Beach holiday

We are on board the Hamnavoe waiting to set sail.

We are leaving Orkney.

We had expected to stay another couple of days but the weather is closing in, and there are not going to be any more boats until it improves.

The man at the ferry port said that if we did not go today we might have to stay for most of next week.

Whilst I quite liked that idea, the difficulty was that the camper van runs on LPG gas, which is not a commodity available in Orkney. We use this for heating and hot water and cooking, and we thought that probably we could last for ten days, if we were really careful, although we have never put this to the test.

Mark said that we could probably manage longer than that, because we also had a fitting for a calor gas bottle, and could, in a terrible emergency, buy one of those: but that would have cost us sixty quid, so we thought we would really rather not.

Orkney is not the sort of place where you do not mind when the heating goes off.

The flood of eloquent prose stopped there, because Mark had the brilliant idea that we could perhaps allow ourselves the magnificent luxury of eating fish and chips on the boat.

Obviously I concurred, with enthusiasm, and we rushed round to the buffet restaurant there and then, in order to accomplish this before we set off.

It was a mistake.

Probably not for Mark, who ate his dinner with enthusiasm, and then lay down on the bench and fell soundly asleep. He snored comfortably for the next couple of hours.

I was less fortunate.

Having finished dinner just as the boat steamed out of Stromness harbour, I curled up on the bench and tried to pretend I was being rocked to sleep.

It was not convincing.

At least, it would perhaps have been convincing if you imagined you were being rocked to sleep by a parent suffering from criminal insanity, and whose right to custody of their infant was in urgent need of some robust examination.

I consoled myself by listening to the kitchen staff talking in the restaurant. They were talking about cutlery. I persuaded myself that people who believe they are in imminent danger of death by drowning in thousands of tonnes of icy black water do not discuss forks.

The boat rocked and rolled and pitched and tossed. It rose in the air and then crashed back against the water. Once it tipped so far that I slid along the bench, and things in the kitchen clattered about, and even the indifferent kitchen staff laughed.

I was not sick, but after about half an hour had the most excruciating indigestion.

This is what happens if you eat an enormous greasy dinner and then spend the subsequent two hours being violently jogged about in all directions.

I was not at all sorry to reach Scrabster harbour and stagger down to the camper van.

The dogs were very pleased to see us.

They had been traumatised.

They had not been sick, which was a relief, but they both leapt on to the front seat with me and refused to get off. They lay there trembling, which I could feel despite their newly Orkney-thickened coats.

Mark said that of course in the camper van the suspension wags about as well. They must have had an exciting trip.

I am quite sure that they will recover. They have had a brilliant holiday. It is not often that you go on a holiday where the only activities of every single day involve taking the dogs for a scamper around somewhere interesting.

Today’s scamper involved crossing a causeway to another island.

This was not from Shapinsay. There are no causeways on Shapinsay.

We sailed from Shapinsay this morning.

Last night was terrifically windy. The camper van swayed and juddered as the gales hurtled across the waves and bashed into the side of it.

We do not mind this, it is very snug in the camper van. All the same we knew that high winds cancel ferries, and that we did not want to be trapped.

We made the last journey along the long road from Ness back to the little ferry port this morning, and backed slowly and carefully on to the boat.

The girl on the boat asked if we would like a return ticket, but we said no, sadly.

We drove across Mainland Orkney to Birsay and looked at the ruins of the Earl’s Palace. We did not look very hard or very long, because of the icy wind and the bouncing hailstones. All the same, as the tide slowly receded from the causeway we could not resist, and we wrapped ourselves in scarves and coats, and bounded down on to the beach after the dogs.

The water is so clear.

The skies were vast and filled with ice and rainbows.

We took some pictures.

We are just north of Inverness as I write, and it feels ridiculously southern and civilised. Already we have peeled off clothes and are down to a normal number of pairs of trousers. I am not entirely sorry about this. Visiting the bathroom becomes very complicated when you have got to find your way through seven or eight layers of garment.

We are Sooth again, and I am sad about it.

All of the pictures were taken within a minute or two of one another.

It has been a very splendid beach holiday.