A Mother’s Joy, Sort Of

I didn’t mean for it to be, but this has turned out to be a complicated post.  Skip to the end if you can’t face reading the whole thing, where I will leave a summary.

Peterborough This Week (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Tory Boy is home!

He was here for four days over Christmas – the first time in six years that he didn’t have to work on Christmas Eve and Boxing Day, and he’s only 22.  He had to go back to Peterborough to work double shifts over New Year, having swapped with colleagues of a similar age who like to party and who all live close enough to work to be able to go home for Christmas without missing a shift.

We did phone Tory Boy at midnight on New Year’s Eve but he was fast asleep, and had been since nine.  Bless.  They work them hard in TV but they are generous with their leave – TB and two other employees, who will all have been there only eight months at financial year’s end, were each given a full complement of leave instead of pro rata.  All leave must be used up by year-end. Year-end is 31 March.

Tory Boy is home now for ten days  – only four of which are actual leave.  He works twelve-hour shifts in blocks of three and four days, so he booked four days off between two three-day blocks of not working.  He often works overtime on his days off because what else is there to do in Peterborough?

French Fancies (Photo credit: lilivanili)

Spud’s seventeenth birthday is coming up next week.  Tory Boy wanted to surprise him so he didn’t tell Spud he was coming home. Because he knew he’d be back soon, Tory Boy didn’t  take some of his Christmas goodies back with him.  I walked in on Spud polishing off the French Fancies from TB’s stocking.  When I scolded him for stealing his brother’s treats, he argued that TB wouldn’t be home for months and they’d have gone stale and had to be thrown away, and there were starving children in Africa so he had to eat them; it was his moral obligation.  I had to concede the point.  

I’ll instruct Tory Boy to deduct the value of the French Fancies from Spud’s birthday present, though I doubt that he will: he already bought it in the Boxing Day sales because Spud looked at Tory Boy with his little-brother-adores-big-brother-and-won’t-you-please-buy-this-game-for-me-because-you-are-such-a-brilliant-big-brother? eyes.  Spud scores again.

Tory Boy arrived home Monday and asked me to wake him by seven a.m. Tuesday.  I woke him; he got up and then slept on the couch for five hours, cuddling the dog.  He went to see a friend in the afternoon, came home around three, went straight to bed and slept right through last night.  He didn’t hear us enter his room to check on him, or feel my frantic hands checking his temperature (high).  We woke him to insist he take paracetamol but he went right back to sleep.  He did get through two bottles of water and he’s been up to the loo, so I’m not panicking just yet (give it time).  

Bless!

They work them hard in TV production and I think he’s just exhausted.  It’s genetic: my younger brother and I have a similar habit of overdoing things and then taking to our beds to recover.

Thankfully, with the way his shifts work, Tory Boy gets most of February off. His girlfriend gets the benefit of that leave; he won’t have seen her since the beginning of January.  I hope she doesn’t tire him out.  Girlfriends don’t look after clingy mothers’ sons the way clingy mothers do.

Summary:

• Beloved eldest son back in the bosom of his clingy mother
• BESBITBOHCM works too hard  
• Beloved youngest son a do-gooding treat thief
• BESBITBOHCM sick
• Clingy Mother attacks offices of TV company with a big stick