Normally, I like a dark sky. There’s something very exciting about an eerie light behind the clouds, and the promise of lots of lovely rain.
But I have to say that yellow skies make me feel a bit sick. And as the sky got weirder and weirder on Monday afternoon, I kept going to take my sunglasses off, only to discover I wasn’t wearing any. It was a mighty odd atmosphere indeed.
What was it all about? Was the world breaking up into small chunks? Maybe the sun was melting? Or had Donald Trump finally lost the plot completely, and started nuking everyone? I feared the worst.
This doom-laden sky was timely. Gone was the enthusiasm of last week’s post regarding the milestone of waterproofing the roof with Vegas Rubber. Moments after I published that fate-tempting nugget, Roofer Rik was the harbinger of bad news as he approached The Shed with caution and hit me with it: the rubber they’d sent was the wrong size.
Oh dear.
So our flat roof remains tarpaulined up tightly, and the rain that I usually welcome isn’t lovely after all.
Then I started thinking; this yellow light in the sky could be responsible for Boy Seymour’s current lunacy. Perhaps he is sensitive to atmospherical pressures and is a human barometer… I wonder if he knew such weather was coming? Can I can blame his crazy jerking, squealing and total inability to follow instructions, on the sky? That would be a relief. Because quite franky, last week, I was beginning to think he was just plain feral.
He has been better this week. He dragged me over to his teacher on Yellow Monday so that she could tell me he’d improved. He was so proud! And just last night, he was invested into Cubs, and is now religiously learning his promise. I keep trying to point out that goading sisters does not come under anything that promise endorses, but he’s very good at segmenting his activities. If he’s sister goading, he’s not being a Cub at that particular moment. It seems that he’s prepared to forsake any promise he has made in favour of the thrill of whatever is more exciting at the time. This is a terrifying admission on my part, and I can only hope he calms down a bit before he is old enough to drive cars, drink booze or control his own finances.
Today, at the Harvest Festival service, Boy Seymour read aloud in church beautifully. But I am now slightly ashamed of the harvest gifts he took with him. I sent Little Seymour Number Two with a jar of sauce, Mini Seymour had some tea bags and all Boy had to carry was a packet of pizza base mix. Just your usual array of offerings when perishables are not allowed.
I followed Boy Seymour’s class into the church. I watched as they all clutched their donations. And there, in my son’s hand, was the packet of pizza base mix, puffing little white floury jets of its contents at the congregation as he squished and squeezed it into his chest to the beat of his wonky gait. What is probably more embarrassing is that, next to the pizza base mix, nestled in his eternally grubby mitts were three small carrots, accidentally unearthed from Mini Seymour’s school bag at the most inopportune moment, and scooped up by him alongside his packet of pizza base. These carrots were three weeks old! They had been rolling around in Mini’s bag since she scavenged them from the healthy snack pot in her classroom one day back in September, and brought them home for her poor, deprived, shed-dwelling siblings.
Oops.
Rather than retrieve the carrots, I decided to ignore them. After all, despite being perishable contraband, they are more harvesty than a packet of Heinz Creationz. Or an open packet of bloody pizza base mix.
Harvest Festival is like everything else, it seems, when the best laid plans always seem to go awry. But isn’t that just life in general?
The good news is, though, that Donald Trump has not yet decided to end the Earth. Yellow Monday was merely the product of Saharan sand and Hurricane Ophelia. Phew! Still, I can’t help but feel that it might also have been some kind of reminder from above that un-rubbered rooves, rotten carrots and naughty little boys are all part and parcel of everyday life, and to look at the bigger picture. Let’s face it, if the sky fell in, we’d all be in real trouble.
From now on, I’ll be counting my blessings. Ratbags and all.
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