Boyless

We are on our way back down through Scotland, with a great empty gap where a boy used to be.

His bed is empty, and there are no enormous shoes strewn all over the floor.

I am feeling sad.

I do not have the smallest reason to feel sad, because I know that he is in possibly the best place that a boy could be in in the entire world. He is at Gordonstoun, and it is magnificent.

Prince Philip wrote his last letter to the school just three days before he died. Even on his deathbed he was a Gordonstoun boy, and Oliver will be one as well.

We have not exactly been travelling all day. We woke up on a mountaintop which was so cold that the water that was dripping from the fridge exhaust had formed a little icicle.

We chugged slowly down the winding roads to the sea, and to school.

I have become wearily resigned to the endless appalling things that we are doing to our young people these days, in the name of the stupid bat flu excuse, and I am sorry to say that Gordonstoun is no exception. There are endless tiresome new rules about who can see whom, and who is allowed to go where, and when, and of course there are the loathsome masks.

Oliver, fortunately, is exempt from these latter. I am cross about these, which are designed to stop young people who are in no danger whatsoever, from seeing and talking to one another freely. Nevertheless, the Scottish government, like our own beloved leaders, have said they must, and so they must.

Being a school, they are carrying out twice weekly tests on each child to see if anybody has become diseased in the night. I have refused consent for this, because I do not think that it can be good for the sensitive membranes in the nose and throat to be constantly poked. Not far from us there is a factory where the tests have been compulsory from the beginning. Now, a year later, the men who work there are complaining of nosebleeds, and of their sense of smell becoming diminished.

I do not know if this is related to the tests, but given that Oliver is not going to die of bat flu, and that everybody who might has now been vaccinated, we are having nothing to do with it.

This, it turned out, saved us half an hour messing about in the entrance to Chapel, which has been set up as a testing station, and which looked rather like an emergency field hospital. People in masks were waving important looking cotton buds about and children were reluctantly poking them into various sensitive bodily orifices. Oliver and I declined to participate, and sloped off, relieved.

He has been dumped into an emergency overspill house, because some poor oik tested positive since arriving back at school, and Duffus, which is where Oliver lives, has been designated a quarantine area. Instead, he is in Altyre, next door.

It seemed nice enough. We stopped in the yard at the front, and before we had even turned off the engine, we were instantly mobbed by anxious mask-wearers, even despite the sunny day.

We assured them that we were not going to try and break into the Quarantine Emergency Pain Of Death Do Not Go There No Matter What Zone, and somebody helpful went in there on our behalf to drag out the stack of luggage left there once in another long ago life.

Mark scraped rust off Oliver’s bike whilst I hunted for trousers and examined his uniform.

Most of it is not too bad. I let three pairs of trouser legs down, and discovered that his entire Smart Uniform does not fit at all. It doesn’t fit so badly that he could not actually get in to the trousers.

Fortunately I had bought his blazer, ie, the really expensive bit, in such an enormous size that it will still fit him when he leaves, and turned the sleeves up four inches.

I will have to replace the rest, until then he will just have to go to Chapel in the nude.

We dragged the whole lot into his new dorm, which he is sharing with a German boy, who turned out to be lovely. We unpacked and organised everything, until another German boy appeared, and wondered if Oliver and his dorm mate would like to go and play football, which obviously they thought they would.

That was it. That was the goodbye.

We hugged him enough to last until the end of May, and left him to football, and expeditions, and prep, and adventures.

I know it will be lovely, but I am still sad.

We are going to go home and eat all the things that we can’t have for dinner when Oliver is eating it as well, like fish and chilli and olives and almonds and anything green.

I will miss him, all the same.