We are on holiday, and I am so very pleased with my world.
We are not on holiday in the sense of being anywhere different, because we haven’t quite gone yet. I am writing to you from my usual desk, looking out at the special Lake District view of the builders’ yard opposite, and the alley, which tonight features an old freezer that somebody has chucked out, and which I expect will stay there until somebody else finds it useful for something.
That somebody will very definitely not be Mark. I am supervising him closely.
We are on holiday in the sense that our working week is over. Mark is home from work. I have finished cooking, and not bothered to start cleaning, and sewn the last name label in Oliver’s new trousers. I have attempted to disguise the shockingly paint-splattered state of his trainers by spraying them with shoe dye. This did not make any difference at all to the trainers, which now look as though they have been splattered with bluish, instead of white, paint, but it has dyed the backs of my hands and my wrists a sort of brownish-black.
I do not suppose my experiences of going back to Gordonstoun are exactly parallel with the Queen’s. I don’t recall any occasion when she seemed to have inadvertently dyed bits of herself the same colour as that very magnificent tribe somewhere that had been worshipping Prince Philip as a god. There was a photograph of them in the Daily Telegraph. My hands are that colour.
Perhaps that is why she wears gloves.
I hope it comes off in the shower. It did not come off with the scrubbing brush and some washing up liquid.
The point, however, is that our labours are finished. We do not have anything else to do other than hurl everything joyously into the camper van, and set off up the motorway.
It is the most splendid feeling, as if a weight has been lifted.
Not for Oliver, probably. Oliver is upstairs, busily engaging with as many online nutters and paedophiles as he can manage to squeeze in to his last hours at home. I do not know what he is doing, but it is noisy, and there are explosions.
It might be a bit more difficult than he thinks. He has been at home for a jolly long time, and it is going to be a colossal change.
Fortunately his housemaster wrote to me today telling me that he is sharing a dorm with the two boys that he likes most. It will be noisier than his own bedroom at home, but there will be friends and adventures and sailing and expeditions. It will be shocking at first, after these months and months of lonely quiet, but he will get used to it all again.
I have spent my day doing the last of the cooking. We have got several days’ travelling, and I have cooked for all of them. Obviously we can cook in the camper van, but that is not being on holiday. Being on holiday should have a waiter with a while cloth over his arm wondering if I would like red wine with that. Since I can’t arrange that, at the very least I am not going to faff about the camper van, scrubbing potatoes and making bread-and-butter puddings. I am going to pour my own wine , and loaf about idly, drinking it, whilst dinner heats up all by itself.
I have made peppermint chocolate and fudge for Oliver. I have made cheesecake with white chocolate and left out the Bailey’s, again, for Oliver’s benefit. I have cooked chicken and meatballs and sausages and potatoes, and put them all on trays to go in the oven. I have made garlic bread, and bread rolls for sandwiches, and dips for crisps, and yoghurt to put on muesli, and chocolate biscuits to make us fat.
We are, in short, ready to travel. I expect we could probably get to Norway on that lot.
I have packed our respectable clothes. They had been in the drawer for so long that I had actually forgotten them, and looked with surprise at some of Mark’s shirts. It is a very long time since we needed to look tidy. In fact, for most of the last year we have just had two sets of clothes, which we have taken off, washed, hung to dry and then just unhooked from the rack the next day, saving all of the bother of folding them and putting them away tidily. I have not even opened the drawers for months, and it was a bit like discovering a secret room in your house, stuffed with lots of mysterious and unfamiliar things that once might have belonged to a different, more sociable, person.
I am looking forward to it very much, even though it will mean losing Oliver after all these months.
We are going to miss him. I hope it is all right.
