Shot

I am writing from a Scottish lay-by.

Oliver is sitting in the driving seat, and Mark is crawling about underneath the camper van, trying to fix it.

This will surprise nobody.

We are at Perth.

I am sure he will manage it. It was a rattle that has turned into a wheel bearing, or possibly a track rod end.

We have still got loads of time to get to school.

After work last night we had a final dog-empty with the Peppers, and then dashed round hurling Oliver’s massive stack of luggage into the camper van. It is quite handy that Lucy is not here any more, because this means that we can fill her bunk with suitcases and rucksacks. Oliver does not have a trunk, because his last school only had a small box room, so all of the boys had to have folding luggage.

All of his folding luggage is currently unfolded as far as it will possibly go. It is stuffed tightly with everything that I can imagine he might possibly need, from handkerchiefs to spare bits for his bike. He is worried about having forgotten something, but if he has I can’t imagine what it might be.

PART TWO

It is now later, and you will be relieved to hear that we got there in the end, including the wheel bearing, and Oliver had not forgotten anything at all. We can still hear the rattling whenever we get to a quiet bit in the music, but that is not very often, so it is fine.

We listened to Hamilton at full volume for most of the way. Oliver knows all of the words, but we don’t, so we just joined in with the obvious bits about Not Throwin’ Away Our Shots.

It is such a very long way.

We got as far as Stirling last night. It was quarter past four when we got there, and I do not know how Mark managed to stay awake. I thought that I was awake as well, but when we pulled off the motorway I realised that the Fellowship of the Ring had carelessly managed to lose Gandalf somewhere in the Mines of Moria and I had missed it entirely.

After that we chugged slowly North. It was quite a good chug North, except for the rattle, because it turned out that the brakes have been stuck on for the last year. Not only does the van go faster, but it makes less noise and uses less fuel, what a marvellous repair that was.

I like the journey very much, because of the purple headed mountains and rivers running by. Also the sunset was pretty jolly good, and there was a massive golden harvest full moon. I do not know what Radio Four are going on about. They have been saying this week that the price of flour is going to go up next year, because we are having such a poor wheat harvest, but certainly here that is not true at all. We have grown wheat, and know what a brilliant harvest looks like when we see one. The fields were richly yellow as far as we could see, or dotted with round bales. We always have to shout when we see those, because of a family game dating back to Oliver’s toddlerhood, when he liked round bales very much.

In the end we chugged up to school, and everybody felt that dark grey feeling that you get when you reach an unavoidably unhappy moment.

We have had a boy at home for half a year, and he was going.

Dearie me, it was sad.

We lugged his bags inside. We had to wear masks for this, which was irksome. In the end I did not feel cross about it, because it turned out that the staff did not think very much of the idea either.

Oliver has a new housemaster. Actually he was more or less entirely interchangeable with the last one, being young and hearty and made of fresh air and cold baths and leaping out of bed early to swim across frozen lochs and sprint up mountainsides. He appeared to say hello with a small child clinging to his kneecaps, and a home-made mask that at first glance appeared to have been made out of an old nappy, but on closer inspection was probably a babygro. This made me like him immediately.

This term Oliver is sharing a dorm with one other boy, who is new. We unpacked his stacks and stacks of carefully named uniform and and distributed them around his cupboards. Mark did things to his bike, and I delivered a departing lecture about working hard and doing his best.

You do this sort of thing when you are a parent. It doesn’t make any difference with your own children any more than it did when your parents said it to you, but you say it anyway. It is rather like buying them shoe polish. You know perfectly well that there are many better uses of your energy but you still do it.

Oliver promised that he would work hard, which he generally does anyway, and that he would Not Throw Away His Shot, and then the Time Had Come.

I did not cry, not until later.

Oh goodness, I hope he is happy.

It is his Shot. He is going to do brilliantly.

We are on our way home, in that we are about to go to sleep in another lay by, this one on a mountain top.

Not long until half term.