And we are away!
It is the most splendid thing to be doing.
We have gone over to York where we are spending the night, and then we can poke around the byways of the city when we get up in the morning. After that obviously the whole point of the trip is to collect Lucy in the afternoon, when her coach returns from their overseas adventure, which will be ace, we have all missed her a lot.
I have been looking forward to an excursion for days. We had a bit of an anxious moment when we thought that Mark would not manage to finish repairing all the rusty bits on the camper in time: and indeed he hasn’t, but he has done the worst so that it is not dangerous any more, just a bit draughty in places.
He has bolted everything back together again, and he thinks that he will finish it properly when we get back. I imagine that this will be in between working, and doing things at the farm, and getting the taxis fixed and getting the allotment cleared.
Once we were out of bed, which of course wasn’t very early in account of working all night last night, he went over the farm to glue all the last left over bits back on and fill the tanks up with water and give it all a bit of a hose down and clean out.
I stayed at home, and spent the afternoon packing things up as I remembered that we might need them, and cooking Chinese noodles and chicken in a spicy cashew nut sauce to take with us to be warmed up in the oven for dinner this evening. I have never tried to make stir fried noodles before, and they stuck terribly to the bottom of the pan. Everything sticks to the bottom of our frying pan, which is old and tired, so it was because of the pan and not my cooking, obviously.
I was still scraping them off when Mark came back with the camper van, which was tidy and clean and ready, and we slung everything in it excitedly, and were off.
I am writing this in a layby, just on the outside of York now. We have eaten our noodles, which actually were absolutely brilliant, savoury and sticky and pleasing. We were starving by then, because we had forgotten breakfast, which helped, and we wolfed them down, except Oliver, who found a vegetable in his, and unfortunately it put him off.
We have finished dinner now, and we are all curled up in the camper van together, full of noodles and travelling contentment. I am writing to you, and the dogs are asleep next to me, taking up more than their share of the seat so that I am perched precariously on the edge.
Oliver is playing on his Playstation at the other end of the van. He is not killing zombies, he has got a new game which is his current joyful fixation, which appears to be a challenging experience of becoming a town planner. It is called Minecraft, and I think I preferred the zombies. He is designing schools and prisons with a depressing enthusiasm and telling us about them and contemplating drainage in a way that makes me concerned about his future.
Mark has been too lazy to get up and find his own book, and so he is reading my autobiography of Gordon Brown’s wife, and exclaiming with irritation about her lack of style and tedium of prose.
This is unfortunately true, and boringly so far there have been no interesting anecdotes about her husband’s bedroom activities, nor fascinating stories of their rows. I assume they must have had rows, certainly we do, as regular readers will recall.
Anyway, it is a tiresomely supportive and uninteresting tome about good causes that she championed and world figures she encountered. I am very glad that Mark is not Prime Minister, because it sounds like an awful life, but I can promise you that if he was, then my autobiography would be a jolly lot more interesting than hers at the end of it all, although I might have some trouble finding somebody prepared to publish it.
We are going to have another glass of red wine and take the dogs for one last walk, and then go to bed, in our travelling home from home. The sun is setting and the road is quiet, and I am completely and absolutely happy.
