Holidays are Allowed
Just because you only work three hours a day - at home, what’s more - it doesn’t mean you don’t get to have holidays. Holidays are Allowed. Sometimes they are Enforced. I am in the middle of a stop-go holiday that threatens to take all February. The cause is Kids.
First there was the snow. There wasn’t very much of it, by some standards, but there was more than Gloucestershire was equipped to cope with. Roads blocked, ice formed, cars skidded - and schools closed. Even the gritty headmaster of no. 2 child’s school was forced to close in the end. He was about the last head standing in all of the county. (I have this mental image of him going down at the salute while he and his school were gently buried in drifts of - well, not of snow, but of e-mails from parents and teachers alike saying Sorry, they were not going to make it today Because.) And now the snow has melted, it’s half term. So for much of the last three weeks I have been sharing my workspace with two young teenagers for whom entertainment these days is only entertainment if it comes through a screen(1). Family policy is no computers in bedrooms. They stay in the shared spaces where we can all at least be a part of what each other is doing. And there are just two computers. And there are three of us.
In theory this is simple. The order of precedence is Work, Homework, Communication and then Goofing Off. So if I’m working I get one and the kids can rip each other’s eyeballs out about who gets the other. In practice - well, the truth is I’ve become spoiled. There was a time when I could work away in a busy office whatever the chatter around me. I would then come home and write a few pages of novel in the fifteen minutes while Pippa was in the bath or whatever. I could do it then, because that was the only way I was going to get it done. Now I’m used to empty rooms, a quiet lane outside and hours of time for Deep Thought. The very presence of others in the house is enough to distract me. Ten times more so if I know that soon I’ll be getting another tirade about how unreasonable the sibling is being. It makes me tremble to the very core of my sensitive writer’s soul. Oh, for a hut at the bottom of the garden - and I’m going to move the boiler down there too.
But aha! An opportunity! Older teenager has organised with friends to take the day out. The forces of Hades are halved at a stroke. All that remains is to neutralise the younger. And I think of the bathrooms, and a slow smile spreads across my face. The bathrooms, yes, yes. The surfaces are coated with hairs and soap scum, the toilets are - well, let’s not be too explicit. Get him started on that and I’ll be at peace for hours! With a parents’ cunning, I stalk and pounce. Negotiations. A threat. A bribe. The deal is done. Off he goes. And I can settle with a sigh, fingers poised over the keyboard, mind beginning to fumble for whatever it was I had planned to get done this week. I’m between manuscripts, aren’t I? So it must be…
Door opens. He’s back, willing but implacable.
“How do I clean a bathroom?”
Another sigh, but not of contentment. The Holiday continues.
(1) Books are an honourable exception. The thing about a book is that you can read a few pages and then go back to whoever’s hogging the screen and complain that they are hogging the screen. Somehow this makes the next few pages that bit more satisfying.