It s eleven o’ clock and I am in bed.
If I had not promised myself that would write in these pages every single night I would be in bed and asleep, but I did and so here I am, yawning and rubbing my eyes and trying to think of something interesting to tell you about a day that has been almost entirely occupied by driving through endless snowy mountains.
Of course we are still in the wilds of Scotland. I am not exactly sure where. It is snowing.
If Maria in The Sound Of Music had had a camper van she would have been singing Go Round Every Mountain. It is a little laboured on hills, especially in a blizzard.
We must have just missed a blizzard last night, because out of nowhere we came across a stretch of road that was unexpectedly covered in snow with cars strewn all over it. We passed six accidents in fifteen minutes. None of them were completely blocking the road, so we could drive round them, and they had happened too recently for anybody to do anything to close the road or otherwise inconvenience everybody else. We had just passed them all when we saw a stream of blue lights heading in their direction at high speed, and felt very relieved that whatever catastrophe had just happened, we had somehow avoided it.
I might add that nobody seemed to be hurt, we are not completely heartless. There were a very lot of expensively crushed tail lights and bumpers, though, and quite a few cars facing the wrong way or marooned several yards into adjoining fields.
We stopped just before Stirling, when both of us realised that we might have been asleep for some time, and collapsed into bed and oblivion until morning.
I always like waking up in the camper van, there is something wonderful about being in the middle of a journey. We had a moderately exciting snowy adventure as we crossed the Cairngorms, because of the high winds and blizzard conditions that had been forecast and actually turned out to be real, so I suppose the BBC doesn’t lie about absolutely everything, which was a revelation. Anyway, it was snowy and thrilling and huge gusts of wind smacked into the side of the van at intervals, making us feel like truly intrepid pioneers instead of just people in an elderly truck going a few miles north on well-maintained tarmac roads.
We collected Oliver, who we found ambling up the school drive with a group of other youths. He was wearing the leather jacket that he bought in Covent Garden, which has become very much more battered, and therefore presumably cool, since Christmas.
He has grown yet again. He is tall and very grown-up.
He has been suffering through his GCSE mock examinations this term, magnificently timed by the educational establishment to coincide exactly with one’s awakening interest in leather jackets and girls. Really GCSEs should be put on hold until you reach your fifties and have got nothing else to think about, then you might actually be interested, in a contemplative way, in ways to calculate the diameter of a cylinder or the correct construction of the past participle of the verb To Go.
He sat with us in the front and told us stories about boarding school. He has been doing a lot of drumming and thinks that he might put his drum kit in the conservatory when he gets home.
I think this would be lovely, since I am mildly deaf anyway.
We chugged down as far as here, wherever this is. It is somewhere on the A9, probably. It is very dark and very snowy and cold. Cold outside, that is. In here it is warm and still. It feels very safe and quiet. Mark is just coming out of the shower and Oliver is asleep.
I am going to sleep.
