I am adding this in the morning, not the evening as usual, because it has taken me two days to write, and so I thought I might get it up on to the mighty Internet as quickly as I could.
Things are slowly improving, all of the time,
One of the oddest developments is that we seem to have developed the most astonishing sense of taste.
It has come to something when you think that Mozzarella cheese is a taste explosion, but that is indeed our current experience.
Coffee is made at half strength, and extra mature cheddar is too exciting to be eaten at all, on a par with the sort of Vindaloo served by malevolent Indians to very drunk people at three am.
We are eating a very lot of raw carrots and celery, which are just about tolerable, along with lettuce, the gentle kind, because even some of that is just too thrilling.
Despite this I don’t seem to have much of a sense of smell, and I am very much hoping that it will come back again. I like the smells of the world, most especially the morning ones of coffee and fresh bread, and at the moment they have all disappeared again. This happened when we had bat flu last year, and they had only just re-emerged. I hope this bit gets better quickly.
Apart from that, and from the tiredness and the coughing, we are getting along very nicely. We are still as wobbly and unsteady as new lambs, and lots of things are peculiarly difficult, but that is all right.
We are leaving for Scotland tonight, because Oliver starts school tomorrow.
It is, in fact, now tomorrow, and we are just crossing into Scotland as I write these very words.
It feels odd to be in the camper van in our newly weakened state, but somehow lovely. It feels like a kindly space, a safe and friendly one.
We worked until late, showered and set off, with some faffing, at around midnight. It turned out then that we were too tired to drive very far, but at least this morning we were at Carlisle instead of Windermere, and the world felt good.
We will be late, but this doesn’t matter because he should have been there yesterday in any case. We did not go then because of it being bank holiday, and because none of us felt the need to have tea with the headmaster on the lawn or to listen to an explanation of the workings of the library. On the whole it seemed to be more practically sensible just to earn some more school fees. Oliver can start getting up early and having cold showers tomorrow.
Handily, our telephones seemed to know that we were on a journey, and offered us a series of music which was called things like Listen To This On Your Road Trip. I have got fed up of fighting against the tide of cyber-surveillance, so we listened to it, and it was all very pleasant.
Poor Oliver, who is growing as well as weary and bat-flu shaky, slept for miles and miles, I hope he is all right. It is a little troubling to think of my newly-enfeebled lamb struggling along with the Gordonstoun regime, which is not famed for its gentle tolerance of weeds.
I have written to Mr. Interchangeable Housemaster, whose name we have not bothered to learn, because he is identical in his very soul to all the other housemasters. He is tall and energetic and jogs up Ben Nevis before swimming across Loch Lomond before breakfast every day, when he returns to his beautiful wife and little children to eat porridge stirred through with whisky, finished in time to call the boys to get up before dawn.
In fact I like him very much, there could be no better person to whom one might entrust one’s anxious teenage boy. I do not know that he has ever been ill, though, and so I have gone to some trouble to explain the concept to him.
I am sure it will be all right. I will keep you posted.
