Once again it has got very late before I have managed to make a start on your daily update on adventures at Ibbetson Towers.
This is not because nothing of note is happening, but because I still have lots of new taxi-driving friends, all congregating anxiously to discuss the wickedness of Uber drivers.
I do not like Uber drivers more than anybody else, especially ones with illegal licence plates, but I am sanguine. It will all work itself out in the end. These things usually do.
In fact I have been so busily occupied with my own domestic adventures that I have hardly given the villainy of Uber a thought today. We have an interesting philosophical difficulty arising at home, and the outcome is not quite certain even as I write.
It is that Oliver thinks that he might like to leave Norland and join the Army.
This conundrum has been much discussed both today and yesterday, and it is looking increasingly likely that he will do it.
There are all sorts of reasons for this alteration in his career trajectory. It is not that there is one big difficulty that he finds insurmountable, but that there are all sorts of small things adding up. He has liked much of Norland, he has enjoyed doing things with the children, but as time has gone on he has found himself wishing more and more that he had pursued his application to the Army, and wondered, a little wistfully, what would have happened if he had.
He has drifted into reading books written by ex-squaddies, listening to podcasts by ex-squaddies, watching films about squaddies, and we have all detected a certain theme. His girlfriend has been very patient about his entertainment choices, but they do not seem to be fading away.
He has been thinking about it longingly for some time, and finally said it aloud the other day.
I was, of course, very interested.
He made some unsuccessful approaches to the Army when he left school, but without much success, largely because he is too thin. This is not a problem from which I have ever suffered, and so I am not certain that I can help to provide any constructive solutions.
He has got to gain ten kilos before they will accept him. That is a stone and a half. We discussed this on the taxi rank and concluded that his best course of action might be to get himself a taxi licence, since it has worked very nicely for all of us to increase our own portliness.
Probably Oliver will not take this option, as I think he would prefer his ten kilos to be muscle, not flab, obviously.
No final decision has yet been reached, but he has proposed that he apply to Norland for a year’s deferral of his degree, and to occupy the intervening time in becoming increasingly stout and muscular and entering into negotiations with the Army.
I have got mixed sentiments about this, but am rather ashamed to report that chief amongst them is a creeping excitement to think that we might not have to be forking out massive lumps of cash for his education for any longer. Obviously we don’t mind this, but I could not even begin to calculate the colossal fortune that we have coughed up in order to preserve him from becoming an ignoramus, and the prospect of ceasing this endless outpouring is beguiling.
We could do all sorts of exciting things with the fifteen thousand pounds that Norland is costing us every year.
Nothing is definite yet and so I am trying not to think about it.
All the same, it is rather a breathtaking possibility. We might not be eternally flat broke any more.
I am not going to let myself imagine it.
Not yet.
It is two o’clock in the morning.
I am going to bed.
