I am sitting in the camper van at the side of the A9, somewhere around Stirling.
We are very close to the A9, and the camper is swaying excitingly every time something goes past it. Oliver has forgotten to bring a book with him, so I have lent him The Secret Life Of Cows, which he is perusing with some reluctance.
We are just two, a little light in the great Scottish darkness.
We are going to Gordonstoun.
It is Bank Holiday Weekend, so Mark has stayed at home to drive taxis and install rural broadband. Oliver and I are on our own.
We do not need to be there until first thing on Friday morning, but it was such a long journey in the camper van that I thought I would do it in two bits. We set off when Oliver finished work this afternoon, and we are going to drive the rest of the way tomorrow.
You will be pleased to hear that I am already having a nice time. It is rather splendid to feel the road beneath my wheels and civilisation falling away behind me. Going North is an awful lot easier than Going South. The roads are a lot emptier and the Scots seem to be less inclined to decorate them with abstract patterns of traffic cones. The sun has shone benevolently, and it has felt like a happy journey.
I have had a stressful day. This has been entirely my own fault, because I was determinedly looking after the Loved Ones Left Behind, all of whom made perfectly clear that they did not give a hoot if I looked after them or not. I have left them some rice and a cooked chicken, and lots of interesting bread and cheeses and sliced melon and pineapple, but really I think that probably they will all just go to Greggs Pie Shop as soon as I am far enough away not to know about it.
After Mark buzzed off to install rural broadband this morning I went up to Booths. I meant to go for the cheeses really, but of course I got carried away and bought lots of exciting things, like pork pies and kiwi fruit and smoked ham and pate.
I finished up with such a recklessly enormous pile of shopping that I was beginning to panic a bit about climbing over the car park fence with it all and then lugging it all down the steep banking . Fortunately whilst I was in the queue for the checkout I bumped into some taxi driver friends who laughed immoderately at my plight, but who gave me a lift home and helped me carry the shopping.
I flapped about for the rest of the day, cooking pizzas for Oliver and mayonnaise and chicken and rice for everybody else. This does not sound like a lot, but somehow it occupied the whole day, and when Oliver came home I had only just got round to wondering what I was going to wear, and the flap had turned into a besieged chicken house sort of squawk.
The thing is that I am not going to be able to sit peacefully in the camper van and wait for Oliver all weekend, getting on with my painting and reading my book. School has thoughtfully organised Activities for parents, presumably to keep them from relaxing into bucolic child-free holiday stupor during the course of the weekend.
Hence I am going to have to go on several organised tours, including one of a distillery, have dinner and drinks with the headmaster, and go and cheer Oliver on whilst he does something triumphantly enthusiastic in the final moments of the weekend.
I have got plenty of clothes, and almost all of them are entirely suitable for touring a distillery, but somehow none of them looked like it. The problem is that in my natural state my criteria for choosing clothes is simply Comfortable. This means that absolutely everything I own is an undemanding two sizes too big. This feels splendid, but looks rather baggy, as if I were an elderly sofa that has leaked its filling away.
It is not a suitable look for spending two or three days in the company of assorted aristocracy, and then there is always the added problem that I might accidentally get drunk.
At this point I would like to add a note of gratitude to you, the patient reader, who has suffered through these agonies with me on many a past occasion. It is a constant problem in the backdrop to my life, and one which so far I have proved incapable of solving.
Hence I shall not go into detail about the pile of rejected clothes on the floor, the anguished surveys of the mirror, and the final selection of clothes which I know will leave me completely mystified when I come to put them on. You already know about all of this, because it happens every time.
I am either going to go on a diet or purchase a corset. Most of the clothes are fine, the problem is the chocolate biscuits.
The other problem is the drink. Fear makes me incapable of eating, and then I drink too much.
I cannot let Oliver down by being an intoxicated taxi driver at a meeting of the Great And Good , or at any rate at a meeting of the Much Wealthier Than I Am.
I should really be resigned to this by now.
I do wish that Mark were here.
The picture is us in the service station. It is a perfect illustration of the way I will feel this weekend.
