Journey

We have arrived.

We are just down the road from the hallowed portals of Gordonstoun School.

I am completely exhausted.

Oliver is in the shower, with optimistic instructions to be quick and thorough. He is fairly exhausted as well.

It is a long drive.

Having said that, it was a happy drive, the sort of journey that you might use in advertisements to sell cars. We tootled along empty roads that cut across great swathes of Scottish bleakness, purple with heather and interrupted by lonely grey lochs.

We stopped in the middle of one such wilderness for a lunchtime cup of tea. I had subsisted on jelly babies all morning, and hence wasn’t hungry, but we stopped to sample the silence and the gentle blowing of the wind for a while.

I can quite see why the Queen likes it so much, after having to live in London for most of the year it must be brilliant to retreat into the damp mists and listen to the despairing cries of birds instead of motorists.

Oliver came out of the camper van, still in his underpants and dressing gown, and wagged about a bit, somewhat to the surprise of the only car that did pass us. We stood on the side of the road and looked, after which we stood in the middle of the road, because it didn’t make any difference.

Oliver took the picture.

We arrived in the far north in the middle of the afternoon, in surprisingly warm sunshine. We stopped at the harbour, where a solitary fisherman was doing something nautical to lobster pots.

I love the sea this far north. We lived for a while in the Orkney Islands, where seals flopped on to the beaches, and dolphins splashed in the Sound, and once, only once, I saw a whale. The water is paralysingly cold and utterly clear, you can see right to the bottom, unnerving from the deck of a boat.

We went for a paddle, obviously, and gasped at the toe-numbing shock of it on sun-warmed feet. Then we played the drawing-lines-in-the-sand game, and admired the seaweed.

Eventually we got bored, and made our way back to the camper van, and into town, where we bought biscuits and bananas, and parked in a little woodland lay-by for the night.

We had a small alarm in the middle of the evening, when we thought we would give Oliver’s bags a final check over, and discovered that his waterproof jacket had sleeves which ended just after his elbows, and that we had only brought one set of trainers.

Fortunately the civilised world has intruded on some parts of Scotland, and there is a twenty-four-hour Tesco in Elgin.

The scholarship weekend starts tomorrow, at nine.

We think that he is ready. He is excited and terrified and he has a lucky stone in his pocket. I have given him reams of useful interview advice, which I expect he will forget, and which might turn out to be wrong anyway. It is so very difficult to be a parent. I have done my best to impart all of my hard-bought wisdom to my children, and without exception they just think that it is an irritating background noise.

Oliver is only twelve, so he is kinder about this than the others.

I am scared and happy for him all at once, what a brilliant thing to be doing even if he fails. He wants to pass very much indeed, because he wants to leave his name behind him on the scholarship roll of honour board at his prep school, and for that reason alone I hope that he does.

It is an exciting journey, this life.

I am going to get some sleep.

We have got an early start tomorrow.