After all of that, this morning we were at Lucy’s, and all of the adventures were over.
Indeed, things were just about as normal as they possibly could be. Mark had to crawl under the van and mend the exhaust with a couple of jubilee clips and an old baked bean tin, which he said would do until he gets round to fixing it properly, probably some time in another life. The camper van has had so many lives that it has outdone any cat, its name should be Lazarus.
Anyway, I am happy to tell you that once again it got us home. We are back in the Lake District, and you will not be surprised to learn that it is raining.
Cambridge is astonishingly dry and warm. We dressed this morning knowing that we were going to be heading north, and were quite anxious to get moving because it is too warm in the south to be dressed in heavy shirts and dungarees. We were too hot whilst we were there but very glad of them now. We will not be doing any cycling in Windermere, I can tell you.
It is not really a long journey from Kettering, which is where Lucy lives, to our house, but it jolly well felt like it. I bored Mark by going on and on about the things I said in my speech, until finally I was bored with it myself and no longer needed to talk about it. After that I fell asleep.
I slept from the top of the M6 toll until we turned off the motorway at Junction 36. Mark said that he did not mind because he was listening to an interesting story, and in any case making speeches is a tiring business, so it was all right, but I could not have kept my eyes open for another minute. I do not remember a single moment of the journey, it was not the sort of sleep where you are just dozing really and the world carries on around you but somewhat vague and distant. I slept as soundly as if I had just had a general anaesthetic and awoken to discover that a smell of petroleum pervades throughout.
It didn’t really because the exhaust-fix had worked.
We have brought Lucy’s cats home with us. Lucy is busily emptying her house ready to move to Manchester, and the landlord wants it to look shiny and tidy so that he can rent it out to some new tenants. The cats are not very tidy, and really her tenancy agreement only thinks she should have one, and so they are going to have a few weeks’ holiday in the Lake District until the joyous day when she becomes a property owner in her own right and can fill it with whatever livestock she might choose.
The cats might be mildly disgruntled at this move, although frankly it is difficult to know what a cat is thinking because they are such toe rags even when they are happy. I do not know if they are happy at the moment. They have abandoned their basket, which doubles as a cat-jail in any case so I can understand their distaste. They have pooed in the flower bed, stolen the dog food, eaten their own food as well, climbed up the curtains and are now prowling around the house, making sure that nothing is cluttering up any shelf, table or desk. I am sure they will settle in splendidly. In any case they like our house because of the opportunities for predation provided by the rats which lurk in the back alley on occasion.
It was dark by the time we got home. We scrubbed out the camper van, which seemed to have become filthy and sticky during our trip, and unpacked. Everything unworn was carefully put away. There was a jolly lot of this, because I packed just about everything I could possibly think of, just in case we got soaked to the skin every time we poked our heads out of doors, or spilt red wine all over everything, or just decided that we needed to change three times a day, like the Queen.
I do not know if the new King does this as well. It is different when you are a bloke.
We are done now. Everything is tidy and ordered again, and the washing machine is thumping around sedately downstairs. Mark is in the shower, and I am going to bed.
All our adventures are over. I am no longer a person who is going to make a speech in Cambridge.
On the whole I think I am very glad about that.
