Tonight we are in the camper van in the north of Scotland.
Never let it be said that these pages are all alike.
This one is definitely different. I have not spent a single minute of today doing hoovering or dusting.
Today we have been dashing back to school. Oliver should have been there yesterday but wasn’t, because we were at the theatre in Manchester, and his housemaster said it wouldn’t matter in the least if we were a bit late. In fact he has missed lots of wittering about Play Up And Play The Game and Let’s All Work Hard For Our A Levels, and all the other motivational things that schools say at the beginning of term, and everybody really means them for the first week. By two weeks before Christmas everybody has forgotten, including the teachers, because it is too exhausting to keep up that level of virtue for a whole term. I don’t think I ever managed it past the first couple of days. We didn’t have a dog but it it ate my homework regularly.
Lessons do not start until tomorrow so he hasn’t missed anything actually important, except the discovery that he has been made Captain of the Junior School in his absence.
I do not know what the Captain of the Junior School actually does, except I do not think that there is a salary with the role, so probably just pops round and makes motivational speeches every now and again. Regrettably he missed all of the ones given by the new headmaster yesterday so he can’t crib them and will have to make up his own.
We had to get up early in Manchester but this was nothing like getting up early at home because I did not have to clean the bathroom and somebody had thoughtfully cooked the most colossal breakfast. This started with salmon and cheese and slices of melon and croissants, and continued with scrambled egg, bacon, sausages and hash browns, and concluded with coffee and some more discomfort around the waistband. Fortunately my trousers, which are dungarees, do not have a waistband, but even my knicker elastic was beginning to feel the strain by then.
We had a lovely chat with the breakfast waitresses, who marvelled at how much Oliver had grown, and we all sighed regretfully about getting older, because it was only five minutes ago that he was a little squib with a Nerf gun, and then we had to dash off.
We hurled everything into the car and dashed off up the motorway to our house, to which the lodger had kindly returned the dogs, and where the cats were prowling sulkily, having not been fed cheese or ham or prawns for a whole twenty four hours.
We flung all of them and the contents of the fridge into the camper van and rushed off again.
Poor, overfilled camper van. Four of us, two cats, two dogs, and a term’s luggage.
It was a long, long haul up the motorway and the A9.
We got to Gordonstoun just after six, and we all went to help Oliver unpack. I do not know how helpful this actually was, because he kept running his hands through his hair and saying things like For goodness’ sake put that down.
He had not brought Spider-Man. I have promised to post him, along with his shaving things. Oliver’s shaving things, not Spider Man’s, obviously.
We had a last dinner all together, parked in the yard just outside Oliver’s bedroom. It is a nice bedroom, sunny and bright. He is in the Year Thirteen corridor now. He is a grown-up. We will never again take him back to school at the end of the summer holidays.
We were exhausted after that, so we have chugged down to the woods by the beach, which is where we are now. Mark is in the shower. Lucy is in bed, and I am using the peace and quiet to write to you.
We can go and have a paddle before we go home.
