WEEKEND COLUMNISTS What is happening in Armenia? No, I don’t need an answer, I listen to Radio 4 every day so I am fully briefed on protests in Armenia just as I am on the gubernatorial race in Texas and which butterflies have recently become extinct in England. Just as well, since Armenia was the first question of the day from Cost Centre #2 last week when I took him to catch the school bus.
We are now a dayboy house. This might be the norm for most families, but given my previous habit of outsourcing the cost centres to boarding school almost as soon as they could walk, it is a big culture shock, and not just because I have to answer questions on Armenia. (CC#3 catches the bus from down the road and on a nice day walks to school, so I don’t have to cope with his interrogations which are at any rate much less challenging and more to do with the Premier League, about which, I might add, I know even less than I do about Armenia.)
Readers have written in and asked how the CCs (or the Reduced CCs) are getting on in their new schools. Very well, thank you, which is more than can be said for me. CC#2 recently turned 15, inconveniently on a Wednesday. When children are at boarding school, midweek birthdays are easy. Send a card, and then a text and an e-mail, book a birthday cake to be delivered at tea, and plan something special for the following weekend. I was not prepared for a day school child’s midweek birthday.
For a start, I managed to book CC#2’s latest orthodontic appointment on his birthday. So on the day he turned 15 he spent half an hour or so in a surgery in Oxford having his teeth photographed and impressions taken ready for the braces that will be in place by Christmas. Personally, I don’t think that CC#2 needs braces, but he disagrees. And while it might have been an administrative error, once I learned how much they were going to cost I thought that his braces would serve very well as a birthday present – and Christmas present, and next year’s birthday and so on for at least five years.
But then I realised that he would not be home until quite late and I too would only just have got home – with no energy for birthday celebrations. So I called on the services of my Medical Girlfriend, who has never sent any of her three children to boarding school and who lives in Oxford, handily near the orthodontist. Could I, I begged in an e-mail, outsource the birthday to her?
MG came to the rescue. She provided pizza, salad, cake, beer and wine (these last needed for Mr M, who had learned by e-mail at the 11th hour that he had to drive to Oxford for the evening), and above all the company of her soon-to-be 15-year-old daughter. This girl shows great promise – “I have given CC#2 a birthday present,” she announced. “I have given him my telephone number.”
It was probably the best birthday present a 15-year-old boy could hope for, although I am sure her mother would have an opinion on any fraternisation. I vividly remember when we were a lot, lot younger and MG had her home and her practice in a leafy street in London SW3 at the time. We both had one son. Hers had a large playroom with a well-stocked toy cupboard that my CC#1 used to trash until he was banned by MG from going round there to play. I have counselled CC#2 not to make a mess anywhere or he may suffer the same fate.
Birthdays aside, it is very handy having a teenaged son at home. He has turned his hand to tasks as varied as helping me rehearse for my radio telephony exam (“Golf Oscar November,” intoned the newly lowered voice over the kitchen table, “pass your message”) and changing the sheets. “Mum,” he said as we struggled with the duvet cover late one evening, “what is it like to be married for more than 20 years?” I think we’ll stick to Armenia.
