Expedition

My new handkerchiefs arrived this morning, just in time for our trip up to Gordonstoun.

I feel very sophisticated blowing my nose into a piece of fine lawn instead of a piece of kitchen roll. They are white with nice flowers embroidered on the corners and they will not dissolve into a million tiny pieces in the washing machine.

Mark took the dog to the vet’s whilst I washed pots and repacked including all the things I had forgotten.

It turned out that we were right about the dog’s difficulties being cancer related, but the cancer is in a gentleman’s bit that can be easily removed. The vet explained that he has slowed right down because he has got old and needs a knee replacement as well, after which he might enjoy many more years of contented life and also be able to get on and off the bed.

A knee replacement for a dog costs seven hundred quid, which has given my conscience difficulties with which to wrestle.

We wrestled with our consciences somewhat inconclusively all the way up to the next country.

Scotland is not very far away from our house, but once you get into it it seems to go on for an awfully long time. There are huge stretches of it where there are no people at all, and lots of houses which are derelict and abandoned, which the Government perhaps could bear in mind as a potential solution to the refugee crisis, there is absolutely loads of room in Scotland.

To get to Gordonstoun you have got to go miles and miles to the North, it is about an hour and a half further than Aberdeen, which I had always considered was the end of the world.

Of course Mark used to work in Aberdeen so he knows the way very well, and enlivened the journey with thrilling stories of other times when he has made the journey in the past, this is where there was a traffic jam, this is where the speed cameras were switched off, this is where I saw an accident, this is where there were roadworks etc. I can tell you I was captivated for the whole journey, which was seven hours long.

To my astonishment it snowed very hard for a great deal of the way, especially around Perth. This is because Scotland is very close to the Arctic Circle, I am not sure if they still have polar bears, but it would not surprise me in the least. It made the journey long and slow, presumably because nobody wanted accidentally to squish a penguin or something, and we crawled along for miles and miles through a positive fog of huge snowflakes.

We are staying in a place called Elgin, which is where I am now, in a very nice if essentially Scottish hotel called The Mansion House. It is built like a castle, which is the main design feature the Scots seem to have managed to master, probably because they have spent thousands of years having the last word in a quarrel by burning one another’s houses down.

We are sitting in our bedroom. We have had steaming hot baths and the hotel provides fluffy white dressing gowns, which is an essential part of any hotel experience in my opinion. Mark is trying to work out where we are in relation to Gordonstoun and how we might get back to Edinburgh afterwards.

We had a huge dinner of local grouse and salmon and other excellent dishes, washed down by several glasses of a good Merlot, although I imagine that they import this from somewhere else, we didn’t see any vineyards on our epic journey northwards.

After dinner we were inspired by portly guilt into some exercise, so we zipped ourselves into our Barbour jackets and went outside, where we spent twenty minutes drunkenly scrambling up a steep hill in the pitch dark to inspect a monument on the top, and slipping around on the ice and giggling helplessly. We got lost then and wandered about looking at the icy stars in the polar skies and the giant Tesco shimmering beneath them, until finally we found a reasonably gentle path to get down again and eventually meandered happily back to the hotel.

Tomorrow is the Day of the visit.

I am very nervous indeed.