Cairngormy things

It is four o’ clock and we are somewhere in the middle of the Cairngorms.

We are going to be very late for work.

We have been at Gordonstoun all day.

Elspeth popped into the camper van this morning on her way across to the Parents Day, and it was a good job that she did because I had not paid sufficient attention to the emails that school had been sending and would have gone in at the wrong gate and parked in the wrong place, although fortunately we had managed to be on the right day. 

In the event it was all right, and we assembled in the chapel in good time, where we were served pastries and coffee in order to warm us up for the speeches.

These were quite all right, on the scale of school speeches, and enlivened with films of children telling us how important it is to be good and lovely and kind to one another. 

We all agreed smugly that we had sent our children to the best school in the world, and glowed with self-satisfaction at the Principal’s gratitude to us for being so wise and generous in sending our precious children there. Also the pastries were excellent.

After that we went to listen to a talk by the Head Of Year. This was enlivened by more pictures, largely of children jumping off waterfalls and standing on mountaintops looking heroically back at the ravine which they had just climbed.  Oliver was not on any of them, although he assured me afterwards that he had done as much climbing and jumping as anybody. 

Finally we were released to find our children. Duffus House had thoughtfully laid on more coffee, and an assortment of doughnuts, and Oliver was there. 

Obviously he was not the only one there. Everybody’s children were there, polished and shiny and attired in their Smart Uniform so that we would think how expensively nurtured they were.

We hugged him as hard as we could so that he would know that all the expensive nurturing was because we loved him, and we looked at his school report together.

He has done rather splendidly well in everything except Latin, in which he appears to have done brilliantly. 

We read that bit twice to make sure.

We told him how impressed we were. We omitted the bit about how surprised we were, which is tactful with your children, but he knew anyway and laughed.

The next bit was the bit where you go into the Sports Hall and find your child’s teachers. Each teacher talks to you for a few minutes whilst an impatient queue behind you wishes that your child had just kept his head down and turned his prep in on time and was not an interesting case needing in depth analysis.

This was ace. Only one teacher owned up to not being quite sure who he was, which we thought was a good sign, since they all know who the nuisances are from Day One. This teacher had only taught him twice, so it seemed entirely reasonable, and even he remembered that he sat at the front and paid attention. 

The Latin teacher wore a bow tie, and the maths teacher said that he was doing fine, and the English teacher said that the content of his work was perfectly all right but his handwriting was rubbish, which we knew. This turned out to be because he had not been taking his laptop to class because it is too heavy. We promised that we would resolve this issue, so he can spend the holidays doing weightlifting or something. 

In the end we had had enough. We sloped off back to the camper van to release the dogs into the wild and to listen to Oliver’s stories.

He is exhausted. He said that it feels like his new home. 

LATER NOTE:  I stopped writing there because the journey turned into A Trauma. It is now half past two in the morning and we have only just walked in through the front door.

It was not long after writing those words when the phone rang and it was one of Mark’s sisters telling us that his mother had been taken seriously ill and might be at Death’s very door. Since we were just about as far away from South Wales as it is possible  to be without being actually abroad there was not much that we could do about this, and in any case our medical expertise is limited to minor chainsaw injuries, sore throats and earache. We made concerned noises and worried a bit, and then were distracted when a nutter flagged down the van.

We could not drive past him because he was standing in the middle of the road. Mark slowed down and he dived around the side and wrenched the driver’s door open and announced that he was getting in.

The now-familiar rat wee drug smell flooded the camper van, and so Mark told him that he most certainly was not, and accelerated.

The nutter hung on to the door for a little way, shouting and flailing, but in the end he gave up and banged angrily on the side of the van as we drove away.

Sometimes life has some very thrilling moments.

Not long after that Elspeth rang. They were a little way ahead of us and had had a puncture, so of course we stopped to join them and make encouraging noises. This sort of thing is comforting when you are having a crisis in the middle of the frozen wilderness. After a bit of faffing about the wheel was replaced, and we had all had cups of tea, and we could get on the road again.

Shortly after that Mark’s sister sent us a text to say that his mother was not dying. She was going to be kept in for a day or two, but we could stand down from serious worrying, so we did.

Shortly after that the motorway closed.

We had to drive round and round on a massive detour for which nobody had thought to put up diversion signs, and for which our sat nav just tried to send us back to the place where it thought we had just started wilfully ignoring it in the first place.

This took ages. I mean really ages.

When we finally found a road that was pointing in the right direction we hurtled down it only to find it was also doing overnight roadworks, and a thirty mile an hour limit was in place.

The journey took us eleven hours.

We had been going to go to work, but we decided that for the last half an hour of night club disgorgement we could not be bothered.

Also we have had enough of drunk drugged people for one week.

We will get back to work tomorrow. It will be a complete relief just to get back to doing three full time jobs between us.

I can’t tell you how much I am looking forward to it.

The picture was the view from our window when we woke up this morning. We sat in bed with our coffee and looked at it.

It has been a busy day.