When we planned to set off last night after work somehow we neglected to factor in that although the clock said ten, and we thought that really it was eleven, we had still been up since either six, or maybe seven. We had both worked our socks off all day, and somehow we were completely exhausted.
We managed to be loaded into the camper van by eleven, which took a while because the gas fridge, mysteriously, refused to light. In the end Mark took the outside cover off it, at which point it lit unexpectedly and almost removed his eyebrows.
He does not need eyebrows anyway, and it happened to be raining thunderously hard, so he put them out quite quickly and we set off.
We discovered that we were driving in our sleep almost before we reached Kendal, and in the end we got to the motorway junction on the bleak edge of Shap fell, and pulled in to the lay-by with thankful relief.
We slept, dreamlessly and without even the usual middle of the might waking for a wee, until this morning. We fuelled the second bit of the journey with eyebrow-curlingly bitter black coffee, and set off.
It only curled my eyebrows, obviously.
Oliver did not wake up until Perth, which came much, much later, and wound his way around the clutter of dogs and jackets to join us in the front.
This made for a happily sociable journey all together, and we talked for miles after that. It is good to do this, because it makes the story that we are listening to last longer. Also we do not see very much of our children, because even when Oliver is at home, mostly he is either out at work or in his bedroom doing his own computery things.
The others are all miles away Making Their Mark on the world. None of them can come home for Christmas this year. This will be very sad, but we can always go and see them, which might be an exciting change.
Except Number Two Daughter. We can’t go to Canada, and so will just have to imagine her.
I do not mind the children being far away. although I always feel sad at the moments of leaving.
This is an up-to-the-minute reflection. I am writing this on our way back now. Mark is driving. It is dark, and we have come a long way north through the bleak wilderness, and we have just left Oliver behind.
When we left him he was alone in his room and looking a bit forlorn, but when I belted back five minutes later with a book he had forgotten, his friend was sitting on his desk next to him and they were laughing and chattering as happily as two sparrows in the springtime.
He will be fine.
I think about them quite a lot, and wonder how they are all getting along, but in lots of ways it is nicest when they don’t phone at all, because then I know that they are so absorbed in their own lives that they are not thinking about me. That is a contented feeling. It would be dreadful to think of any of them being unhappy and homesick and longing to come back.
They are all scattered to the four winds now, far away from one another and from us.
It does not matter. They are all living happy lives.
We stopped in the end about an hour before school, and emptied the dogs and ate masses of lemon chicken whilst Oliver told us his worries about going back to school and explained that he would miss us.
After that, something reassuring happened.
When we set off again there was a rainbow.
It was a double rainbow, which doesn’t show in the picture, and it was a proper rainbow, stretching all the way across the sky in a huge arc, with its foot right in front of us.
We all thought that it was a cheering omen, even though I know perfectly well that rainbows are the result of meteorological phenomena. All the same I expect the Gods are perfectly capable of borrowing meteorological phenomena to cheer us up if they want to.
We felt cheered. The Gods have made us a promise.
Our lives are going to be perfectly all right. Our worries are going to be over, and all of our children are going to be just fine.
The Gods sent us a rainbow to let us know.
