Mark is not working this week because of an absence of rural broadband equipment to be installed.
It has not been delivered in time for him to work today or tomorrow, and of course after that we will be gone.
We are going to collect Oliver.
We thought we might have an extra day and go and look at some places on our way up, but you will not be at all surprised to hear that we have completely failed to make this project materialise. At the time of writing the plan is that we will set off after work on Tuesday night, meaning that we do not have to rush northwards in any great haste, and can make time to stop, mill about, and of course, purchase some more smoked prawns from House of Bruar.
I do not know if we will achieve this target either, so perhaps I ought not to be quite so critical of our beloved leader and his endless projections for what he and his merry band of brothers might do next.
Either way we will be collecting Oliver on Thursday evening, and then puffing our way slowly back over the Scottish Highlands, home in time to be at work again on Friday night.
I am looking forward to it very much.
Oliver’s school report has just turned up. It is, to our satisfaction, so good that it made Mark cry. Our son, it appears, is a hard worker and a Jolly Good Egg. We could ask for no more.
I will have to remember that over the next two months of feeding him sausages whilst he plays computer games in his dressing gown. Everybody needs some time out.
Instead of going to work, Mark and the dogs disappeared up to the farm and his garden this morning, where he was dismayed to discover that the tiresome deer have found his beetroot and eaten all the little leaves off it. I made sympathetic noises but I am not surprised. If I get around to it I will call the zoo and ask if they have any lion dung that they don’t want, that will jolly well frighten the deer off.
Either that or we will just take a gun up there and have venison instead of beetroot.
I rushed about wiping dust off things and hoovering, so that when we come back from our little jaunt we will be pleased and happy to find ourselves in a lovely tidy house, even if it is suddenly bursting with holiday washing.
After that I needed to get on with my latest project, which I am frantically trying to finish before we leave but of course have only just started today.
The table in the camper van is battered and cracked after forty years of sitting underneath dinners, and spending its spare time being the base for a double bed. We do not do this with it any more, but the last owner, Monsieur Banana Fingers, who was considerably portlier than either, and possibly both, of us, slept on it with his wife, and the effects are with us to this very day.
In the end we want to replace it. Mark wants to build a new one with a nice oaken lip around it that will look lovely and stop things from sliding off.
We have neither the time nor the resources to do this today, nor possibly in the next decade. The next time we have got some spare time, after we have fixed the taxis, finished building the conservatory and serviced the camper van, we will be building a deer fence. After that there is a divorce solar panel and the small matter of some hot water.
In the meantime we have come up with the inspired idea of mending and redecorating it.
Mark has filled it with glue and clamped it back together.
I spent this morning printing out dozens and dozens of photographs of the camper, in all of its rusty incarnations. I have cut them out and we are going to glue them all to the table and laminate it over.
I have not finished yet. The table is considerably bigger than you might think.
This does not matter. We have got hundreds of photographs.
It was lovely to see them. I am not sure that lovely is exactly the right word. It reminded me of lots and lots of agonising times when it was squatting, rustily, in Mark’s shed, with hardly an inch that did not need fixing.
With any luck we will get it done tomorrow before we go, and then we can have wonderful camper van dinners, reminiscing about Great Rusty Adventures We Have known.
You can read about them, if you are interested. They are catalogued in these pages from the summer of 2016, which was when it fell apart so terribly and had to be glued back together over the next couple of years.
I am very glad those times are over.
