Icefields

I am writing to you from the Depths of Weariness.

Observant readers will have noticed there was no diary entry yesterday. This was because yesterday was so completely and utterly awful that even the most faithful of diarists, and I consider myself one, would have gone to bed thinking: Bugger it.

This is exactly what I did.

To begin at the beginning.

The printer repair carried on until almost two in the morning. It went back together and the problem fixed, but then it developed some sort of an electronic resetting problem, and kept flashing up a little warning notice which said: Printer needs resetting. You thought you could fix it yourselves, didn’t you, well just so you know, we thought of that in advance and built in an electronic self-destruct just in case anybody ever gets this far. You lose, cheapskate.

In the end I discovered online that I could collect a new one from Argos in the morning for forty quid which included six months of free ink, so we did that.

In the morning the plan was for me to go for a haircut before we set off. It was the last appointment possibly available anywhere before New Year, and I only got that because it was a cancellation, which serves me right, it isn’t as though scruffy long hair ever takes you by surprise, you get plenty of notice, but obviously I ignored it until it was making me look like the sort of overgrown sheep you see in amusing postcards, just with some legs sticking out of a colossal ball of wool. I looked like that but rather less well groomed.

The haircut was at ten and we thought we would go straight on to Scotland from there.

This meant we had to get up at seven.

Remember we went to bed at two.

It was not nice. We did not even have time for coffee.

We staggered about hurling things into bags and eventually stuffed everything into the van and rushed off.

The haircut was splendid.

After that things went terribly downhill.

I am falling asleep as I type, so I shall be brief.

The temperature had dropped to minus five in Windermere, and the van had been frozen. We had drained all of the water out of it to prevent any bursting disasters, but the shower had obviously still got some water left in it so it turned out we had one anyway. It took us ages to discover this, because although we had refilled the water before we set off, the pump was frozen, and so we couldn’t get any water out of the taps, until eventually we managed to thaw it out, somewhere round about Stirling, at which moment we had a flood. We turned it all off then, and it froze again.

The gas would not come out either. The valve for the gas bottle had frozen, and the gas would not come out. Mark took it off and managed to warm it slowly, but it kept re-freezing as we travelled.

It was bitterly cold. I mean really, bone-achingly cold, the sort where smiling outdoors makes your teeth hurt, and became steadily colder as we travelled north. The journey was truly horrible. The low winter sun glared into our eyes and reflected back off the icy road, and the screen wash bottle had frozen, so we couldn’t wash the windscreen,. The roads were being endlessly gritted, in what must be the nearest the Scots ever get to discovering perpetual motion, and so of course the windscreen became filthy in seconds, and Mark kept having to stop and wipe it. Lots of other people along the roads were doing the same. We got the screen wash defrosted in the end, but not until we were almost there. I can’t tell you how much a journey is improved when you can see where you are going.

As the sun went down, much to our squinty-eyed relief, it started to snow. It snowed and snowed. We passed several cars in ditches and decided to go the long way round, because the short cut over the mountains was too snowy, and it was agonisingly slow. We left Kendal at ten in the morning, and did not stop at all, apart from for fuel and to wipe the windows, but still it was eight at night before we arrived.

We had been going to stay overnight and collect Oliver the next day, after the carol service, and spend the day walking on the beach. In the end this was all just too difficult.There was no water, and the heater was only working sometimes, and we were exhausted. Then when we called Oliver, he was not feeling well and said that he did not want to go to the carol service anyway, so we collected him there and then.

He was certainly ill, white-faced with enormous eyes, and when he got into the van he croaked a few words and collapsed onto the seat, so we set off for home.

Going home was no better.

It is not nice, ploughing your way through the Scottish Arctic, knowing that if anything goes wrong you are really in a very thorough pickle, but we carried on as long as we could, until eventually Mark was just too tired to drive any further, and we chugged off the road in Perth and stopped.

Fortunately the heater worked.

We couldn’t shower, but we were too tired to care. We crawled into bed and slept.

Today was just as bad. We left Perth at ten in the morning, but it was after four in the afternoon before we got home.

We hurled everything back into the house and dumped the camper van back on the square. We will worry about it another time.

Then we set the new printer up and started trying to print Christmas cards.

I have had enough of all of it.

I am going to bed.

Merry nearly-Christmas.

PS. Oliver is recovering.

PPS The six months of free ink is a complete scam. It has run out already. Beware HP printers bearing unlikely gifts.