looking at the art exhibition, we didn’t. We rescued Oliver and the dogs and went to the pub to eat.
We loitered about for ages in the pub, eating far more than turned out to be comfortable on the journey home afterwards, and laughing and enjoying one another’s company: but of course work was calling, and we had got to practice self discipline.
Fortunately Mark is better at that than I am.
He drove us home, eyes stinging, but grimly open, whilst I half-dozed in the front seat beside him.
The journey seemed to take for ever.
When we got home we left the children in charge of dogs and unpacking. Mark and I stampeded up the stairs and collapsed gratefully in to bed.
Two hours later we had the unpleasant experience of getting up after not nearly enough sleep again.
I am at work now, and in just a very few more hours it will be over. We will have managed it.
The picture is Lucy’s school uniform, which we found in an abandoned heap when we got up. She will never have to wear it again. When she goes back next term she will be in the sixth form, and quite grown up. We will only be going to two more Speech Days at Queen Margaret’s.
They are wonderful, civilised, happy days. I love going, love being a part of it all. It will be unspeakably sad for it all to be over for ever.
All the same, there is a part of me that will be relieved.
