Oh dear, it is over and we are back home.
Obviously we are back home in an on the taxi rank sort of way.
I do not mind being on the taxi rank, but I did not want to come back. I could have stayed in Northumberland for days and days and walked on the cliff tops and splashed in the sea with the dogs.
We had a walk this morning before we left. The coast where we were has lots of interesting rocks and caves and cliffs, so we ambled along and looked at them, and watched a fishing boat collecting lobster pots. I hope they go to restaurants where they are humane. Boiling anything alive, especially a lobster with its advanced nervous system, is wicked.
It was not very far to drive back to the castle for Oliver, and he shot out to meet us with great enthusiasm, having had a wonderful time.
Obviously he had not even started to pack, and I went upstairs with him to collect everything bearing an Ibbetson name tag and stuff it into his rucksack.
Whilst we were hunting for things that he had left lying about, his friend’s mother showed me some of the interesting bits of the castle, which was gorgeous.
It has been in their family for generations, when Oliver’s friend grows up it will be a thousand years, although it has been rebuilt a bit since then.
We talked to her for ages, which was splendid. Owning a castle sounds like very hard work. There had been a terrible time when burglars came in a huge lorry and stole every single thing, all their treasured furniture and things they loved, and there was not enough insurance to pay for any of it. Her parents had painstakingly re-furnished the house with hardly any money, building things themselves and making their home warm and welcoming again.
The thing was, we thought, they were just like us.
They had fought and struggled to educate their children, who had worked their socks off to get into their next schools, and then their parents had had to scrape and beg to try and raise the funds.
Her husband was in the wilds of Afghanistan, and she worried about him because he was not a young man any more, and being a soldier is exhausting when you are fifty. The castle took a lot of work as well, and the garden sometimes became overgrown, and there was no time for holidays, because the stables had been turned into a holiday let, and she needed to look after it.
We were sorry to say goodbye, because we had liked her very much, but we had to go because of work, and she had still got some boys to take to the station.
They are going walking on Helvellyn in a few weeks and might come and see us.
We hoped so very much.
LATER NOTE: I stopped writing there because I could not get the website to load the page. It would not work at all, and I spent every spare minute for the last couple of hours trying to get the stupid thing to work. Then my last customer of the night punched me in the face, which was irritating enough for me to lose interest in websites for a while.
I am, before you all write to me with gentle concern, perfectly all right, except for a mildly sore eye, and I think she may be worse than I am. This is because I am a robust old boot. Obviously the problem, as always, was that she did not want to pay, and indeed told me that I ought to be grateful to get a fiver for a twelve pound fare. She started off by trapping her leg in the sliding back door, because she was trying to jump out when I stood on the brakes, and it slammed closed, rather painfully I expect. Then once she had jumped out she reached in through the driver’s window to hit me, and although I didn’t see it coming, when she had done it I caught hold of her arm and twisted it, hard. Then I crushed her fingernails in the painful press that military police use to subdue tiresome squaddies, and explained that I did not want her custom in my taxi any more.
Some good fairy made me let her go, because I was so angry that I almost accelerated off down the road with her arm still sticking in through the window, but of course I didn’t. She staggered away and I drove off.
I didn’t ring the police, clearly, after Mark’s misadventures, there isn’t any point.
I hope she is sore in the morning. 
