Adapted

We are at home.

It is a very odd feeling.

England is not like Scotland. On Orkney it is courteous to wave at every single other driver on the road as you pass them, and also to any pedestrians. I had forgotten about this until I got back there last week. I remember when I first moved back to England it was a difficult habit to lose, and for ages people waved back with a puzzled look, wondering if they ought to know who I was.

I am not curled up in a warm camper van. I am in our house, which has not quite warmed up yet. There has been nobody here for ages, and the floors and walls are cold to the touch, how I wish I had thought of an electric blanket for a Christmas present.

All there same it is luxuriously splendid. I am sitting in my comfortable chair in front of my large, user-friendly computer. The washing machine is bashing away downstairs and Mark is making dinner.

It is very peculiar because of not being in the camper van, but also because we are not going to work tonight, and suddenly we are not sure what we usually do when we are at home in the evenings.

We have had a very busy few months. There was the whole fuss of manufacturing the Advent calendars, which takes ages, and the arrival first of Oliver, then of Number Two Daughter. Then we took Oliver back to school and almost the next week had to go back to get him again and sing along at his carol concert.

There were hotels and smart clothes and glasses of wine and country walks. Of course as well as all that there was a long interlude of kitchen shifting and setting the house on fire and making Christmas presents. After that there were children all over the place and pantomimes, and then when all of that was over, we went on holiday.

We have come home now and there is nobody else here. It is so quiet that we wondered what we ought to be doing. It is the first time for months and months that there has not been something terribly urgent that needed to be done urgently, with an urgent deadline, and very probably, no cash and the urgent need of earning some, urgently.

Today there is nothing at all urgent that needs to be done. We are not going to go back to work until Friday, and Mark does not know when he will be recommencing their rural broadbanding, all of which has left an unexpected void.

You will be pleased to know that we have already started to fill this gap by moving the living room into the conservatory in order to put a kitchen into the living room. No time like the present.

We did this after we had finished unpacking.

We woke up this morning, as you know, on the windswept slopes of Shap Fell.

We took the dogs for a walk, which was a bit wild and exciting, and hence short, after which we cleaned the camper van.

We stripped the sheets off the beds and scrubbed the bathroom and emptied the washing into bags ready to be taken into the house. There was lots of washing, because I decided that I did not trust the horrible expensive Scottish laundry. There were marks on things, and some things were greyish, and nothing felt crisp and clean, so we thought that we would wash it all again.

At any rate, I thought we would wash it all again. I do not know if Mark noticed really. He agreed, patiently, when I pointed it out, but sometimes I do not think that he really thinks very much about the right shade of white for his pillowcase.

We could have done the cleaning and packing up at home, of course, but if we were doing it in the camper van then we were still on holiday and it did not feel like work.

We crawled down the long fell side to Kendal and Mark gave the camper a thorough jet wash whilst I bleached the bathroom and the fridge. We filled it with fuel and made it gleamingly ready for its next adventure.

Its next adventure will not be very far away. We have got to go back and get Oliver in four weeks, this is a very short term.

It needed a jet wash. It was crusted with Orcadian salt, so much so that it was getting difficult to see out of the windows. If left undisturbed, liberal coatings of sea salt encourage camper vans to dissolve into crumbling heaps of rust very quickly indeed. One of the reasons ours has lasted for such a very long time is that it spent the first twenty years of its life in the inland centre of France. The UK coastline is not kind to ancient vans.

We thought as we made our way back how very brilliant it has been to have it. This year will be its very last MOT before it is so old it does not need them any more. It will be formally and officially ancient.

It has hardly been put out to grass in the meantime. Over the course of the last twelve months it has chugged from Brighton to Orkney, and an awful lot of the country in between. It has been to Wales and Yorkshire, Elgin and London and Blackpool. It has Travelled.

It is elderly and idiosyncratic, but we have been warm and comfortable and clean and well-fed, especially this week, when I have discovered that my trousers have become a little tighter even though I am down to one pair of them now.

It might be a good thing that I am home. I suppose that what has happened is that just as the dogs have adapted to the Orcadian weather by growing thick woolly coats, I have started to grow an insulating layer of fat.

I will not need an extra layer of fat here. The Lake District is wet and muddy, but there is no ice blast howling down from the Arctic circle.

Maybe it will just melt naturally away.