I Drive a Steamroller

It’s been a busy few weeks here. Honestly though, when is it ever not? Jason was talking to some old friends of ours last week and when I asked how they were, he said: ‘Their life is so calm. They just pootle along.’ We looked at each other wistfully. I said: ‘I can’t remember when our life was ever calm.’ He nodded. We have pootle envy.

I have been wrangling parents from afar for the last few weeks. There has been wet room shenanigans, which involved me having to call the builders of my parents’ house to find out if a particular wall is load bearing. When I got through to the lady in customer care and asked my question, she announced that she couldn’t tell me if the wall was load bearing or not because of GDPR. I asked her what she thought I was going to do with the information to which there was a small pause in which I decided to be kind and left the thoughts of David Shrigley and his steamroller in my head and not in my mouth.

I was less kind to the GP surgery where my parents and anyone else with five minutes to spare have been trying to organise getting them a Covid jab for over six weeks now. After we had run out of people to call, ask and plead with I lost my temper and complained to the practice manager. This in itself took a long time because God forbid that the surgery provide any way to contact them that doesn’t involve AI and hanging up on you if you so much as sniff another human being. Apparently my complaint is being dealt with. It had better be.

Oscar has been going through some things lately and as a result my attention at home has been fixated on sad teens rather than bereft pensioners. I have driven hundreds of miles in the last week taking him to auditions and moving him into student accommodation for his last term.

Last Friday he needed to be in Oxford for an audition. The estimated three hour journey took five. Thankfully I like to be early and plan for lunch, which meant we did get there on time, even though there was no time for lunch. The audition took four hours so I scooted off to explore my old stomping ground.

I failed my Masters at Oxford Brookes in the mid-Nineties. It was a turbulent time. Not only did I fail my masters, I broke off an engagement a week before the wedding and met the man who would eventually become my first husband and father to my girls. There are a lot of ghosts there and I bumped into a fair few of them, even though I was not in Oxford proper. The audition was about three miles outside Woodstock, near Blenheim Palace, so I slunk off to Woodstock to see what was happening.

What was happening was that it had changed very little in the thirty years since I was last there. I parked my car, rounded the corner onto the high street and came face to face with the place I spent my first wedding night. It’s a hotel called The Bear, it was and probably still is very old school and fancy. Our stay was a wedding present from my husband’s uncle. As with many things related to my first marriage not everything was as it seemed, because the next day when we checked out we were presented with the bill, which the uncle had forgotten to pay. We didn’t have the money for such a fancy establishment and six months of financial aggravation followed which dampened the mood somewhat. I know we never paid. I wonder if his uncle finally did? I didn’t go in and check in case they recognised me and whipped out an invoice.

The first of many duck harassment incidents.

Woodstock is very beautiful and well worth a visit if it isn’t haunted by your past wildness. I killed a couple of hours poking round charity shops, buying books and eating a very good cardamom bun. I was going to sit on a bench in the sunshine and read my book but gangs of feral ducks roam the streets and gather if you so much as sound like you’re opening a sandwich, so I drove back to the drama school and had a nap before driving the boy home again.

At the beginning of this week I girded my loins and set off to move him from Elephant and Castle to Camberwell. These two places are not very far away from each other but the route between them is very stressful when your car is full of stuff, you can’t see out the back window and your teenage son is not very good at defining exactly what it is you should ‘look out’ for. It is also very stressful when the building administrator has forgotten to come in to work and administer the building, leaving you with a confused cleaner doing her best to sort you out, but who then puts you in the wrong room, which you only find out the following day.

I got him into ‘a’ room, which we then promptly abandoned and wandered into Camberwell proper to find lunch. After decent Japanese food and a large ice cream each we were feeling much more the thing.

We greeted the cat ruler of Camberwell outside Lidl, where I did the mum needful by filling his cupboards. I also bought him some clothes that don’t look like a dog had chewed them and put money in his bank account before I headed home again.

He got offered a place at the last two drama schools he applied for, including Oxford, which made all the aggravation worthwhile and has meant I can dial down the worry a few notches for now.

At home we have been getting to grips with some house things. We bought two, cheap cupboards from eBay and installed them in the utility room. They’re not gorgeous and if you breathe on them too hard they will disintegrate, but they make the room workable and get rid of bigger problems elsewhere.

I have emptied my studio space of all the things that got flung in there when the garage leaked and was full of mice. I also emptied out four million woodlice and some spiders. I took down a lot of my drawings that were on the walls because they kept blowing off every time you opened a window. We have fitted a blind, which means I can work in there without cooking, which means it is usable for the first time since we moved in. I am still figuring out where everything goes so picture will follow when I’m happier with the space.

We bought some plants and tools and made a tentative start on the garden. It will be a slow process, largely because after a couple of hours my hip clicked out of place and I spent several days limping and visiting the osteopath. The universe keeps on reminding me how much I hate gardening and I will keep ignoring it.

We have also bought a stair runner and all the fixings for phase one of getting rid of the cheap grey carpet which is so thin the gripper rod pushes through and lacerates your toes. Now we are resting on our laurels because we need to figure out how to actually fit it. Despite the lack of carpet action proper, it felt good to tick a few things off the list of home improvements.

In less errand based news, I went for a delightful walk on Camber Sands one evening with my friend Claire, her husband and her two, daft dogs. We had a good dinner at The Owl pub afterwards to reward our efforts. All their seafood is provided by local fishermen. I had wild sea bass with mussels and it was great.

I also managed to sneak a day off to go and see Les Liaisons Dangereuses at the National with Oscar and one of my oldest friends. Aidan Turner and Lesley Manville were exceptional and it was staged really thoughtfully. I was sad that they had decided against Eighteenth Century costume because who wouldn’t want to see Aidan Turner in knee breeches, but he still put on a good smoulder in a well fitting tux. He’s had a lot of practice recently what with Rivals season two back on Disney.

What I’m Reading:

I read Happy All the Time by Laurie Colwin. Perfect. No notes.

I listened to the audiobook of Ten Steps to Nanette by Hannah Gadsby which was perfect too.

I also read My Autobiography of Carson McCullers by Jenn Shapland which was very thought provoking on the subject of writing memoir and gave me a lot to think about.

What I’m Watching:

Rivals - nuff said.