Home

I am having trouble with WordPress. This probably won’t have a photograph. I will try and fix it tomorrow…sorry.

We left the lovely Caledonian with the greatest reluctance.

We sat up late last night, Mark and Oliver played the worm game on their computers, and I wrote to you, and we drank champagne and laughed, and then overslept completely this morning.

Hence we were among the last bleary-eyed travellers to appear for breakfast, and sat blinking in the bright morning, drinking coffee and orange juice in equally enormous quantities.

Nobody seemed to mind, and after a while I felt sufficiently recovered to breakfast on smoked salmon and smoked trout and warm bread rolls, followed by sausage, bacon, mushrooms and scrambled eggs.

I noticed with some surprise this morning that my trousers seem to have become mysteriously tighter during this trip, Mark thought perhaps they might have shrunk in the suitcase.

We celebrated the last holiday morning with a swim in the hotel pool, made less sophisticated by Mark and Oliver pretending to have wind in the jacuzzi. I showered afterwards and drenched myself in bluebell perfume, and felt fantastic, in a sort of very clean although not exactly bursting with fitness  type of way.

Afterwards we drank some peculiarly exotic tea in their lovely lounge. Mine tasted of cinnamon and vanilla, Mark’s had a sort of citrus edge, we were intrigued and liked it very much, I thought I might ask them for the recipe, but then wasn’t brave enough in case they said: “go to Tesco and ask for a box, idiot.” Oliver had hot chocolate and had to wash his face afterwards.

Finally we had to drag ourselves away for the long journey south, which was pleasant through Scotland, and slow and full of lots of people once we got down to Newcastle, where, incidentally, there are a lot of tiresome roadworks, go somewhere else on your holidays.

The sun shone, and we drove along the coast road and looked at the sea, and sighed with end-of-holiday contentment, and when I looked at my computer there was an email from the head of Gordonstoun, saying that he would be very happy for us to go ahead with the application process because Oliver is a decent chap and he thought he would probably be fine, and not especially likely to turn into a future embarrassment for Gordonstoun, so fill in the forms. He didn’t say that, exactly, but that was what he meant.

Of course we were very pleased indeed about this, and the rest of the journey passed in great lightness of spirit. In the end, though, we were nearly there, and Oliver had to wriggle out of his holiday clothes and into his school uniform.

School was lovely. We arrived just as our shadows were getting long on the cricket pitch and the clock struck six. We unloaded bags and boxes and his bike and Spider-Man, and lugged it all into school. There were boys and parents all over the place, and the head greeted us with a huge smile, because he is pleased about Oliver and Gordonstoun as well, because they are generous and lovely like that.

They were having a barbeque for their evening meal. Boys were bouncing about the playgrounds excitedly, hands full of burgers and sausages, being excited for the start of the new term.

We took Oliver upstairs and unpacked and put Spider-Man helpfully on his pillow for the homesick moment later, and then hugged each other as hard as we could, to make it last.

It is terribly hard to say goodbye. I waved until he had gone round the corner, and we had to go, and there was a dreadful Oliver-shaped hole in our lives.

We made our way to home, and Number Two Daughter and the dogs, and had an ecstatic welcome from the latter and caught up with events in Windermere from the former. We sat in the kitchen and drank our own splendid French red wine and thought that after all it was nice to be home.

We still have one chick in the nest.

We are completely exhausted. We walked round the Library Gardens quietly with the dogs and set the washing machine going, and now we are on our way to bed.

It is nice to be home.