We have collected Oliver and I am just beginning to come to terms with it.
I have a son with a thick mass of too-long dark curls and a deep voice. He is taller than I am.
It is strange and sad and wonderful all at once.
The skinny, squeaky little boy with the freckles and the toothy grin is gone for ever. I do not think that I would like to challenge this solid young man to a wrestling match.
He was waiting outside Duffus House when we chugged up with the camper van and explained that he had heard us coming pretty much from when we left Elgin.
We hugged each other joyfully. and Roger Poopy hurled himself on him, barking.
He came to sit with us in the front of the van whilst we waited for Caitlin, and told us everything he thought we ought to know about school, which took him almost the whole of the three or four minutes we had until Caitlin arrived.
Rugby is good, computers are good, maths is good, dance is good, the house master is good, and he is sorry that he hasn’t had time to write to me at all ever.
I do not mind to being written to. It is much better to be forgotten and ignored than to have a child who is lying awake missing you. I do not think I could manage that.
As I write I can hear the two of them chattering happily in the back. Their luggage is stowed, their computers are tuned to the camper van wi if, and despite having been told to eat before we collected them, they are both starving so we will have to stop soon and get dinner.
We have, of course, been travelling all day. This will not make for an exciting diary entry, so it might actually turn out to be quite short. Short is probably preferable to long and boring, ask anyone who has ever been to a school speech day.
We woke up somewhere around Stirling, and had a leisurely day-off cup of coffee before turning our faces to the north and chugging off.
The camper van has a new rattly noise but Mark says that it will probably not matter.
It is not very often that we have time to spend together at the moment, and so it has been quite a happy day, although conversation is a bit limited due to having to shout over the noise of the camper van ending, complete with new rattle. In the end we put the story on and listened to Merry and Pippin escaping from the orcs and meeting the Ents. This was a lovely way to occupy hours and hours of journey through the Scottish wilderness.
We arrived in Elgin at teatime, and rushed over to Johnston’s to see if they had any new cashmere flat caps. Mark wears these. The latest one has been worn and worn and worn until it is becoming a bit frail and shapeless. I have mended it half a dozen times, but to no avail, it is nearing the end of its useful incarnation, and it is time for Flat Cap, The Next Generation.
They did not have any.
Well, they had one, and only one in his size, but it was blue, and all of his jackets are green.
I was aghast at this and on the way to school I wrote an email to their Customer Services Department to express my indignation.
I do not know what we will do if they have stopped making them. Oliver wears them as well.
I am troubled in my very soul.
LATER NOTE: It is the very middle of the dark Scottish night and we are about to stop. The children are already asleep in the back, and we have held our breath through the terrible battle of Helm’s Deep and are now heading out to Isengard. We have stopped it because I keep dozing off and missing bits.
We stopped on the mountaintops and ate a cheerful dinner, and emptied the dogs in the pitch dark under a moonless sky. It has been a long way, and we are weary of travelling. Roger Poopy is asleep with his head on my knee, and it feels as though we are the last people left alive.
Home tomorrow.
