the first sick day

Poor Avery. I picked her up at school yes­ter­day, after feel­ing rather off-colour, as they say, myself all day, sort of sore-throaty, and the poor thing was pos­i­tive­ly grey. Which is much worse than “gray”. I was chat­ting with anoth­er moth­er and she just hung there till I final­ly looked at her prop­er­ly and felt quite sure that all was not well. We walked along to get a snack. I’m sor­ry to con­fess we went to Star­bucks. “Miss Clarke was so sweet,” she said as we trudged along. Miss Clarke is a most mag­nif­i­cent, gen­tle, age­less per­son about whom every­one you men­tion King’s Col­lege to says, “Oh, is Miss Clarke still there?” A per­son shaped sort of like a jack­et pota­to as they call baked pota­toes here, and sol­id and kind­ly but severe. It did­n’t real­ly sur­prise me that she had tak­en a sick Avery under her capa­cious wing. “She told me just to go ahead and lie down,” Avery relayed, and I said, “Oh, is there an infir­mary and a nurse?” with pic­tures of old board­ing-school nov­els I have read pass­ing through my mind. “Well, no, actu­al­ly, the King’s Col­lege ver­sion of lying down is sort of putting your head down on your desk.” Oh.

So she ate an enor­mous piece of choco­late cake and had hot choco­late and I was telling myself she was just tired, but when I came back from get­ting my pep­per­mint tea put into a cup to take away, she was lying on the cush­iony chair look­ing like I don’t know what, some­thing one of the cats dragged in, if they were in a posi­tion to drag things in. We went home and both of us felt sort of pathet­ic, so I put the chick­en in the oven to roast, wrapped in streaky bacon, lying on a bed of rose­mary (does­n’t that sound like part of that poem, “The Lady of Shalott”) and we had hot water bot­tles on our feet and read our books with a purring Tacy. Avery slept for a bit as the dusk turned into dark in our gar­den and when she woke up she was hot as any­thing. John came in short­ly after and I sent him straight­away back out for some med­i­cine, which she downed with con­sid­er­able dra­ma, shiv­er­ing and buck­ing. John and I sat down to din­ner, but it was­n’t very yum­my with poor Avery lying dog­go on the sofa across the room. We repaired to our beds and I’m glad to report she slept through the night and today is very, very thirsty but cheer­ful. John went off to a pre­sen­ta­tion in front of the CEO, the CFO and just about every­one in the civ­i­lized world, quite calm I thought. I hope it goes well.

Our new sheets are odd. Not enough elas­tic, so they sort of migrate around the bed. I shall put them in the wash­er and hope more elas­tic appears. The sizes just made me laugh. I must get some­one offi­cial to put me in the pic­ture about how they size things, because the Marks and Sparks lady seemed utter­ly bemused by my ques­tions. First of all, Avery has what I would call a dou­ble bed. That is, between a twin and a queen, right? Well, here they seem to call that a sin­gle, but the sheets are mea­sured in feet and inch­es. Hmm, could you say right off
the bat how many feet and inch­es make up a dou­ble, sor­ry, sin­gle bed? I could­n’t. But it turns out to be 4 feet, six inch­es. Or maybe cen­time­ters. I have no idea. Then what we call queen is called king here! Or rather, it’s labeled “5 feet” but it’s called “king” by the salesla­dy. Then they have a “queen” size that’s labeled “6 feet.”

Now. Do you sup­pose this des­ig­na­tion shifts with the reign­ing monarch? That is, if it’s King Edward, the largest size sheet is a King? But now that it’s Queen Eliz­a­beth the largest size is a Queen? I could not say, but in this cul­ture gov­erned at turns by his­to­ry and by whim­sey, it’s entire­ly pos­si­ble. TGIF.

And Hap­py Birth­day to my niece, Baby Jane! I won­der how she’s
doing… We gave her a real­ly cute boxed set of four of the Bram­b­ley Hedge books by Jill Barklem, a tru­ly dar­ling series of books about voles, field mice and oth­er peo­ple who live in Eng­lish hedges and fall in love and find secret cup­boards and such. Plus at the gro­cery store I found a box of baby-sized gin­ger­bread men, and a jar of some­thing called “puree of William Christ pear” which sound­ed so Eng­lish I could­n’t resist. I hope she has a great day. Lots of love from Lon­don, Jane. We miss you.