It is night.
We are chugging unhurriedly along a narrow road which is winding precariously around the side of a Scottish mountain, faintly illuminated by the light of a yellow moon with silver clouds trailing in front of it.
Mark is driving, and the children are doing something of their own in the back. Roger Poopy is snoring gently on the seat next to me, and his father is settled comfortably on my feet. They are beginning to be a bit numb, but I do not want to move them because of disturbing him, and also because he is warm and furry, which is nice.
I thought that I would write to you whilst nobody needs me for anything.
We have been driving all day, and we are still driving, although we are going south now, not north.
Poor Lucy has had to borrow everybody’s jumpers, because of having become used to the climate five hundred miles south. There is a lot of cooling down that happens between Northampton and Inverness.
Oliver is equipped with plenty of thermal underwear, and does not seem to notice any more.
It is lovely to have him back.
We have had an uneventful sort of day, and it has been entirely occupied with the journey. This makes for dull diary-writing, but is an awful lot nicer than an interesting journey. I am sure you do not wish misfortune upon us, so you will have to be contented without hair-raising stories of bits of camper van bursting loose in terrible rusty explosions. These happen quite often enough without wishing for them. So far, on this journey, there is nothing to report, and I like it better that way. Mark’s determined repair efforts have paid off, and so far we have not had a single disaster.
The exhaust is not going to fall off on this journey because we have not yet put it back after it fell off last time. Mark says it is one less thing to worry about.
Oliver must have been watching for us, because he appeared out of his boarding house practically as soon as we arrived. We had the usual squeaks and giggles about his increased dimensions and the astonishing depth of his voice, and rushed off to find a quiet parking space where we could be away from school and hear all of his stories.
He has become taller again whilst we were not looking at him. He is not yet as tall as Mark, but it will not be long at this rate. He is looking down on both me and Lucy from a lofty height, although he has clearly paid for this by becoming practically the definition of a line, being length without breadth.
He does not have a spare ounce of body anywhere. If he was a girl he would look nice in any clothes that he happened to try on, without ever needing to try and squint over his shoulder to assess the dimensions of his rear view in a mirror, and I am trying not to be envious.
It is difficult to piece together the whole picture of a term from the bits and pieces that come out when we first meet up, because the stories tumble over one another, and sometimes one breaks into another and then it takes ages for the rest of it to catch up. For me the best bit was when he looked downcast for a moment in the middle of a particularly involved yarn, and said: I’m sorry to be coming home. That tells me that he is very happy indeed at school, and really I could not ask for any more.
I don’t suppose anybody but his grandparents will be interested in the actual details, but basically the best bits were physics, drama, maths, dance, chemistry, badminton, biology, self-defence and drumming. He thinks Romeo was mental and that Shakespeare must have written it with his tongue in his cheek, about which which I suppose he might have a point. The food is good and his housemaster is ace and everything is going just fine.
We ate sausages wrapped in bacon and drove on a bit further. It is now half past nine, and we have just stopped, only to discover that both of the children have gone to bed.
This seems to me to be a brilliant idea.
I am going to follow them.
