We have had an exciting journey.
It was so exciting that it almost did not happen at all.
Once we had done the usual camper van prolonged coffee-in-bed accompanied by a great deal of loafing about and contemplating the world, we took the dogs for a walk.
We had no idea where we were. We had left the A9 somewhere after Perth and driven down a series of dark and indistinguishable country lanes, to come to a rumbling rest just outside a village that might have been called Tibblemore, or some similar Scottish appellation. There, too travel-weary even to become inebriated, we ate fish and blue cheese for dinner, because obviously Oliver-of-the-conservative-tastes has now left. Then we showered and collapsed into bed.
Morning revealed ploughed fields and tidy-looking farmsteads, edged about by well-kept deep ditches, suggesting a climate which might incorporate a lot of rain.
It was not raining today, however. The sun was beaming hopefully, and it was pleasantly warm, so we ambled off along a promising-looking path.
We discovered more ploughed fields and a few pens of geese. These interested us greatly, because goose-keeping is on our list of things that we have imagined doing with our field, in that bright future when we have got a bit more time and a bit more cash to invest. We contemplated the geese with interest and examined useful-looking hoppers filled with feed for pheasants.
Roger Poopy disgraced himself by finding a pheasant.
On our way back we found the bricks-and-mortar reality of my daydream for my old age, which I liked so much that I could hardly leave it behind.
It was two very decrepit bungalows, side by side, each so tiny that they would barely have housed a family of rabbits. A tree grew out of the doorway of one, and somebody seemed to be storing pheasant- feeding clutter in the other: but the brickwork was pretty, and the chimneys were tall and splendid, and – and this was the thing – they stood in the middle of the most enormous garden with a paddock at the back.
This is without a doubt my happy ever after. When I am old I will have the smallest house into which I can possibly cram my collection of clutter, with a log burning stove and a conservatory, to be winter and summer reading spaces. There will be a shed in which I can keep Mark and the camper van, and there will be a garden and an orchard and a field so that I can have a horse.
I would like a horse very much, but not to live miles away at the farm where I have to make a huge effort to drive across the fells to see it. I would like a horse like the one we had in France, which kept clopping up the front steps into the kitchen when nobody was looking, to pinch the apples out of the fruit bowl. There was a perfectly good apple tree in its field, which plonked apples into the long grass like chunks of pumice stone erupting from an idling Icelandic volcano, but those apples were not good enough.
It was not our horse. We borrowed it for the summer. Regrettably it had a brief amorous liaison with a visiting donkey, about which we kept quiet when we returned it. I never found out what happened.
Anyway, we admired the bungalows for a while, and tramped around them imagining ourselves old and rural, with round rosy faces and chickens at the door, but after a while we had to go.
Once back at the camper van the adventure began, because it would not start.
It might have been the battery, or the starter motor, and Mark fiddled around with both for ages. In the end he wired the battery to the leisure batteries, and hit the starter motor with a hammer, until eventually, after a prolonged period of bad language and anxiety, it started.
We chugged back through Scotland. I have to say, the Scots seem to dump an inordinate amount of litter at the sides of their roads. I have always noticed this and thought that perhaps it was English tourists, but there have been no tourists for almost a year now, so it must be the Scots’ own fault.
In fact the roads on the Carlisle side of the border were quite noticeably less plastic-strewn, and so there is no excuse, they must all bring their kitchen rubbish bins with them and empty them out of the window as they drive down the motorway. I was disappointed about this, I have always had a fondness for William Wallace, and suspect he would not have been impressed.
Once we got back into England there was not nearly so much litter, but every illuminated road sign contained some dire warning about not doing anything enjoyable, like talking to anybody, in case anybody had not already thought of this by now. One road sign, inexplicably, said, in big orange letters: STAY AT HOME, clearly utterly impossible to accomplish for somebody already motoring frantically down the M6. I imagine the Government thinks that people had not considered that as an option, and would be grateful for the helpful suggestion, not that anybody seemed to be skidding to a halt and trying to turn round.
We stopped for a cup of tea, which was when we discovered that we had run out of gas, and also that the van would not start again.
We thought we might have a gas leak, until some consideration made us both realise that it was almost a year since we had last filled the gas tank. Then we marvelled at our good fortune, because how utterly unspeakably dreadful it could have been. Imagine waking up on the road up to Gordonstoun, in terrible sub-zero temperatures, with a boy in residence, to discover that the heaters would not work, there could be no coffee, and that the engine would not start.
Truly the Gods were good to us.
No amount of swearing seemed to start the van, and so I had to push it, which would have been nicer if it had not been raining. It started easily once it was rolling, but it had been a troubling moment, and we resolved not to turn it off until we arrived home.
In the end we filled up with gas and also with diesel in Kendal, discreetly, without turning the engine off, which fortunately nobody noticed. We went to Autoparts for a new battery, but the chap said that battery technology was in its infancy when our camper van was born forty years ago, and he would have to order a battery made of ancient and archaic materials and methods to match, so it would not arrive until Friday, because nobody stocks antiques in the motor trade any more.
We were not sorry to arrive home.
We parked it on the roadside and abandoned ship with some relief.
The mission has been accomplished.
