Dawdle

We are heading south with a slowness that I can hardly describe.

This is not because we have broken down, not so far, at any rate, although there is a lot of Scotland to go yet, but because we are dawdling.

We are dawdling more than we have ever dawdled. We have stopped everywhere we like and done almost everything that we like doing. We did not even go very far last night, but stopped in the woods by the beach about four miles up the road from school.

To begin at the beginning. I have got to get used to saying things like that because my first module at Cambridge is about poetry, and I have got to write a poem about a journey for the class in a couple of weeks time. I have been trying to think of rhymes for Scrapyard, and Broken Down At The Roadside, but they keep telling us that modern poetry is perfectly acceptable and so probably it doesn’t even need to rhyme. 

Anyway, the beginning was a prolonged trail up to Aberdeen Airport, where we had a cup of tea on a little hill behind the airport and watched Oliver’s plane coming in. That was really quite splendid. I am no great flyer, it makes me feel rather sick and scared and uncomfortable, and so his arrival somehow seemed rather joyous and heroic.

He was very tired, although I do not think he has grown much taller whilst he has been in Canada. Also he was full of stories about Canadian living, and the peculiarity of being in a country that is mostly made of nothing. 

We deposited him in school, and I harangued his poor housemaster about his missing sleeping bag. He does not use this for school but for expeditions, and it has disappeared. We had a look for it ourselves whilst we were there. If you can imagine a kit room used by fifty boys for storing muddy kit when they return from exhausting weeks at sea or in the wilderness, supervised not by their mothers but by an enthusiastically overworked young chap who is mostly thinking about rugby, you will get the idea, and we withdrew pretty quickly. The housemaster promised that they would either find it or steal a good one from somebody else’s lost property, so I suppose it will turn out all right. We did find his boots, which still fitted, so that was all right as well.

In the end we left them all to it. Oliver rang us up today wondering if he could do English for A Level instead of biology, and obviously that was fine, he will just have to be a taxi driver instead of a neurosurgeon when he grows up.

We parked in the woods and went for a long, long amble on the beach, including the obligatory paddle. We listened to the birds and watched the dogs belting in and out of the surf and speculated about the little cement boxes left over from the wartime defences. It was such a happy morning we let it drag on and on, and did not even begin to set off until after lunch, when we drove as far as the top of the mountains and stopped again, to wander about in the heather and then to loaf about in deckchairs, listening to the silence and feeling at peace with the world. 

We watched a pair of hunting harris hawks, and Roger Poopy found a whole leg of a dead sheep, which he carried back proudly. He was very disappointed to find that it could not come home as a souvenir, and so he and Rosie ate it whilst we sat in our deckchairs and tried to ignore them. It was very old and smelled completely revolting, but they crunched it up with delight anyway. I have not allowed either of them to lick me since. They are banished to the floor.

Tonka, Number One Daughter’s dog, is banished to the floor as well, because he was eating sheep poo and rolled in what smells like the rest of the sheep. Roger Poopy’s father stays on the floor anyway because of being too decrepit to get on the seat now and because he keeps being sick.

Dogs are horrible.

After that we set off home, but became distracted by House of Bruar, and the irresistibility of purchasing some smoked trout and Orkney cheese. We ate most of it in the car park before we set off, and took the dogs for another walk to try and rub the last walk off them. The manager came to talk to us and to admire the camper van and hope we were not planning to stay for the night. 

We are on the way home now, unless anything else interesting distracts us. It is the middle of the evening and we are not even at Perth yet.

I wonder what might rhyme with Dawdle.

LATER NOTE. We reached Tesco at Perth. I went in to pay for fuel and the lady said: Been taking your son back to school, have you?

I wonder what rhymes with Notorious.