Well being

I am sitting in the last moments of the fading sunshine at the harbour just by Gordonstoun, and I can tell you that life is just splendid.

I spent the morning busily trying to do all the maintenance things that you have to do when you are temporarily resident in a camper van. I have refilled the water and emptied the loo and plugged in the solar panel to charge.

All these things were made complicated because I thought that I might be able to do them at a caravan site, except the solar panel, obviously. You do not plug this in to the world, but into the camper van, after which you prop the flat bit upright against the wheel and let the Weather Gods benevolently fill it up with hairdryer and microwave fuel. You can do this anywhere, except, mostly, the Lake District.

Anyway, in our travels we have discovered that caravan sites have got facilities for waste and water, and usually if you give them a fiver they are happy to let you use them, even if you are not staying there. We do not like staying on caravan sites because it is like going for a holiday on a particularly grumpy sort of council estate, with rows and rows of identical white vans and lists of rules up all over the place, like not letting your children play out after nine o’clock, and keeping your dogs on leads.

Haverigg Prison looks a bit like a caravan site.

I am not currently in possession of either children or dogs, but the principle stands firm, and I do not want to park my camper van on a Designated Pitch from which I can hear the neighbours watching the telly.

Despite this the people who run the sites are generally inclined to be friendly and helpful, especially if they know that we do not want to stay there and give them headaches with our anarchic rebelliousness. They usually let us organise our sanitary facilities without hesitation, everywhere we have ever been except here.

Here they were not having it at all.

There are several caravan sites around Elgin, and not one of them would let me refill the water or empty the loo, no matter how much I offered to pay. One of them even said that they didn’t have fresh water on the site, which was clearly not true, because everybody needs fresh water, even the Scots, and also I passed the tap when I turned the van round.

Worse, all of them were cross, and sour, and unfriendly, which was not at all nice.

I was beginning to feel miserably prejudiced against the Scots when I pulled in to the harbour, gloomy and troubled, and wondering if I should creep back in the middle of the night and empty the loo in the front garden of the caravan site owner.

I parked by the slipway, and went to ask the lady in the shop if she knew of anywhere.

She showed me the harbour tap and the loo, and told me to help myself, so I did.

Some kindly chaps sitting outside agreed that it was perfectly all right, and that I was welcome, and suddenly the world began to look all right again.

They wouldn’t accept any money, so I chucked a fiver in the lifeboat tin, and then had a contented half an hour talking to them about tides and fish and sunshine. The lady in the shop turned out to know some people that I know, because it is a small world, and I had filled and emptied my van, and everything in the world was lovely.

Oliver had gone by then, of course.

We got up this morning with separation looming terrifyingly large, and The Examination rearing up in front of him like the Hydra.

He is a brave boy.

He gulped and gritted his teeth, and ate a huge breakfast. Then he put on his Smart Clothes, especially pressed and polished for the occasion, and off we went.

“I knew you were here,” the headmaster said, when we passed him in the hallway, because obviously he has met the camper van before.

The entrance to the sports hall was filled with milling parents and boys, and, which surprised us, some girls. There is no reason at all for this to have been a surprise, because Gordonstoun is co-educational, but we have been doing single sex schools for so long that we were both shocked to see them, and we eyed them suspiciously before sloping off to the side of the room to sit with some other tweed-jacketed youths.

Oliver eyed up the competition and decided that probably he would do all right.

“See you on the other side,” he said determinedly, as he was ushered off into the examination hall.

I gazed after him anxiously, and another mother asked if I was crying. I denied this furiously, and she said that she wasn’t either. Then I talked to a nice lady whose daughter was already at the school, and to a couple from Texas whose daughter had not been allowed by British Airways to travel alone, and finally sloped off. It is not easy to make a discreet exit in the camper van.

During this journey I have abandoned the sat nav bit of my phone, and resorted to maps. Partly this is because it is not possible to get Google to direct you on a route where you won’t need to use second gear much, and partly because I want to learn the area properly by working things out.

Also I can’t hear my phone explaining to me over the noise of the engine.

This afternoon I mapped my way over to a place called Findhorn, which is a sort of supermarket for Spiritual Well Being, about six miles away from Gordonstoun harbour.

Findhorn was started by some hippies years ago. I knew one of them, who was a retired pop star who found that being spiritual helped him ignore his continuing cravings for alcohol and drugs. It is a community for holistic living whilst not harming the planet. This was quite commendable, because nobody cared about the planet then. They were going to grow all of their own vegetables and live in harmonious togetherness.

I think that they must have failed to achieve the former, because I could not see any agriculture anywhere, and I know that they had a bit of a miss with the latter, because my friend had left in a huff after squabbling endlessly with everybody about everything. Nevertheless, the community survived, and is still there now, making a living out of running a caravan site and selling organic peanut butter in its shop.

Obviously I was fascinated, and milled around looking at everything. I am sorry to report that as far as organically living goes it was a bit rubbish. There were some pretty houses, but nothing that was brilliantly insulated, or covered in solar panels, or showed creative use of rainwater.

It was the sort of thing that would have made Mark rant. He is keen enough on free energy to make me not able to concentrate for long when he talks about it. This is partly because he knows that we have got a carbon footprint, but mostly because he does not like spending money on things that he can do perfectly well for nothing some other way.

I cannot comment on the inherent spirituality of the place, because I do not think that I would notice spirituality even if it leapt on me from off the top of the wardrobe. There were lots of spiritual books, though, with titles like Zen And The Bumblebee, which looked tempting, and Meet Your Inner Unicorn, and The Art Of Seeing Fairies, so maybe my friend was not alone with his lingering drug habit.

I had a cup of pleasing chai tea in the cafe, which made me regret having just uprooted and composted all of my fennel last week, and then when I got back to the van I discovered some friendly neighbours with a van they were living in and modifying for themselves. We talked about camper vans for ages, and they made flatteringly admiring noises about mine. They had been wondering about painting theirs as well, which I hoped that they would, the world needs more people do do interesting things, and I like to see other colourful vans.

They took the picture at the top and sent it to me later.

It was so sunny that the Weather Gods generously filled my solar panel right up, and I dried my hair with the hairdryer before I went to bed.

I had fish and chips for dinner.

I am having an unexpectedly lovely time.

Perhaps some spiritual well being has rubbed off.